Microsoft Cloud APP security is now generally available. Microsoft acquired Adallon in September 2015 and based on that Microsoft has come up with a product called Microsoft Cloud App security. It’s used for deeper visibility, stronger controls, and enhanced security for your Cloud Applications.
The main features of the CAS are,
- Discover all SAAS APPS
- See policy violation
- Detect Anomalies
Discovery
It identifies all Apps, Users, and IP Addresses across the network and shows them under one dashboard. All this information was visible and controllable in the traditional IT on premises services but with the help of Cloud App Security we can have that same level of control over SAAS Applications as well. A large percentage of employees use SAAS Applications that that the organizations are not aware of, that opens a lot of security and compliance Issues so this discovery features help in monitoring those applications. It also conducts risk assessment, it conducts a risk score for each application. You don’t need to deploy any agents in your apps to conduct this analysis as MS is getting that data from Proxies and Firewall.
It can discover more than 13000 Cloud apps and also provides automated risk scores by evaluating each discovered service against more than 60 parameters. You can even get a break down of the score based on the parameters like Data transfer restriction, Laws and regulations, Sensitive data definition, personal data definition etc.
Cloud App security also provides powerful ongoing reporting capabilities of your cloud usage such as usage patterns, Download/upload usage as well as your top users.
Policy
Control over your apps by providing the policies, using cloud App security you can build granular security policies easily. You can either use out of the box policies or build & customize your own. You can view all the apps/Files that are violating the policies, investigate the issue by getting some more information available on a click of a button and then fix the issue as well.
Anomalies
Deeper visibility and stronger controls are key components of providing enterprise–grade security for your applications. Cloud APP Security not only provides you Discovery and Data control features but also a powerful threat detection engine.
Cloud App security Advanced machine learning Algorithms learns how an user Interacts with the each SAAS Application and a behavior analysis accesses the risk in each transaction, like suspicious login activity from different IPs of a same account simultaneously.
Cloud App Security seems to be a bug bet in the field of cloud security by Microsoft and I am looking forward to getting my hands dirty on it. I have created a request but didn’t have the access until now. If this article excites you and you want to get your hands on CAS just request for the access here.
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