5 CASB Implementation Challenges
Moving on-prem infrastructure to the cloud, particularly utilizing cloud-based services such as SaaS, brings many benefits. Unfortunately, it also increases your attack surface and offers new entry points for cybercriminals to breach systems and reveal sensitive business data.
To access the benefits of SaaS applications without making it easier for attackers to gain access, you need a new approach to security. One of the most popular solutions for extending security policies to SaaS is a Cloud Access Security Broker (CASB). However, with businesses now relying on tens, if not hundreds, of SaaS tools, there are significant CASB challenges to overcome during implementation.
The Importance of CASB
Integrating cloud services (SaaS, PaaS, IaaS, etc.) into your workflows means sensitive business data is no longer locked away in secure, on-prem servers. It is available for your users to access from different locations and devices. This brings flexibility, scalability, and savings that improve business operations. But it also creates challenges, making it harder to understand the different users and applications that have access to your data.
This reduced visibility and control enables new cyber threats, increasing the risk of data breaches. Check Point’s 2025 State of Cybersecurity Report lists the ever-expanding attack surface of the cloud as one of the year’s main trends:
“The rapidly evolving ecosystem and the multitude of cloud providers, each offering dozens of services, terminologies, and security mechanisms, create complexity that is hard to navigate. As a result, administrators are often overwhelmed by the amount of settings and configurations required to secure their environments effectively. This leads to the exposure of resources online or penetrable environments that allow easy privilege escalation paths.”
The resulting fallout of unauthorized data access can be catastrophic for a business due to:
- Financial costs associated with remediation
- 聲譽損害
- Loss of customers
- Repercussions due to non-compliance
Given these potential consequences, organizations need to have robust strategies to protect access to their data while utilizing SaaS.
CASBs monitor and filter the traffic between your employees and the SaaS applications they utilize in their day-to-day work. They allow you to extend internal security policies to external applications, ensuring protections remain in place even when your data leaves on-prem systems. CASBs also help identify the use of unapproved cloud services (known as shadow IT) and configure security settings on approved services to maximize data protection.
The resulting benefits of successful CASB implementation include:
- Improved threat detection to mitigate SaaS-specific risks.
- Enhanced visibility and monitoring across SaaS environments, including shadow IT visibility.
- Data Loss Prevention (DLP) policies and methods, including advanced access control
- Implementing security controls in line with relevant regulations to simplify compliance
- Potential cost-saving opportunities from better understanding your SaaS ecosystem and finding instances of over-licensing or wasted subscriptions
5 Common Challenges in CASB Implementation
While they offer many benefits, cloud access security broker issues can arise during implementation. Key CASB challenges to overcome include:
#1. Integrating CASBs With Existing Infrastructure
CASB deployment complexities caused by modern IT networks also arise when integrating the technology with existing infrastructure. To overcome CASB integration problems, you must clearly understand the current network infrastructure, including approved cloud services and any other security tools utilized.
The specific CASB challenges you face during implementation will depend on the complexity of existing infrastructure and the variety and scale of your SaaS landscape. You need to achieve a level of interoperability across your tech stack without impeding existing cybersecurity operations.
For comprehensive protection, CASBs also typically integrate with other security tools. This can include firewalls, Identity and Access Management (IAM) solutions, Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) systems, AppSec tools, and endpoint protections.
In particular, CASB integration problems occur when combining the technology with legacy infrastructure not designed for cloud environments. Outdated infrastructure built for previous security models creates significant CASB challenges that either require considerable reconfiguration or an overhaul of existing infrastructure. Both of these options can be costly and resource-intensive.
#2. The Costs and Resources Required
While CASBs deliver effective security capabilities, their implementation is typically a costly and resource-intensive process. The required level of financial and operational investment places a significant burden on your cybersecurity budget and IT staff.
Firstly, CASB costs primarily come from subscription payments that are still based on the number of users and cloud services. This quickly spirals with charges for every SaaS tool your organization utilizes. Given that the prevalence of SaaS products across the business world is only increasing, the current pricing structure of CASB solutions ensures they will remain an expensive option.
Next, CASB implementation is an extensive process requiring a range of technologies that are costly and resource-intensive to deploy. This includes:
- Log collectors or firewalls that gather the data needed for CASB tools
- Traffic forwarder appliances to forward logs to the CASB
- Identity collectors to enforce IAM policies
- Endpoint agents when utilizing proxy-based CASB solutions
These all require significant technical expertise to implement, increasing CASB costs and creating new challenges with the process duplicated across business sites. Additional endpoints must also be configured due to remote work and employees utilizing various devices to access business data and cloud services from new locations.
With significant CASB challenges to overcome during implementation, a skilled and knowledgeable IT team is necessary. Without the required in-house capabilities, you must invest in training or hiring new staff with relevant experience. Finally, once implemented, CASB challenges remain for continuous monitoring and fine-tuning to maximize protections.
#3. Visibility Challenges
Although they improve visibility, CASBs still struggle to achieve comprehensive insights into SaaS use. This includes providing granular visibility into shadow IT activity against a backdrop of complex SaaS environments. Keeping pace with the sprawl of modern SaaS usage and evolving threats places significant emphasis on CASB security controls. Any visibility gaps create security and compliance risks, as you no longer know every SaaS app in use and how employees are sharing data with them.
Additionally, many CASBs utilize static application discovery methods that have limitations in responding to changes in your SaaS landscape. They don’t rapidly identify new SaaS applications. Plus, CASBs do little to protect once a malicious actor has breached your systems. This could include compromised accounts or insider threats.
#4. Impact on Network Performance
Standard CASB deployments utilize API and inline inspection methods to maximize security while monitoring traffic between users and SaaS applications. However, inline CASBs that reroute cloud traffic inherently reduce network speeds.
Added network latency in CASB-monitored networks makes cloud services slower for the end user. In particular, this can impact CASB scalability, as more traffic creates bottlenecks at the inline proxy servers.
However, cloud-based CASB solutions are significantly less impactful than on-prem deployments when it comes to network performance. Identifying vendors with a global cloud-based service can help minimize performance impact and improve scalability by alleviating bottlenecks with many more servers positioned at strategic locations around the world.
最佳的業界資安方針
To overcome these challenges, you can follow a number of CASB implementation best practices:
- Discover all Your SaaS Services for Comprehensive Visibility: Understand and map out your entire SaaS landscape, including shadow IT, to identify risks and develop proper protections
- Define and Enforce Next-Generation Security Policies: Utilize CASB-powered insights to develop advanced security controls that integrate with existing tools and respond in real time
- Rely on Adaptive Access Controls and Identity Management: Enable seamless data access without sacrificing security by incorporating contextual information for real-time access management decisions
- Implement Proactive Data Loss Prevention: Use advanced analytics and real-time information to prevent data breaches before they happen
- Choose a Multimode CASB Solution: Combine the benefits of inline and API-based CASB solutions for real-time data monitoring in transit, scanning data at rest on cloud services, and comprehensive visibility
Get SaaS Security with Harmony SASE
The best way to integrate CASB functionality into your security posture and extend data protection into the cloud is by implementing a comprehensive Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) framework. With SASE, you can get all the cloud security capabilities of a CASB while also addressing broader network and data security needs.
Harmony SASE from Check Point provides advanced SaaSsecurity capabilities without complicated implementation and maintenance or slowing network performance to a crawl. Learn more about Harmony SASE by scheduling a short call today.
