A Technical Approach at Securing SaaS using Cloud Access Security Brokers

The adoption of cloud services allows organizations to become more agile in the way they conduct business, providing scalable, reliable, and highly available services or solutions for their employees and customers. Cloud adoption significantly reduces total cost of ownership (TCO) and minimizes hardware footprint in data centers. This paradigm shift has left security professionals securing abstract environments for which conventional security products are no longer effective. The goal of this paper is to analyze a set of cloud security controls and security deployment models for SaaS applications that are purely technical in nature while developing practical applications of such controls to solve real-world problems facing most organizations. The paper will also provide an overview of the threats targeting SaaS, present use cases for SaaS security controls, test cases to assess effectiveness, and reference architectures to visually represent the implementation of cloud security controls.