With CISOs increasingly having to deal with the cloud officially – with management signing up for cloud-based services – or unofficially – with employees signing up without permission to cloud-based services – there’s a risk enforcing security policies will be up in the air.
Which is where cloud access security brokers (CASBs) come in. Either on-prem or software-as-a-service, CASBs sit between end users and cloud service providers to ensure security and governance policies are enforced, including authentication, single sign-on, authorization and other capabilities. They also give visibility into all cloud usage.
This week one of the earliest CASBs, Skyhigh Networks, said it has overhauled its interface to add role-based access for administrators and pre-built operational workflows for each group.
“We realized there’s not one single group within the security team or the governance team or IT is reponsible for operating cloud access security team – the are multiple teams involved,” Kamal Shah, Skyhigh’s vice-president of products and marketing said in an interview.
So the user tabs of the application, which used to read “Discover,” Analyze” and “Secure” have been changed to be aimed at particular users:
–Governance is for those in the governance and compliance group that wants visibility over all cloud services employees use. The workflow allows admins to categorize services on whether they are approved, or even approved for limited personnel or not allowed for high risk data;
–Compliance is for those looking after data loss prevention controls, including collaboration and access control policies, and compliance with financial, health or other regulations;
–Security is for those on the security operations team who manage threats. This view is for those looking for anomalous behavior of users or accounts. Users of this tab can tune threat models to minimize false positives, and export data to a security information and event manager (SIEM) for centralized management of all threats.
–Executive, for the C-suite, boards and audit and compliance committee members. Delivers pre-built reports that summarize cloud usage, risks and trends.
Access to these tabs is protected with role-based access controls. For example, the company says, super administrators can ensure that a Compliance Manager only has access to data loss prevention violations but not threats.
The included policies, which are arranged by verticals, can be modified or extended.
“The end result for a large enterprise is it drives efficiency across the organization,” said Shah. “It makes it easy for them to have multiple groups use the product because you don’t have to worry about, for example, the compliance person looking at information that should be seen by the security team.”
There’s no shortage of CASBs, including Blue Coat, CipherCloud Inc., Netskope, Adallom, CloudLock, Zscaler, Actifio, Bitglass, Trend Micro’s SecureCloud and EMC CloudLink.
Skyhigh also said this week it now supports the security classifications of cloud storage provider Box Skyhigh for Box lets admins now identify and automatically apply data classification on documents uploaded to Box, as well as existing documents already in Box.
Skyhigh also has versions for Office 365, Salesforce, Dropbox, Google Drive, ServiceNow and Shadow IT.
