Is your data safe? Your IP, is it secure? Do you trust your employees, your processes, and governance protocols to mitigate or eliminate cyber security threats?

Your answer might vary, but the truth is that security is a real concern for IT, regardless of the technology in place, including cloud access security brokers (CASB).

As of 2020,  60 percent of large enterprise companies use CASB.1  Yet, managing cyber security threats was the top challenge cited by IT in that same year.2 

Why this disconnect? CASB is a powerful technology, but what’s missing from this solution?

In this blog, you’ll discover what CASB is, what it lacks, and why you should consider combining it with SaaS Management.

CASB-A short history

What is CASB? According to Gartner, cloud access security brokers (CASBs) are security enforcement points placed between cloud service consumers and providers to enforce enterprise security policies. In Short, CASB’s main focus is security. It acts as the first layer for adopting SaaS applications, implementing necessary security solutions for data loss prevention, incident detection, permission controls, and more.

Why was CASB needed? After the SaaS Explosion of the early 2000s, organizations began rapidly downloading and experimenting with SaaS applications, finding innovative ways to streamline workflows and generate revenue. But, the shift from on-premise to cloud-based applications posed new security risks—namely, the rise of Shadow IT. This left organizations scrambling to secure their data within the cloud. Thus, CASB was born.

Is CASB a silver bullet for security? Simply put – no. However, that doesn’t make CASB obsolete. The reality is that While CASB is a great tool for security, it doesn’t provide IT with full transparency into your organization’s tech stack, leaving your sensitive data exposed and SaaS spend unmanaged.

That’s why combining CASB with a SaaS management tool is essential to ensuring your organization’s success.

Strengthening CASB with SaaS Management

With organizations’ rapid use, exploration, and discardment of applications, it’s no longer enough to just implement baseline security measures. Instead, IT needs a method for monitoring, analyzing, and ultimately acting upon SaaS usage, preventing security breaches rather than just responding to them.

Combining your CASB solution with SaaS management empowers IT by streamlining:

  • Application Discovery and Mapping
     
  • Usage analysis
     
  • Onboarding and offboarding employees
     
  • Adding and retiring SaaS applications
     

Application Discovery and Mapping

Did you know that most organizations have 300-600 cloud apps in use across various departments? With the rapid adoption of SaaS applications, organizations can no longer rely on spreadsheets for application mapping.

That’s why SaaS management tools automate the mapping process, quickly discovering sanctioned and unsanctioned apps, and sending alerts to IT each time a new application is used—essentially eliminating the threat of Shadow IT.

Usage analysis

Just knowing what applications your organization has isn’t enough to secure your sensitive data. Instead, it’s essential to know which applications are being used and which ones are just taking up space (and money). Understanding employees’ app usage empowers IT to…

  • Manage vendors and prevent surprise SaaS Spend: With SaaS management, IT can easily identify redundant and/or abandoned applications and licenses currently draining your organization’s budget. Deprovisioning and removing these licenses and applications will prevent unnecessary (and costly) renewals, saving your organization thousands.
  • Protect your organization’s sensitive data: Your organization’s sensitive data is constantly running through each and every one of your applications—even the ones your employees aren’t using! Protect your organization’s data by removing unused apps and licenses, limiting unnecessary exposure to security risks.

Onboarding and Offboarding employees

Onboarding employees need access to your organization’s ever-expanding tech stack, while offboarding employees need to be removed from them. With hundreds of apps in your company’s tech stack, manually provisioning and deprovisioning licenses to each of them is a nearly impossible task. While SSO may help streamline the process, it doesn’t account for all your organization’s applications.

That’s why SaaS management tools like Torii automate the onboarding and offboarding process, allowing IT to quickly and easily provision and deprovision users from all applications with the simple click of a button.

Adding and retiring SaaS applications

Organizations’ increasing reliance on apps makes understanding the SaaS lifecycle a necessity. SaaS management tools track your applications’ lifecycles for you, ensuring they’re safely onboarded and offboarded.

  • Adding applications: Despite how a SaaS application is introduced to your organization, whether through a proper purchase order request or an employee’s unreported trial, the usage of a new SaaS application needs to be mapped into your system. This way, IT can ensure the safety and compatibility of every downloaded application with your organization’s safety and compliance protocols.
  • Retiring applications:  Retiring a SaaS application is a necessary and natural step to ensuring the safety of your organization’s sensitive data, while also eradicating wasted spend. When you decide to retire an application, it’s important to understand what data the app currently holds, ensuring said data is either moved to another services provider or backed up before the application’s deletion.

Conclusion- CASB is better with SaaS Management

Enhance your CASB security with the help of a SaaS management tool. Allow IT to not only respond to security threats but proactively prevent them. Find out why hundreds of leading organizations trust Torii as their SaaS management tool here.

Torii is the leading SaaS management platform on the market. It provides solutions for all the new challenges of managing cloud and on-premises applications. It was built from the ground up to integrate with all your core systems, identity and SSO providers, expenses software, and to enhance existing CASB solutions.

Footnotes:

  1. Gartner. “Magic Quadrant for Cloud Access Security Brokers.” Steve Riley and Craig Lawson. November 30, 2017
  2. https://go.snowsoftware.com/2021_ITPrioritiesReport_LP-Download.html