Secure Dropbox with CASB solution
From the time of its launch, Dropbox has continued to impress this industry. File sharing and file collaboration tools in the cloud have become a significant part of businesses. As firms are gradually increasing their cloud adoption, they even look for ways to increase data privacy and cloud security and to maintain compliance. Dropbox has sincerely put many security measures in place, but still,, companies remain vulnerable to risky behaviors of users, compromised email accounts, and other data theft threats. For addressing such challenges, a Cloud Access Security Broker can provide that extra layer of security to any firm so that it can secure Dropbox productivity benefits while protecting sensitive information too, at the same time.
5 ways Firms can use a CASB solution to secure Dropbox usage
1. Standardizing Dropbox
Many organizations are now using multiple cloud-based services like file-sharing services including Box, Dropbox, Google drive, etc. A CASB can very well help in providing the much-needed visibility into any company’s working system with all such cloud services being used, including the usage for file sharing, and is also useful in putting any data privacy risks associated with such services at bay. IT can block risky services or can even coach the employees towards Dropbox using automated messages whenever the user’s log in to such file-sharing services.
2. Scanning Sensitive Information
Of all the shared documents stored within any cloud-based file sharing service, a good percentage is shared with users other than document owners. Of these, some percentage of data contains highly sensitive information, including personal health info in the medical sector, confidential data, as well as customer info. With a Cloud Access Security Broker, firms can easily scan their pre-existing Dropbox data and can identify files containing any sensitive information to secure Dropbox. This can prove useful to firms as it can help them remediate sensitive data files exposure by deleting/revoking their access and help them in identifying users, who have uploaded such sensitive info to work with those users in addressing the issue. On-demand scanning also helps to track publicly shared sensitive data files. Users of Dropbox might have unintentionally created some links, which made sensitive data to be accessible publicly. Firms can identify such data and revoke public access at once.
3. Enabling Securer Collaboration
Many companies use Dropbox as a central file system for organizing and sharing documents across multiple offices. Multiple user collaboration on single files is certainly a useful proposition that Dropbox has enabled the enterprises with. But at times, employees tend to share sensitive company information with their external partners or say some other teams are not authorized for the access of that information, being that data is in the danger zone of theft. With a CASB, firms can address such concerns by enforcing sharing policies as per domain & content to secure Dropbox. It is possible to apply policies preventing such sensitive data sharing outside the company’s domain.
4. Enforcing Compliance
Earlier, companies enforced compliance policies through DLP rules to on-premises data. However, CASBs are now being asked to apply such DLP rules to the data uploaded on the cloud. Such rules include blocking files having sensitive data and info, and also for extending those previously on-premises DLP policies even to the cloud for leveraging remediation workflow. Therefore, if users upload files to Dropbox, CASB would pass them to an on-premises DLP platform; and then, as per the policy definition, would allow those files either to be uploaded or to be blocked.
5. Detecting and Remediating Potential Threats
Even though most firms made huge investments to protect against external attacks, still they are vulnerable to certain threats from insider users and compromised accounts. A CASB leverages monitoring of user-end behavior for any such anomalies and then alerts the IT for potential data breaches and threats whenever they are detected.
Role of CloudCodes
As Dropbox is making large strides into corporate markets by providing enhanced productivity capabilities spanning across PCs and Smartphones, CASB innovations in the cloud data security space are also paving way for their quick and simple adoption by both users as well as IT. Next-gen CASB solutions with data governance capability of CloudCodes for Dropbox are delivering users with actionable insights for data management without the need of altering any beneficial user experience.