Cloud Access Security Broker (CASB)
Shadow IT isn't a niche risk anymore, it's the default state of most organizations. Employees sign up for a project management tool, a file-sharing service, or an AI tool with a company email address, and IT finds out about it when something goes wrong, not before. A cloud access security broker sits between your users and the cloud services they're using, giving you visibility into what's actually being used and the ability to enforce policy on it, whether that service was officially sanctioned or not.
The value isn't the acronym, it's what it actually solves: knowing what SaaS applications have access to your company data, being able to enforce consistent security policy, encryption, access control, data loss prevention, across services that were never built with your specific risk tolerance in mind, and catching risky behavior, like someone uploading a sensitive file to a personal cloud storage account, before it becomes an exposure.
How I approach this
I start with discovery: what cloud services are actually in use across your organization, often a much longer list than IT expects, and what each of them has access to. From there, we prioritize based on risk, not every unsanctioned app needs the same level of scrutiny, a team using an unapproved note-taking app is a different risk than finance using an unvetted file-sharing tool for client financial data.
From there I help implement controls that fit how your organization actually works: data loss prevention policies that catch sensitive data leaving approved channels, access controls tied to your existing identity provider rather than a separate silo, and policies that are enforceable without making every sanctioned tool painful to use. A CASB rollout that blocks everything indiscriminately just pushes people toward workarounds that are even harder to see.
Who needs this
If you genuinely don't know what cloud services your employees are using with company data, if you're worried about sensitive data leaving through unsanctioned channels, or if you need consistent policy enforcement across a growing list of SaaS tools, this is worth setting up properly.
Get in touch and let's find out what's actually running in your cloud environment today.