4 Best Practices for Protecting Against Cloud Security Risks

In today's rapidly evolving technological landscape, SaaS applications have been essential in driving efficiency and promoting collaboration. But the benefits of the cloud also bring new risks, and securing your organization against a vast array of cloud security threats can be a unique challenge. 

One of the reasons cloud application security is so difficult is that you don’t have the same visibility and control you had when all of your users and devices were sitting inside a defined perimeter. The popularization of hybrid work combined with the development of complicated multi-cloud environments have created new hurdles that your legacy security tools simply aren’t equipped to handle.    

You may already have a cloud access security broker (CASB) to protect against cloud security risks, but not just any CASB will do. In this blog, we’ll delve into four important best practices for effectively securing your organization against a vast array of cloud security risks with CASB so you can be confident that your data stays secure in SaaS apps. 

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Best practice #1: Understand the cloud landscape 

In the not-so-distant past, your organization may have only used a few cloud apps. But now, most organizations are using dozens if not hundreds of cloud apps, which means you need a CASB product that can enforce policies across all of them. 

To ensure your CASB can keep you protected from a host of cloud security risks, you have to understand the cloud landscape of your organization in order to properly assess your cloud security posture. SaaS apps are often thought of as the main event, but you also need to think about your data. Many enterprises use IaaS solutions like Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud Platform to store data, and your CASB should extend to these repositories as well. 

And as the number of cloud apps and data repositories increases, so does the risk of misconfiguration. You need a CASB that can spot these misconfigurations and repair them so each cloud app meets the security standards of your organization. 

Best practice #2: Visibility beyond cloud apps 

Threats to your data aren't limited to SaaS apps. Remote and hybrid models mean that your employees, partners and contractors are using a variety of unmanaged devices and apps to access your organization's data. Because of that, you need visibility that goes beyond traditional boundaries of IT control. 

Your CASB should be able to detect how data is being exchanged in unsanctioned cloud apps, unmanaged BYOD devices, and email. While these are all necessary tools for promoting collaboration in a hybrid work environment, they are also potent vectors for data risk. But with the right CASB solution, it's possible to regain the visibility into users, apps, and devices that you had when everyone was still working on-premises.  

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Best practice #3: Go beyond binary access 

Securing your organization against cloud security threats shouldn’t come at the expense of productivity — but traditional access management solutions aren't designed to protect sensitive data and allow seamless access at the same time. 

Instead, you need a CASB that can make informed decisions about access that will enable people to get their work done while still protecting against cloud security risks. This means taking an adaptive, zero-trust approach to access. Instead of granting access to everyone with the right credentials — which won't detect compromised accounts or insider threats — adaptive access takes into account things like device health and user and entity behavior analytics (UEBA) to continuously assess risk levels and use that information to make granular decisions about access.   

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Best practice #4: Proactively protect data 

When it comes to securing your organization against cloud security threats, one thing is at the heart of it all: data. Your sensitive data is the lifeblood of your organization, and because of that, you need a CASB solution that takes a proactive approach to data loss prevention (DLP). 

Your CASB should be able to detect the sensitivity levels of your data and enforce policies in a way that keeps data secure without hampering workplace productivity. Instead of automatically denying access to a file that contains sensitive information, a data-centric approach might enforce policies like disabling downloads, watermarking documents, or redacting or masking the sensitive information within the file. 

It's also crucial to be able to safeguard sensitive data as it moves onto unmanaged apps and devices. By using enterprise digital rights management (EDRM), you can automatically encrypt data when it leaves your organization, ensuring sensitive information won't fall into the wrong hands, even when it leaves your sphere of influence. 

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Protect against cloud security risks with CASB 

Choosing the right CASB is critical in protecting your data from cloud security threats. To learn more about what to look for in a CASB product, download our free e-book, Safeguarding Cloud Data with CASB: 4 Key Questions to Consider. You’ll learn about how CASBs can prevent data loss in multi-cloud environments, the importance of real-time visibility into apps and data, and more.