Evaluating CASBs. Looking for community feedback on some vendors.

I have only done a peripheral review of CASB vendors in the past few months, but I do agree that the top ones to consider right now are Skyhigh Networks and Netskope.

When looking at a CASB, be sure not only to consider if they offer all the right checkboxes, but take a look under the covers to see how they are handling those checkboxes. Sometimes, integration between the components is severely lacking or disjointed even when they have a high feature list.

Hi Tim, I'm currently a student and doing research about cyber security market, may I know how do you narrow your list down to these 5 vendors?

Hi, I am working on both Skyhigh and Netskope. The both has their own unique features. List down your requirement and do the POC with the said products.

Skyhigh is efficiently handling both shadow IT and sanctioned IT applications. DLP, threat protection and access controls are the key features of skyhigh.

Netskope is good in access control.

Regards / Ramesh M

Hello,

The CASB space is booming right now. Everyone is leveraging the cloud for various reasons and having a CASB in place is paramount to security. What CASB to get is really a matter of your business requirements. What exactly are you trying to do? Do you want to get a handle on all the Shadow IT that your company is currently exposed to and set up a plan for such activity? Do you want to apply DLP policies to safeguard your data? Perhaps GDPR and other regulatory issues are forcing you to get into compliance? There are many reasons for adopting a CASB solution, the best place to start is with an Audit of your current traffic and finding out what Shadow IT is present, any related Shadow Data that needs to be monitored, and come up with a plan on how to handle SaaS apps in the cloud. The best CASB vendors out there will offer the audit service as part of the CASB solution. From there, you can design policy and stipulate what cloud apps to sanction, which ones to block, and how to coach users during any suspect activity. The end goal is to keep your users productive and happy while securing your data in cloud apps.
For an unbiased answer, I would direct you to Gartner and Forrester for reports on CASB. They will detail what the landscape looks like, who the vendors are, what the pillars of a good CASB solution should entail, as well as some features and functionality that are specific to the various CASB vendors. Gartner has a CASB overview document that is very handy and they are currently working on a magic quadrant for the existing vendors. Forrester has released a “ForresterWaveCASB” document that dives into the vendors and who they think are the best based on market presence, features, etc.
Of course, Symantec offers a CASB solution that should be added to your list of vendors for review. Do not look at a CASB vendor without looking at Symantec. Currently, Forrester ranks Symantec as the number 1 CASB vendor in the marketplace. Symantec offers the following:

· Cloud app discovery and analysis

· Data governance and protection

· Threat detection and incident response

· A CASB that integrates with Symantec DLP (the industry’s leading DLP solution)

· Integration with endpoint

· Integration with Secure Web Gateway (Blue Coat proxies are the best in the industry)

· Authentication with Symantec VIP

· Field level tokenization and encryption

· File-level encryption

Consider these questions when looking for a CASB vendor:

· What do yo udo when you need to apply consistent DLP policies to data in the cloud and on premise?

· What are your options for encrypting confidential data

· Can you safeguard against confidential data transfer to unsanctioned cloud apps or personal cloud accounts?

· Can the CASB automatically identify and respond when a user account has been compromised?

· Does the CASB automatically classify confidential data or do you have to build a system from scratch?

Netskope is really good. MCAS meets the requirements but lacking features, it is cheaper though. Depends on your requirements, netskope has an optional light weight desktop agent which makes monitoring easy.

Do you have any specific requirements?

we use ciphercloud. basically, all of them handles: office, google, & salesforce. now with the GDPR happening in our european offices they're mainly SAP & ciphercloud is the only one approved by SAP.

At the risk of giving a solution without knowing the situation, some very broadbrush advice would be to look at these vendors in this priority order. That said, given the right environment, any of them could be the best fit. CASB is not a market that is matured with standard architectures and features, so it is advisable to consider the specific requirements before making a decision. Another way to say this is there is not one that is universally superior in most situation.

1. Netskope
2. Skyhigh
3. CipherCloud
4. Bitglass
5. Microsoft Cloud App Security
The ones higher on this list tend to have a greater number of use cases where they do a good job. I don’t feel I can publish pros and cons in this forum.

We have used Skyhigh and its pretty good to handle cloud sanctioned IT applications like Office365, Google APPs and salesforce etc.

Easy to deploy, better application, device and user visibility.

No help on any of these, but thanks for the question. For a holistic approach (because anything less is insufficient), I've begun using Sophos appliances, services, and endpoint protection which all speak with each other and really fortify a network on all fronts. Services take up resources, so be sure to invest in an appliance powerful enough to serve all your endpoints effectively. Hope this helps.

We have used Skyhigh Networks for three years and very happy with it. Over the years they have added new capabilities. The original service provided an inventory of cloud applications that our internal people accessed as well as statistics and risk ratings and configuration guidance to block access. Over time they added more functions such as "protect" services for cloud applications like Microsoft O365 and Google Apps that provide protection for users regardless of whether they are on our network or anywhere on the Internet.

We see the service as very effective and they have improved capabilities over the years such as improved reporting.