Tag Archives: Microsoft 365

See risk, fix risk: introducing Remediation in Cloudflare CASB

Post Syndicated from Alex Dunbrack original https://blog.cloudflare.com/remediation-in-cloudflare-casb/

Starting today, Cloudflare CASB customers can do more than see risky file-sharing across their SaaS apps: they can fix it, directly from the Cloudflare One dashboard.

This launch marks a huge advancement for Cloudflare’s Cloud Access Security Broker (CASB). Since its release, Cloudflare’s API-based CASB has focused on providing robust, comprehensive visibility and detection. It also connects to the SaaS tools your business runs on, surfacing misconfigurations, and flagging overshared data before it becomes tomorrow’s incident.

With today’s release of Remediation – a new way to fix problems with just a click, right from the CASB Findings page – CASB begins its next chapter, and moves from telling you what’s wrong to helping you make it right.


An example of a Remediation Action (Remove Public File Sharing) in a CASB Finding.

CASB 101: A single place to see SaaS risk

Inside Cloudflare One, our SASE platform, CASB connects to the SaaS and cloud tools your teams already use. By talking to providers over API, CASB gives security and IT teams:

  • A consolidated view of misconfigurations, overshared files, and risky access patterns across apps like Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, Slack, Salesforce, Box, GitHub, Jira, and Confluence (CASB Integrations).

  • Continuous scanning for new issues as users collaborate, share, and adopt new tools.

  • Findings that are organized, searchable, and exportable for triage and reporting.

But until now, the actual fixing usually happened somewhere else, whether it’s inside each app’s admin UI, or through a ticket to the team that owns that tool. Remediation closes that loop.

Remediation: CASB’s next chapter

The launch of CASB Remediation marks a major shift forward for the product and Cloudflare One, and we have a ton of big updates planned for the next year. 

With today’s release, we focused on fixing file-share issues in Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace.

With Remediation, you can fix the highest-impact, most common file risks we see across customers, including:

  • Public links that let anyone on the Internet view or edit a file.

  • Files shared company-wide across your tenant or domain, even when just a handful of people should have access.

  • Files shared outside your organization to personal accounts and external domains.

  • All of the above, when they also match a DLP Profile. For example, a document full of customer records, credentials, or financial details.

When you trigger the ‘Remove sharing’ Remediation action on a supported finding, CASB immediately moves to remove the risky sharing configuration (for example, the public link or organization-wide access) from the file in question. And crucially, Remediation only removes risky sharing; it doesn’t delete files or change who owns them.


A new page to track the progress and success of Remediated CASB findings.

Two starting points: Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace

We chose to start with Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace because, for many organizations, that’s where the bulk of their business-critical documents live: internal financials, product roadmaps, customer contracts, HR notes, and more.

They’re also where “temporary” sharing tends to linger too long:

  • A spreadsheet shared “Anyone with the link can edit” for a quick review.

  • A doc made company-wide for an all-hands, then quietly forgotten.

  • A sheet of customer records shared to a contractor’s personal email.

For Microsoft 365, that means cleaning up risky shares in places like OneDrive and SharePoint. For Google Workspace, it means tightening sharing on Docs, Sheets, Slides, and other files stored in Drive.

Instead of exporting a CSV of risky files out of CASB, sending it to app owners, and hoping everyone gets around to fixing their share settings, you can drive the clean-up directly from CASB and know when those risks have actually been addressed.

And when you and your team use CASB Remediation, every action is logged in Cloudflare One’s Admin logs, so you can see who took action on which files and when, or export that activity to your security information and event management tool (SIEM).

How it works

When architecting the system that supports CASB Remediations, we knew it had to do three things really well:

  • Be fast, even at scale

  • Durable execution to handle surprises gracefully

  • Be easy for our customers to use 

To meet these goals, we built a system using several Cloudflare products: Workers, Workflows, Queues, Workers KV, Secrets Store, and Hyperdrive. 

