Cloud-based services increase the risk of data breaches, compliance violations, and unauthorized access. Traditional security measures fall short in addressing these cloud-specific challenges and leave a significant gap in your web security stack.

Cloud Access Security Brokers (CASBs) are critical to the security of cloud environments. Despite the strategic deployment of CASBs, understanding the intricacies of CASB pricing is a crucial consideration. Here, we equip you with the knowledge to make informed decisions that resonate with your security posture and budgetary frameworks.

What does CASB mean?

CASB stands for Cloud Access Security Broker, which connects users and providers of cloud services. By protecting cloud services, it ensures that organizations can leverage the vast potential of cloud computing while minimizing their associated risks.

A CASB operates as a policy enforcement center to implement various security policies such as authentication and credential mapping. By doing so, it provides organizations with greater visibility into their cloud service usage and comprehensive compliance management. CASBs provide a centralized platform for managing cloud services, including the integration of secure web gateways.

An analysis of the CASB's value

In the process of assessing CASB pricing and rationalizing the investment, teams should consider the substantial value and cost savings a CASB delivers. It enhances organizational cloud security frameworks through several key dimensions:

• Enhanced visibility and control: CASBs provide organizations with critical insights into cloud service utilization, enabling the enforcement of comprehensive security policies across all cloud applications. This level of control is essential for managing data access and ensuring secure data sharing practices, particularly with unmanaged devices.
• Improved compliance: CASBs facilitate adherence to regulatory standards by extending compliance mechanisms into the cloud environment. They automate the compliance reporting process to simplify regulatory compliance across various frameworks.
• Data security and loss prevention: Protecting sensitive data against unauthorized access and breaches is a cornerstone of CASB functionality. Through effective data loss prevention strategies, it prevents unauthorized data exfiltration.
• Threat protection: CASBs proactively identify and mitigate cloud-based security threats, including malware and ransomware. Their capacity for real-time threat detection and response is critical for maintaining a secure cloud ecosystem.
• Identity and access management (IAM): By integrating with existing IAM systems, CASBs enhance identity verification processes and access controls for cloud applications. It ensures secure and efficient management of user and device access.
• Enhanced user experience: CASBs maintain operational efficiency and user productivity by facilitating secure, high-performance access to cloud services. Features such as single sign-on (SSO) and conditional access policies streamline the user authentication process.
• Consistent security policies: CASBs enable the uniform application of security policies across diverse cloud services. It ensures that security measures evolve with new cloud services and emerging threats.

A checklist for selecting a CASB tool

Choosing the appropriate CASB tool is crucial for enhancing your organization's cloud security posture. To ensure you select a CASB that aligns with your specific needs, consider the following critical factors:

• Security needs assessment: Begin by evaluating your organization's specific security requirements. Identify the types of cloud services in use, the nature of the data stored, or processed in the cloud. This assessment will help you determine the key features your CASB solution must have to address your security needs effectively.
• Integration capabilities: Integration capabilities are crucial for ensuring that the CASB can provide comprehensive visibility and control over cloud usage. The CASB you choose should seamlessly integrate with your existing security infrastructure.
• Scalability: As your organization grows and your cloud usage evolves, your CASB solution should be able to scale accordingly. Assess the CASB's ability to handle an increasing number of users, cloud applications, and data volume.
• Compliance and data protection: Ensure that the CASB offers robust compliance and data protection features. It should help you comply with relevant regulations (e.g., GDPR, HIPAA, CCPA) and industry standards.
• User experience and support: The CASB should offer a user-friendly interface and intuitive management tools that do not require extensive training to use. Additionally, evaluate the vendor's customer support services, including the availability of technical assistance and training resources.
• Cost transparency: Understand the pricing model of the CASB solution and any additional costs that may arise. This includes setup fees, subscription costs, charges for additional features or services, and costs associated with scaling the solution.

Features and CASB pricing of Strac

Strac provides security solutions designed for today's digital enterprises. With its CASB service, it offers cross-platform data protection across cloud platforms. It allows organizations to:

• Discover and remediate sensitive data across platforms: Strac scans SaaS applications, cloud storage, emails, and endpoints. It's designed to detect and categorize sensitive data, including personal and financial information.

• Comply with regulatory standards: The platform supports organizations in adhering to major compliance standards like HIPAA, PCI-DSS, GDPR, and CCPA. It enforces data security policies, manages access controls, and maintains audit trails.
• High accuracy and deep integration: Powered by advanced machine learning, Strac identifies sensitive data with high precision and minimal false positives. It integrates smoothly with widely-used SaaS applications and cloud platforms.
• Access Controls: Strac enables organizations to implement granular access controls. It helps define who can view or transmit sensitive data across cloud apps and services.
• Effortless deployment: With pre-built, no-code integrations, Strac is easy to set up and deploy across your organization's technology stack

• Secure data sharing: Through tokenization and proxy features, Strac enables the secure sharing of sensitive data. This approach allows collaboration without compromising data privacy by hiding actual data values.

Strac is committed to providing transparent pricing for CASB solutions. Book a free demo to request CASB pricing and explore more features.