Today’s businesses spend more money on SaaS tools than on laptops. According to Gartner, the average organization now uses over 125 different SaaS applications.
With the multitude of cloud apps businesses use on a daily basis, securing that expanding environment requires visibility and control across users, applications, data, and infrastructure. As security solutions proliferate to respond to the diversity of needs, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to determine which solutions are right for your organization and will most effectively mitigate its risks.
We take a look at two popular solutions that security professionals often resort to: Cloud Access Security Broker (CASB) and Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) solutions.
What is a Cloud Access Security Broker?
A cloud access security broker (CASB) is a set of security capabilities that provides visibility and control over the use of cloud applications and services. CASB helps organizations identify cloud applications, enforce security policies, protect sensitive data, and detect threats across SaaS environments.
While CASB was historically offered as a standalone security product, its capabilities are now commonly integrated into Security Service Edge (SSE) platforms. Modern SSE platforms can combine CASB with secure web gateway (SWG), zero trust network access (ZTNA), data loss prevention (DLP), and other security services under a unified architecture and policy framework.
In essence, CASBs secure data flow between your organization and the cloud vendor, according to your organization’s security policies. They encrypt data to prevent malware and thus protect your system against cyberattacks.
Four core CASB capabilities
The four main functionalities of CASB are:
- visibility
- compliance
- data security
- threat protection
We investigate whether these functionalities are enough to guarantee the security of your SaaS apps in the next section.
CASB solution deployment types
There are three ways to deploy CASBs, and each affects their performance differently. In practice, you don’t have to pick just one, most modern CASBs run two or more of these together.
Reverse proxy: This mode sits in front of the cloud app and doesn’t require an agent on the device, making it suitable for unmanaged or BYOD devices.
API-based: An API-based CASB integrates with supported cloud apps, but doesn’t cover the unsupported ones.
Forward proxy (inline/gateway): This mode sits between users and cloud apps, inspecting traffic in real time. Because every request passes through this single checkpoint, it can slow network performance and add friction to login.
CASB solution limitations
- It’s a point tool: CASBs are point tools with a limited protection range. CASB is essentially a visibility and policy control point that sits between your users, your organization and the cloud. CASB solutions focus exclusively on the cloud. They offer deep analytics and a wide variety of controls for cloud services, but their coverage does not go beyond the cloud infrastructure.
- Proxy-based CASBs have critical blind spots: Proxy-based CASBs are unable to keep up with the pace of upgrades to your application infrastructures, causing performance and security issues. They also limit the visibility of what’s in your cloud. They miss data shared by people outside your organization (be it customers or collaborators), can’t monitor your desktop, nor API connections to third-party SaaS.
- No coverage of intranet data: If you want to secure data in intranet applications and services, CASB is not your best choice. If your organization shares data between computers connected to LAN, they will not be covered, since they aren’t cloud-based.
- Difficult installation: Most CASB solutions are hard to install, and they’ll only work well on devices managed by your organization. Your security professionals must have a thorough understanding of the organization’s use cases and a range of IT skills to manage them effectively.
- Lack of a universal tool: It’s hard to decide which CASB solution to pick for any one organization. There are no universal criteria, and you are often warned to do your own thorough research before choosing the right solution.
- Cannot act as a firewall: While CASBs add some features to firewalls, they should not replace them. Firewalls are still crucial for providing visibility to network traffic.
CASB comparison: Unlike CASB, SIEM provides unified coverage
SIEM is a security solution that collects, correlates, and analyzes log data from across your entire IT infrastructure, including cloud, on-premises, and hybrid environments, to detect and respond to security threats in real time.
Both CASB and SIEM solutions secure your cloud infrastructure, but there are clear differences in how they cover your SaaS tools.
CASB vs SIEM comparison
| Dimension | CASB | SIEM |
| Coverage scope | Cloud applications only | Entire infrastructure (cloud, on-premises, hybrid) |
| Data sources | Cloud service logs and user activity | On-premise apps, databases, web proxies, network devices, cloud services, and more |
| Primary use cases | Shadow IT discovery, cloud DLP, cloud compliance | Threat detection, incident response, security monitoring across all systems |
| Deployment methods | API-based or proxy-based | Agent-based, API, log forwarding |
| Threat detection | Cloud-specific threats and policy violations | Correlated threat detection across your environment |
SIEM collects data from many different sources, not just from the cloud. These include your on-premise applications, databases, web proxies, network switches, routers, data loss prevention and more. It filters through and correlates event logs across the different systems, informing you of threats in real-time, allowing you to respond to them as quickly as possible.
SIEM is a consolidated tool that offers early attack detection through real-time data analysis. CASBs only cover certain points within the cloud and inform you about the usage of your SaaS tools. Further, proxy-based CASBs only secure SaaS cloud services, leaving IaaS and PaaS clouds vulnerable.
Ensuring a fully secure SaaS
Employees sign up for all kinds of SaaS tools, unaware of the consequences. As a security professional, you need full visibility into what applications just entered your environment, how they entered, and how to remove them quickly.
If your organization uses G Suite along with other SaaS tools, you’ll need a solution that both secures them and gives you visibility and control. You’ll need a solution that can do more than CASB.
When it comes to securing your SaaS apps, ensuring you have full visibility into what’s happening in your cloud should be your top priority. A cloud-native tool is a better option for SaaS to ensure you have maximum protection.
With Sumo Logic SIEM, you can have an integrated view across your hybrid and multi-cloud infrastructure. Request a demo to see how it works.
