Explore Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps
Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps, a Cloud Access Security Broker (CASB), offers versatile deployment modes such as log collection, API connectors, and reverse proxy. Its advanced features enable you to gain extensive visibility and control over data movement while providing sophisticated analytics to detect and mitigate cybersecurity threats across all Microsoft and third-party cloud services.
This CASB solution is tailored to meet the security needs of professionals, seamlessly integrating with other Microsoft solutions to provide a simplified deployment process, centralized management, and advanced automation capabilities.
What is a CASB
Adopting cloud technology offers increased flexibility for IT teams and employees but also introduces new challenges and complexities in maintaining security within your organization. Achieving the full potential of cloud apps and services requires a delicate balance between supporting access and safeguarding sensitive data. This is where Cloud Access Security Brokers (CASBs) come into play. A CASB serves as a gatekeeper that enforces your enterprise security policies, providing extra safeguards to your organization's use of cloud services. It does this by brokering access in real-time between your enterprise users and cloud resources, regardless of user location or device. To accomplish this, CASBs offer various features, including the discovery and visibility of Shadow IT and app use, monitoring user activities for abnormal behaviors, access control to resources, sensitive information leak prevention, protection against malicious actors, and assessing the compliance of cloud services. By providing granular visibility and control over user activities and sensitive data, CASBs address security gaps in the organization's cloud services, covering SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS. Regarding SaaS coverage, CASBs commonly work with popular content collaboration platforms (CCP), CRM systems, HR systems, Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) solutions, service desks, office productivity suites, and enterprise social networking sites. For IaaS and PaaS coverage, several CASBs govern the API-based usage of popular cloud service providers (CSP) and extend visibility and governance to applications running in these clouds.
Why do I need a CASB?
A CASB is essential to comprehensively understand your overall cloud posture, encompassing SaaS apps and cloud services. Shadow IT discovery and app governance are critical use cases for a CASB. In addition, as an organization, it's your responsibility to manage and secure your cloud platform, including IAM, VMs, compute resources, data and storage, and network resources. Hence, if you're an organization that uses or considers using cloud apps in your network services portfolio, a CASB is likely necessary to tackle the unique challenges of securing your environment. Malicious actors can use cloud apps to infiltrate your enterprise network and extract confidential business data, making it crucial to protect your users and data from different attack methods. To achieve this, CASBs offer a broad range of capabilities that safeguard your environment across multiple pillars. These pillars include:
- Visibility: where CASBs can detect all cloud services and assign them a risk ranking while identifying all users and third-party apps that can sign-in.
- Data security: CASBs can also provide data security by detecting and controlling sensitive information through Data Loss Prevention (DLP) and responding to sensitivity labels on content.
- Threat protection: CASBs offer threat protection with Adaptive Access Control (AAC), User and Entity Behavior Analysis (UEBA), and malware mitigation.
- Compliance: CASBs can assist with compliance efforts by supplying reports and dashboards that demonstrate cloud governance and help conform to data residency and regulatory compliance requirements.