Zscaler Blog

Ask just about any industry analyst and you will hear the same thing—enterprises with a significant cloud presence need a cloud access security broker (CASB) to protect their cloud-based data. But not all CASB offerings are the same. Organizations must be careful to select a CASB solution that fits in today’s ever-changing cloud-based world.

View this infographic for a quick look at the key challenges of data protection in a cloud-first world.

A growing need

The adoption of software as a service (SaaS) applications has fundamentally changed the way employees do their jobs and accomplish their corporate goals. And it doesn’t seem like SaaS adoption is going to slow down any time soon. According to recent estimates, the global SaaS market size is projected to reach $307.3 billion by 2026, up from $158.2 billion in 2020.

SaaS solutions are quite easy to adopt and use, and can be readily available to employees around the globe. However, as these tools have been quickly adopted, the risks have increased. It's impossible to train every employee to consistently use security best practices with their SaaS applications, and lapses can lead to costly mistakes for the organization.

The traditional approach to solve this is to add a CASB as a separate overlay to report on SaaS usage and provide some level of control. Unfortunately, this is usually independent of the rest of the organization's security offerings and is another separate data protection function that adds unneeded complexity without solving the key challenges of SaaS usage.

A challenging time

With the threat of cyberattacks looming over every piece of internet traffic, organizations can ill afford to trust the security of their data, and potentially their entire network, to an unproven solution that doesn’t fit with the most widely recommended security architecture today—secure access service edge (SASE).

Let’s take a look at just some of the struggles with CASB point product overlays:  

• Unproven architecture: Most CASB point overlays can’t decrypt all traffic or scale on demand to meet a business’ changing needs or handle an organization’s full traffic load.
  
• Lack of integration: Most CASB point overlays don’t work with inline secure web gateways (SWGs)—and often treat inline and out-of-band CASB separately, leaving policy and reporting separate for SaaS vs. the rest of the organization’s traffic.
  
• Unproven private access: CASB point overlays lack integrated private access or don’t comply with the principles of zero trust network access (ZTNA), leaving applications and users exposed.
  
• Complex deployment: Adding overlays for inline traffic on top of an existing SWG is complex to deploy, and results in redundant (and reduced) functionality. 
  
• File-centric inspection: Most CASB point overlays can’t see beyond web traffic and offer limited security functions, exposing the organization to threats.
  
• Multiple agents: CASB point overlays often require yet another endpoint agent to work. While customers are looking to reduce agents on endpoints, CASB point overlays are asking them to take on one more.
  

A better CASB

Organizations have quickly discovered that adding on point products to their legacy infrastructure isn’t the answer to the challenges of today’s cloud- and mobile-first world. Instead of making cloud security easier, most of these add-ons just add cost and complexity. Network, security, and IT leaders realize that a fully integrated solution is the best fit in today’s landscape.

What these industry leaders are looking for, and what thousands of global corporations have already discovered, is the power of the Zscaler CASB and its critical role in the integrated Zscaler Cloud Security Platform. With Zscaler, organizations get:    

• Proven architecture: The Zscaler platform was built from the ground up for full decryption and data classification at scale to identify hidden threats and data exposure. It runs on a proven architecture that processes more than 100 billion transactions per day.
  
• Deep integration: Zscaler integrates CASB and SWG into a single offering and has been validated by Gartner as the Leader in the SWG Magic Quadrant nine years in a row.
  
• Integrated private access: Our fully cloud-delivered service gives organizations visibility into application access across SaaS, public cloud, and private data centers to ensure that only authorized users have access.
  
• Simple to deploy: Zscaler CASB eliminates redundancies as traffic is only decrypted and inspected once in a single pass. There are no complex overlays or proxy-chaining to deploy, third-party firewalls and proxy logs to fetch, or additional agents to install. And all of this is under a single pane of glass to simplify deployment and management.
  
• Reduced risk: Threat prevention is fully integrated into the Zscaler platform of services. Cloud Firewall, Cloud Sandbox, CASB, and Cloud DLP work together to identify and stop threats based on the full context of apps, users, and file contents across locations.
  
• Browser Isolation: With Zscaler Cloud Browser Isolation, organizations no longer need a reverse proxy or agents. You control how users get access to SaaS content by serving them pixels instead of data based on the context of the user. 
  

A trusted solution

Your internet traffic is under attack as never before. Don’t believe me? The FBI found that online crimes reported to the Bureau's Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) have increased by 400 percent since January 2020. And our Zscaler cloud saw a 30,000 percent increase in phishing, malicious websites, and malware targeting remote users between January and March 2020.

Data is the currency of cybercriminals and it has never been more valuable. You can’t trust your data to an add-on solution that wasn’t built to be deeply integrated with the rest of your organization’s security and data protection. That’s why more than 400 of the Forbes Global 2000 organizations trust their data to Zscaler.

Shouldn’t you?

Want to learn more?

Read this paper on data protection challenges.

View this infographic on the five data protection challenges.

Learn more about our overall data protection platform.

Learn more about CASB.

Chris Morosco is Senior Director of Product Marketing at Zscaler.