The Future of CASB: Emerging Trends and Technologies to Watch

November 8, 2024 By Janne Smith No Comments 6 minutes

While businesses are moving faster to adopt cloud services, the importance of having robust security solutions has never been greater. Protecting data, managing access, and staying compliant while utilizing multiple cloud ‘services’ is a challenge, but Cloud Access Security Brokers (CASBs) are a key component to doing so.

The Future of CASB

The CASB market is changing rapidly, with new trends and technologies driving big changes into what these platforms can bring to the table for organizations. Cato Networks also provides a glossary on CASB that details the baseline functions and the inherent benefits of CASB in allowing businesses to leverage the cloud effectively.

Note: We recommend connecting to a trusted VPN, like FastestVPN to elevate digital protection. While the CASB adds an extra layer of security by monitoring traffic and enforcing policie, the VPN offers a secure link to the corporate network. This layered approach strengthens security by incorporating multiple protective measures.

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A Quick Recap: What is CASB?

CASB is a security tool that is positioned between users and cloud service suppliers and works as a gatekeeper to enforce security policies and control users’ access to cloud applications and data. Visibility into cloud usage, protection of data from threats, ensuring compliance with regulatory standards and mitigating risk with shadow IT are enabled by CASBs.

However, since organizations are now using multiple cloud services, CASBs are now critical for cloud security including management and securing cloud interactions. As the cloud landscape increases in complexity, so do the capabilities CASBs require. To do that, here’s a look at some of the key trends and emerging technologies influencing the future of CASB.

1. Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) Integration

Secure Access Service Edge, or SASE, is one of the biggest shifts in the CASB landscape, with the ability to integrate with it. SASE is a broad framework that incorporates network security and Wide Area Networking (WAN) services into a single, unified solution. This integration allows CASBs to play well with other security tools like SD–WAN, Secure Web Gateways (SWG) and Firewall-as-a-Service (FWaaS).

Converging CASB with SASE enables businesses to gain unified visibility and control over their network and cloud environments. By converging these technologies, performance improves, management is simplified, and a more adaptive and secure IT architecture emerges that is positioned well for both today’s dispersed workforces and cloud first strategies.

2. Zero Trust Security Saw Increased Focus

CASB technology is being influenced by the rise in the Zero Trust security model. In Zero Trust, the default state is that no one inside or outside an organization’s network should be trusted by default. All access requests must, instead, be verified at each step.

Zero trust and CASB go hand in hand, enforcing strict access controls, continuous user authentication, and monitoring user behavior in a cloud environment. CASBs prevent the risk of data breaches and insider threats through Zero Trust, by preventing unauthorized access and lateral movement within a cloud application.

With more organizations taking on the principles of Zero Trust, CASBs will be more and more often built into these frameworks to ensure consistent security amongst both on-prem and cloud resources.

3. Threat Detection with AI and Machine Learning

As the sophistication of cyber threats grows, CASBs follow closely, employing artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to detect and respond to real time anomalies. The latest CASB technologies allow them to detect suspicious behavior patterns, and flag them before a data breach ensues.

AI-driven CASBs process large amounts of data and user activities and can detect unusual behaviors including excessive data download, abnormal access location, fast file sharing, etc. These insights help security teams find and address potential threats more quickly, helping to create more proactive security in a cloud environment that is constantly changing.

As we go forward, it is clear that AI and ML will continue to be vital to improving CASB threat detection, requiring as little intervention as possible from a human being and improving security response accuracy.

4. Enhanced Compliance with Data-Centric Security

Following regulations such as GDPR, HIPPA and CCPA, compliance is still a top priority for organizations dealing with critical data. For their part, CASBs are evolving as the regulations do, while their data security features are more and more becoming a data-centric security model where data protection is the focus, rather than perimeter security.

CASBs that are data-centric provide data classification, encryption, tokenization, and real-time data loss prevention (DLP). These enable organizations to support compliance requirements and to ensure sensitive data is protected even when accessed from unmanaged devices or external networks. CASBs will offer enhanced data protection features that will make it easier to enforce compliance across many cloud services and different global jurisdictions.

5. Support for Multi-Cloud and Hybrid Cloud Environments

The adoption of multi-cloud and hybrid cloud environments is increasing and therefore complicates cloud security management. They are, in other words, no longer flying their proverbial colors under a single cloud provider but instead using a mix of public, private and hybrid cloud services to meet their operational needs. Diversification comes with new security challenges – layers of disparate, inconsistent security policies, visibility gaps, and data control silos.

To support multi-cloud and hybrid environments, CASBs are enabling a unified platform that allow for consistent security policies across all cloud services. This functionality ensures consistent enforcement of security controls, data protection policies, and access management protocols, even if you choose to utilize multiple cloud providers. As organizations further extend their cloud strategy, the ability of CASBs to secure multi-cloud setups becomes crucial.

6. UEBA (User and Entity Behavior Analytics)

Another upcoming feature of CASB is User and Entity Behavior Analytics (UEBA), which gives detailed user activity insights and unusual behavior identification. As a result, CASBs can spot suspicious calls to action (Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) or RESTful calls) and potential security risks when UEBA examines the behavior of users, devices and even applications in the cloud.

With behavioral baseline monitoring, UEBA-enhanced CASBs pick up on threats such as compromised accounts and insider attacks as well as malicious applications. Additionally, UEBA provides an additional layer of security enabling organizations to proactively defend threats before they get worse. With the sophistication of cloud threats, UEBA may end up as a standard part of any CASB solution.

Conclusion

CASB’s future is integration, intelligence, and flexibility. Since organizations are relying more and more on cloud services, CASBs will increasingly fulfill security, compliance and access control demands. Innovations in SASE, Zero Trust, AI driven threat detection and multi cloud support are making CASBs indispensable tools to secure the modern cloud first enterprise.

CASBs will continue to serve a critical role in cloud security by attracting themselves to advances in these trends and by adopting new technologies that will aid organizations in protecting sensitive data, making compliance seamless, and controlling access to a resource in a more seamless manner. Nonetheless, the advancements in CASB solutions have a promise for a secure and resilient future for companies that are trying to navigate the cloud computing complexities.