CASBs, now essential elements of cloud security strategies, help security and risk management leaders to discover cloud services and assess cloud risk. They identify and protect sensitive information, detect and mitigate threats, and institute effective cloud governance and compliance.
Market Definition/Description
Gartner defines the cloud access security broker market as products and services that address security gaps in an organization’s use of cloud services. Especially designed to protect and control access to data that’s stored in someone else’s systems, CASBs deliver differentiated, cloud-specific capabilities that generally aren’t available as features in traditional security products. CASBs provide a central location for policy and governance concurrently across multiple cloud services and granular visibility into and control over user activities and sensitive data from both inside and outside the enterprise perimeter, including cloud-to-cloud access.
The core functionality areas (previously described as “pillars”) of products in the CASB category include:
Visibility. Detect all cloud services; assign each a risk ranking; identify all users and third-party apps able to log in
Data security. Identify and control sensitive information (data loss prevention [DLP]); respond to classification labels on content
Threat protection. Offer adaptive access control (AAC); provide user and entity behavior analysis (UEBA); mitigate malware
Compliance. Supply reports and dashboards to demonstrate cloud governance; assist efforts to conform to data residency and regulatory compliance requirements
Other functionality is present and includes, but isn’t limited to:
Provide threat intelligence and incident response workflows
Assign classification labels to content
Encrypt structured and unstructured data; tokenize structured data
Integrate with enterprise DLP products
Combine CASB capabilities with those typical for secure web gateways (SWGs) to provide a blended offering
Perform cloud security posture management (CSPM) for IaaS and PaaS workloads and SaaS security posture management (SSPM) for SaaS applications.
While they’re important, Gartner doesn’t deem these extensions to be core to its product definition.
