Cato Networks yesterday announced the release of Cato CASB, the first Cloud Access Security Broker (CASB) to help companies with visibility and managing cloud application data risk. This new offering “addresses a critical visibility and control gap created by cloud migration but must be converged into a broad SASE platform to be truly effective across the business,” said Shlomo Kramer, co-founder and CEO of Cato Networks. Cato’s CASB integrates into the company’s SPACE engine, allowing it to leverage the global footprint, rich context, cloud scalability, and self-healing and self-maintenance underpinning the Cato SASE Cloud.
SASE:
Along with Cato CASB, Cato brings the benefits of a true SASE platform to the challenge of managing cloud application risk. Typical CASB offerings typically waste valuable time on the planning and deployment stages. Cato’s CASB, on the other hand, is instantly available and easily deployable within an organisation. Companies will immediately have full visibility into and control of their cloud applications.
In addition, Cato CASB taps the full power of Cato’s multi-layer threat defense. Cloud-based file access is inspected by Cato advanced anti-malware and IPS engines. Access control to locations and resources are limited through Cato NGFW and SWG. With legacy CASB, all of those components would be additional, requiring integration and deployment.
The Four Steps to Managing Cloud Application Risk
With this new launch, Cato addresses all four stages for managing cloud application data risk — visibility, assessment, enforcement, and protection. It’s doing so by introducing a new Shadow IT dashboard that provides full insight into aggregate SaaS usage, including number of total and high-risk applications, list of the highest risk applications, number of users accessing them, as well as distribution by risk.
Along with this, Cato has built a unique Application Credibility Engine (ACE) which automates data collection from several sources to enable a quick and accurate assessment of each application. Three vectors are aggregated together for a comprehensive analysis – general company information, compliance features, and security capabilities.
Having discovered unauthorized applications on their networks and been able to assess their risk, IT leaders must now decide how they want to respond. With Cato CASB, they gain fine-grained access over the application. The rules allow them to define the matching criteria, the specified action to be taken in case the rule applies, the associated severity level, and whether an alert or event should be generated.
Finally, the last stage is ensuring the protection of SaaS usage. Cato’s SASE achieves this through the convergence of its security tools. All SaaS traffic is processed by multiple security tools — NGFW, SWG, IPS, and NGAM. Together, these tools provide comprehensive protection from a wide array of threats.
