The Most Critical CASB Use Cases in the Market Today: Block or remediate malware in sanctioned and unsanctioned cloud services, even when users are accessing from mobile or desktop apps or sync clients

As cloud services become more popular and broadly used, they are becoming a big target for hackers. This is especially disconcerting, since most organizations don’t know fully what services are in use, much less which ones are the target of malware developers. Moreover, many organizations do not inspect SSL traffic for malware because it impacts network performance. This makes it easy for malware to hide in plain sight in cloud services, even popular ones like OneDrive, Box, Google Drive, and Dropbox, which organizations have either sanctioned or at least for which they have made an exception in their application firewall or web gateway. Netskope finds that one out of every ten enterprises has found malware in its sanctioned services, and on average, has 26 pieces of malware in those services. As IT and security professionals invest in a cloud access security broker (CASB) to enable them to monitor and control cloud services, they expect that investment perform more security functions, and threat protection is at the top of the list.

Blocking, detecting, and remediating malware in cloud services is critical, but it needs to be comprehensive across not just sanctioned cloud services – which represent less than five percent of cloud usage in an organization – but also unsanctioned ones. More importantly, threat protection in the cloud needs to work whether users are accessing services from on-premises or remotely and whether they’re on a browser, mobile app, or sync client. Netskope customers have deployed our ALL-MODE architecture (with more than three-quarters of them going beyond a single mode) to achieve their most critical use cases. We have noted 15 of these use cases in our recent e-book, The 15 Critical CASB Use Cases, and we’re highlighting them and more (and we want to hear from you too!) in this blog.  

Here’s use case #4: Block or remediate malware in sanctioned and unsanctioned cloud services, even when users are accessing from mobile or desktop apps or sync clients.

How can a CASB enable this use case? A CASB sits in between the user and the cloud service provider and monitors, enforces policy, and guards against threats. This level of protection requires a multi-mode deployment architecture that includes at least a forward proxy and API-based introspection, and may be helped in part with a reverse proxy deployment. To cover remote and mobile access, the organizations must use a thin agent or mobile profile to steer cloud traffic to the CASB for SSL traffic inspection. Here are four critical functional requirements that are needed to achieve this use case:

• Inspect, detect, block, and remediate malware in sanctioned cloud services
• Inspect, detect, block, and remediate malware en route to/from unsanctioned cloud services
• Have visibility over cloud traffic whether it’s coming from a web browser, mobile app, or sync client
• Decrypt SSL and decode the unpublished API to understand the transaction (for forward proxy)

How are you protecting against threats and malware in your cloud services? We want to hear from you. Learn more about this and 14 additional most impactful use cases by downloading The 15 Critical CASB Use Cases.