Appurity: Why your firm needs CASB in 2022

A shifting landscape

The cybersecurity landscape is constantly shifting. There are always new threats to protect against, different and evolving approaches by the cyber criminal community and technology challenges that require a fresh mindset. And if that was not enough, along came COVID-19. Firms of all shapes and sizes suddenly had to deal with an entirely new set of challenges brought about by the effects of having to work under lockdown conditions. Firms suddenly had to deal with a remote workforce, most of their people based at home or on the move – no longer was everyone sitting in an office together accessing networks and systems that were relatively easy to manage and secure – with fairly defined perimeters.

All of a sudden, these perimeters had to be redefined (and secured) quickly. A largely remote and (Working From Home) workforce needed to access the firm’s resources – documents, files, data – but from outside the traditional security of an established network. Also, firms witnessed a massive uptake in mobile and smart device usage amongst their people – another massive security challenge for your firm’s IT department. These (largely) unsecured devices were being used to access resources that would have normally been the work of the office PC or laptop (nice and secure in the centralised network).

To be fair, most firms had already started their digital transformation journeys having adopted cloud services to some degree or another. But with so many more people now requiring access to information via the cloud, it was clear that security in a cloud-specific context needed addressing. Meet CASB.

What is CASB all about?

A cloud access security broker (CASB), is cloud-delivered software or on-premises software and/or hardware that acts as an intermediary between users and cloud service providers. The ability of CASBs to address gaps in security extends across software-as-a-service (SaaS), platform-as-a-service (PaaS), and infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) environments. In addition to providing visibility, a CASB also allows firms to extend the reach of security policies from their existing on-premises infrastructure to the cloud and create new policies for cloud-specific contexts. CASBs have become a vital part of enterprise security, allowing firms to safely use the cloud while protecting sensitive corporate data.

The CASB serves as a policy enforcement center, consolidating multiple security policy enforcement functions and applying them to everything your firm uses in the cloud—regardless of the kind of device attempting to access it, including unmanaged smartphones and personal laptops.

Why should your firm adopt a CASB approach?

If your firm uses the cloud, a CASB is mandatory. In fact, Gartner ranks the CASB as #1 on it’s list of Top 10 Information Security Technologies companies need today. Massive adoption of cloud services and applications has created new targets and threats like never before. Do your people use Office 36, iManage or Salesforce? How about Dropbox, OneDrive, Twitter, Linkedln, Google Drive, Evernote or iCloud? If so, your firm needs a CASB.

What’s more, the widespread use of mobile devices is the new reality: your firm undoubtedly interacts regularly with users they don’t manage. Your systems, applications and data are in regular contact with mobile phones, tablets and laptops outside of your firm’s control. In fact, an estimated 86% of workflows are in the cloud today. Gartner predicts that 95% of all security failures in the cloud will be from human error. Manual and people centered cloud security approaches will not work. They need to be augmented by automation. As services previously offered on-premises continue migrating to the cloud, maintaining visibility and control in these environments is essential to meeting compliance requirements (paramount in the legal sector), safeguarding the enterprise, and allowing your employees to safely use cloud services without introducing additional risk.

With the increase in remote workers and workforce mobility, the growth in bring-your-own-device (BYOD) programs, and the presence of unsanctioned employee app usage (Shadow IT), the ability to monitor and govern cloud applications such as Microsoft Office 365, SAP SuccessFactors and Slack has become essential to enterprise security. Rather than banning cloud services outright and potentially impacting employee productivity, a CASB enables your firm to take a granular approach to data protection and policy enforcement, making it possible to safely use productivity-enhancing and cost-effective cloud services.

And with so much going on in the cloud as firms strive to provide increased levels of remote access, there is the potential for data leakage in the cloud – not a happy state of affairs if your firm loses sensitive client data in this way. Using CASB gives firms the power to maintain visibility over data that has gone beyond the reach of on-premises tools. Detailed logs on all cloud transactions (logins, uploads, or downloads) are always recorded and app-specific behaviours are also logged, helping firms know the whereabouts of data if it is shared. This is especially useful within the legal sector when knowing who sent what to whom, and the time and date, provides bulletproof compliance and overall peace of mind when dealing with volumes of casework.