When a remediation job is initiated, an API call is made to a Worker. That Worker writes the job to a Queue which is consumed by a second Worker to kick off a Workflow. Workers KV and Secrets Store are used to securely distribute credentials for use in the Workflow. The Workflow runs a series of steps to collect information and execute third-party API calls to complete the remediation. The final outcome of the action is recorded in a database via Hyperdrive. 

At scale, we are guaranteed to encounter 429s from vendor APIs. Workflows’ native retries simplify handling this, and built-in step logging gives visibility into each retry. This means that there was no need for us to build a complex, single-purpose, state-tracking system or dozens of serverless functions for each action.


Performance results from load testing and early access customers have shown strong performance even under heavy load. The average (p50) end-to-end job completion time is 48 seconds, and the p90 is 72 seconds. Durable Execution (via Workflows) has made job management completely hands-off for our team, even when the Workflow encounters issues with third-party APIs. The simplicity of the final system has made troubleshooting issues fast and straightforward.

What’s next for CASB Remediation

File-sharing Remediation for Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace is just the first step.

In the near term, we’re working on bringing our customers new Quarantine actions, which can move or isolate high-risk files to safer locations. We are also introducing Custom Webhook actions, hooks that let you trigger downstream workflows, like ticket creation, chat notifications, or your own automation.

And more broadly, we’re excited to explore ways to make CASB even more of an active control plane:

  • Autoremediation policies for carefully scoped, policy-driven fixes where you’re comfortable letting CASB take action automatically.

  • Custom CASB findings so you can define the exact patterns, data types, or access conditions that matter most to your organization.

  • Bulk Remediation that allows you to remediate many similar findings in a single operation.

  • Extending Remediation to additional SaaS integrations beyond Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace, so the same experience applies to tools like Box, Dropbox, Salesforce, GitHub, Slack, Atlassian, and more over time.

How to get started

CASB Remediation requires a paid CASB license, but don’t let that stop you from trying CASB out today!

  • For existing Cloudflare One / CASB customers: Integrate your Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace tenant (or update your existing integration to Read-Write), and start remediating risky shares directly from the side panel within your file sharing-related finding types.

  • New to Cloudflare One? Sign up now for 50 free seats to begin using CASB immediately. For larger deployments, request a consultation with our experts.

From there, talk to our team about enabling CASB with Remediation for your Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace tenants so you can find and fix overshared files in one place.

We’re excited to see how you use Remediation to clean up long-lived file-sharing risks — and to help shape what CASB’s next generation of remediation capabilities looks like.

Cloudflare One helps optimize user connectivity to Microsoft 365

Post Syndicated from Kyle Krum original https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-one-helps-optimize-user-connectivity-to-microsoft-365/

Cloudflare One helps optimize user connectivity to Microsoft 365

Cloudflare One helps optimize user connectivity to Microsoft 365

We are excited to announce that Cloudflare has joined the Microsoft 365 Networking Partner Program (NPP).  Cloudflare One, which provides an optimized path for traffic from Cloudflare customers to Microsoft 365, recently qualified for the NPP by demonstrating that on-ramps through Cloudflare’s network help optimize user connectivity to Microsoft.

Connecting users to the Internet on a faster network

Customers who deploy Cloudflare One give their team members access to the world’s fastest network, on average, as their on-ramp to the rest of the Internet. Users connect from their devices or offices and reach Cloudflare’s network in over 250 cities around the world. Cloudflare’s network accelerates traffic to its final destination through a combination of intelligent routing and software improvements.

We’re also excited that, in many cases, the final destination that a user visits already sits on Cloudflare’s network. Cloudflare serves over 28M HTTP requests per second, on average, for the millions of customers who secure their applications on our network. When those applications do not run on our network, we can rely on our own global private backbone and our connectivity with over 10,000 networks globally to connect the user.

For Microsoft 365 traffic, we focus on breaking out traffic as locally and direct as possible to bring users to the productivity tools they need without slowing them down. Legacy security solutions can introduce additional hops or backhauling that slows down connectivity to tools like Microsoft 365. With Cloudflare One, we provide the flexibility to identify that traffic and give it the most direct path to Microsoft’s own network of service endpoints around the world.

