According to Gartner, a cloud access security broker is a security policy enforcement point placed between cloud service consumers and cloud service providers.

CASBs aggregate enterprise security policies and enforce them as cloud resources are accessed.

• Authentication and single sign-on
• Authorization and credential mapping
• Device profiling
• Encryption and tokenization
• Logging and alerting
• Malware detection and prevention
• Data loss prevention and activity monitoring
• Shadow IT detection

CASBs are mainly used to protect SaaS applications in the cloud. Their support for PaaS and IaaS is usually more limited.

• Proxy mode
• API mode

• Shadow IT discovery and governance
• Data exfiltration prevention
• Threat detection and forensic investigation
• Compliance support and activity monitoring