CASB For Small Medium Business
With the steep increase in cloud adoption, the need for CASB for Small Medium Business is also gradually augmenting. For Startups and SMBs, cloud transition is raging from novelty before to a kind of the norm now. Cloud advantages are pretty clear: cost-effectiveness, user-friendliness, and extreme flexibility! Startups and SMBs are transitioning away from many legacy solutions and thus facing a lot of operational challenges, from cloud security to augmenting costs. Spiceworks, which is a professional networking community, did a survey, whose collected information revealed the practical side of Startups and SMBs and their cloud adoption. A 2017 Report also revealed an overall rise in budget allocations specifically for high-priority cloud services, which include the following:
- Cloud storage
- File hosting
- File sharing
- Emailing solutions
- Disaster recovery models
- CRM or Customer-relationship-management
- Experimentation and innovation
Choosing The Right CASB For Small Medium Business
As these legacy solutions happen to meet the end-of-life dates, many such firms are seeking their replacements and exploring cloud-based alternatives. IDC also forecasted that SaaS would remain the most dominant type of cloud-computing model, capturing almost two-thirds of public cloud spendings in the year 2017, and around sixty percent by the year 2020. Cloud adoption has been on the rise for most Startups and SMBs as they started finding various cloud security solutions, too, if they did not have anyone already.
However, choosing apart this marketing hype from these given facts would not be so easy. Fathoming the underlying technology, its implementation, maintenance, and budgeting would probably take a little longer than most of the IT pros thus anticipated. Choosing the right Cloud Access Security Broker is not an easy battle for sure; it is a meticulous affair, demanding SMBs and Startups to be carefully checking the features offered in their CASB modules. Unfortunately, most perimeter security options do not adequately cover all of the cloud applications. Every CASB vendor would approach particular cloud security problems from different angles, and each of these approaches would lead to strengths in some areas while weaknesses in the others. It is imperative to decide which CASB solution would be right for you.
The Need of CASB For SMBs
While the essential central control over the activity of cloud apps may be the organizational goal, the tiny milestones, which are necessary for achieving this goal, are far more significant. The Discovery Phase would help in determining the basics, with the answers to the following questions:
- Which cloud do applications need monitoring and control?
- How can the monitoring and control of account access be done?
- How can the monitoring and control of business data be achieved?
- How can compliance and reporting be managed?
Trying to answer these questions given above might not be easy as many SMBs and startups lack the technologies for providing adequate answers to these questions. Also, most of them do not necessarily require all of the features that most CASB vendors usually offer to secure cloud applications. Most of these SMBs and Startups only need 1 particular thing to initiate their foray into cloud security, and that is just ‘monitoring!’
Initiate With Monitoring First
Monitoring of cloud-based activities provides the IT pros a proper clarity about what are the actions that must be taken for creating a more cohesive and far securer cloud ecosystem. Knowing this activity helps the firms to start answering the above mentioned crucial questions and plan their further steps.
SMBs would always need a CASB solution eventually, but mostly their IT pros are only beginning to scratch the surfaces. Monitoring is a very non-invasive approach for starting with this research procedure. While starting with this process of monitoring, it is possible to build smart policies around the cloud apps, and if needed, even control the usage of those cloud apps.