Securing data and users with Cloudflare Zero Trust

With this setting, trusted traffic to Microsoft uses the most direct path without additional processing. However, the rest of the Internet should not be trusted. Cloudflare’s network also secures the connections, queries, and requests your teams make to protect organizations from attacks and data loss. We can do that without slowing users down because we deliver that security in the data centers at our edge.

SaaS applications delivered over the Internet can make any device with a browser into a workstation. However, that also means that those same devices can connect to the rest of the Internet. Attackers try to lure users into lookalike sites to steal credentials, or they attempt to have users download malware to compromise the device. Either type of attack can put the data stored in SaaS applications at risk.

Cloudflare helps organizations stop those types of attacks through a defense-in-depth strategy. First, Cloudflare starts by delivering a next-generation network firewall in our data centers, filtering traffic for connections to potentially dangerous destinations. Next, Cloudflare runs the world’s fastest DNS resolver and combines it with the data we see about the rest of the Internet to filter queries to phishing domains or sites that host malware.

Finally, Cloudflare’s Secure Web Gateway can inspect HTTP traffic for data loss, viruses, or can choose to isolate the browser for specific sites or entire categories. While Cloudflare’s network secures users from attacks on the rest of the Internet, Cloudflare One ensures that users have a direct, unfettered connection to the Microsoft 365 tools they need.

With traffic secured, Cloudflare can also give administrators visibility into the other applications used in their organization. Without any additional software or features, Cloudflare uses its Zero Trust security suite to analyze and categorize the requests to all applications in a comprehensive Shadow IT report. Administrators can mark applications as approved, unapproved, or unknown and pending investigation so for example Administrators could mark Microsoft 365 traffic as approved — which is also the default setting in deployments that use the one-click enablement being released today.

In some cases, that visibility leads to surprises. Security and IT teams discover that users are doing work in SaaS platforms that have not been reviewed and approved by the organization. In those cases, teams can use Cloudflare’s Secure Web Gateway to block requests to those destinations or just to prevent certain types of activities like blocking file uploads to tools other than OneDrive. With Shadow IT, we can help teams that use Microsoft 365 ensure that data only stays in Microsoft 365.

Our participation in Microsoft 365 Networking Partner Program

Cloudflare has joined the Microsoft 365 Networking Partner Program (NPP). The program is designed to offer customers a set of partners whose deployment practices and guidance are aligned with Microsoft’s networking principles for Microsoft 365 to provide users with the best user experience. Microsoft established the NPP to work with networking companies for optimal connectivity to its service. We are excited to work with a partner whose global network and security principles align with ours.

Starting today, through Cloudflare One, organizations have the ability to ensure as direct a connection as possible for Microsoft 365 traffic. This allows our customers with our WARP client to benefit from a seamless user experience for Microsoft 365, while at the same time securing the rest of their traffic either to SaaS apps, on-prem apps or direct internet traffic through Cloudflare’s global network and security suite of products.

To do this all customers need to do is to enable the Microsoft 365 traffic optimization setting in their Cloudflare One dashboard. Via the setting even if Microsoft 365 connections are routed through the Cloudflare gateways, they are being handed with the least amount of additional overhead for example “Do not inspect” policy is automatically enabled.

It’s very easy to enable with just a few clicks:

  1. Log into the Cloudflare for Teams dashboard.
  2. Go to Settings > Network.
  3. For Exclude Office 365 traffic and Bypass Office 365 traffic, click Create entries.
Cloudflare One helps optimize user connectivity to Microsoft 365

“We’re thrilled to welcome Cloudflare into the Networking Partner Program for Microsoft 365,” said Scott Schnoll, Senior Product Marketing Manager, Microsoft. “Cloudflare is a valued partner that is focused on helping Microsoft 365 customers implement the Microsoft 365 Network Connectivity Principles. Microsoft only recommends Networking Partner Program member solutions for connectivity to Microsoft 365.”

Conclusion

Your organization can start deploying Cloudflare One today alongside your existing Microsoft 365 usage. We’re excited to work with Microsoft to give your team members fast, reliable, and secure connectivity to the tools they need to do their jobs.