Description

The Frost & Sullivan report analyzes the global market for Cloud Access Security Brokers (CASB) and presents this in the Frost Radar™. This measures growth rates in addition to absolute revenues and combines them with several other factors to measure companies’ performance along the growth axis. Companies are also measured along an innovation axis. Companies plotted on the Frost Radar™ are the leaders in the industry for growth, innovation, or both. They are instrumental in advancing the industry into the future. CASB is software that acts as a security control point between users and cloud services. This can be deployed as an on-premises or cloud-hosted solution. CASB has evolved quickly as a platform offering many features and continues to develop, in particular adding security features. Data moving to the cloud exposes it to multiple risks, including malware, threat actors, accidental over exposure, leveraging social media, and others. CASB began as a way to detect shadow IT practices. Shadow IT revealed the need for visibility and control. It has since grown to include more functionality for visibility, compliance, data security and threat protection. Via malware protection and data encryption, CASB offers additional layers of protection. In addition to Software as a Service (SaaS) apps sanctioned by IT teams, such as Office 365 and Google G Suite, users employ numerous unsanctioned cloud services which pose security challenges—a practice known as “Shadow IT” within the industry. The explosive growth of mobile, remote work force and cloud services are putting pressure on security teams to monitor and control cloud application usage thus fueling the growth of CASB. The market faces ongoing technological evolution. CASB vendors are extending coverage into Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), e.g., Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud and Platform and Platform as a Service (PaaS), e.g., Force.com, ServiceNow. The CASB market has settled into a model in which CASB is integrated with other products to offer a total solution to customers. Integration is with a vendor’s own portfolio or with other vendor’s products.

Author: Tony Massimini