Imagine your marketing team needs to share a product roadmap with a partner, so they drop it into a shared OneDrive folder. Everything looks fine — same interface, same app — but no one realizes the file was uploaded to the partner’s personal OneDrive account instead of their corporate tenant. Days later, the file is still accessible from an unmanaged device, with no audit trail, no data loss protection, and no way to revoke access.
This kind of slip — easy, common, and almost invisible — can lead to compliance violations, data leakage, or worse. That’s the reality of working with multi-tenant SaaS applications: just because an app is sanctioned doesn’t mean the data is going where it should.
Introducing Cato’s CASB Tenant Awareness; designed to solve this problem. It helps IT and security teams distinguish between corporate, partner, and personal tenants — even within the same app session — and enforce granular policies that protect data without hindering productivity.
What Is CASB, and Why Does Tenant Awareness Matter?
Cloud Access Security Brokers (CASBs) serve as the gatekeepers between users and cloud services. Traditionally, CASBs have helped organizations monitor usage, enforce security policies, and protect data across sanctioned SaaS platforms.
However, as platforms like Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, and GitHub are used across multiple organizations — often in the same session — traditional CASBs fall short. They can allow or block access to the app itself, but not necessarily distinguish between a corporate tenant and a personal one.
That’s where Tenant Awareness steps in.
By inspecting session-level data such as login credentials, email domains, or persistent cookie headers, modern CASBs can tell which tenant a user is interacting with. More importantly, they can apply granular policies tailored to that specific context — enabling collaboration with partners, while blocking access to unsanctioned personal accounts.
Meet Alicia and Bob: Two Roles, Two Sets of Needs
Let’s introduce Alicia and Bob, two employees at a fictional company called Novaris BioTech. Both use cloud applications daily, but their needs — and associated risks — are quite different.
- Alicia is a project manager working with external research partners. She needs to exchange large files and documents regularly through OneDrive and Google Drive with authorized external collaborators.
- Bob works in finance and handles sensitive budget files. He should only be allowed to access and upload to internal Novaris tenants and must be prevented from interacting with any personal or external accounts.
With Cato CASB Tenant Awareness, Novaris can implement precise policies to accommodate both use cases:
- Alicia’s Policy Set:
- Allow upload and download from Novaris’ corporate OneDrive and Google Drive tenants.
- Allow upload to a whitelisted partner OneDrive tenant (i.e., Acme-research tenant) if the file does not contain sensitive data.
- Block upload to any other OneDrive or Drive instance; allow read-only access to prevent workflow disruption.
- Bob’s Policy Set:
- Allow upload and download only within the OneDrive Novaris tenant.
- Block any interaction (upload, download, view) with personal or partner tenants.
- Scan all outbound files for PII or financial data, applying DLP policies accordingly.
By recognizing the tenant associated with each app session, Cato’s CASB enforces these rules inline, during browser activity — even when users don’t explicitly log in or out between tenants.
The Mechanics Behind Tenant Awareness
Cato’s approach to Tenant Awareness is based on extracting identity and tenant data from the user’s session. During the browsing process, user emails or domains are often returned in API responses or HTTP headers. Cato associates this data with a session cookie, enabling persistent recognition of the tenant throughout the interaction —, even across multiple activities like upload, download, or share.
This capability is supported across widely used applications such as:
- Microsoft 365 (Outlook, OneDrive, SharePoint)
- Google Workspace (Drive, Docs, Chat)
- GitHub
- Dropbox
- ChatGPT
With this deep visibility, Cato allows policies such as:
- “Permit download from private Google Drive tenants, but block uploads.”
- “Only allow users from @novaris-biotech.com to upload to GitHub repositories.”
“Block ChatGPT conversations unless the session originates from the corporate tenant.”
The Cato Advantage: Unified Security and Networking
Cato’s Tenant Awareness doesn’t operate in a vacuum: it’s natively embedded into Cato’s SASE Cloud Platform. This convergence delivers several key advantages:
- Policy Consistency: One policy engine applies to all traffic — whether it’s app access, file sharing, or data movement.
- Centralized Visibility: All tenant-level activity is visible in the same dashboard as network and security events.
- Simplified Operations: No need to manage separate point products or integrations for CASB — everything is built into the Cato Socket and cloud-native platform.
For organizations like Novaris embarking on cloud-first and hybrid work strategies, this means faster deployments, stronger protection, and fewer operational headaches.
Tenant Awareness: Make it Your Default
In a multi-tenant SaaS world, traditional binary controls — allow or block — are no longer enough. Organizations must recognize and manage who is accessing what tenant, not just what application. CASB Tenant Awareness makes this possible by identifying tenants at the session level and enforcing fine-grained policies that match business needs.
Whether enabling a project manager like Alicia to collaborate securely with external partners, or ensuring a finance analyst like Bob never touches unauthorized storage, Cato CASB Tenant Awareness delivers the right balance of control and flexibility.
And when delivered as part of a unified SASE platform, this capability becomes more than a security feature — it becomes an enabler for secure digital transformation.
Check out Cato’s CASB on our website and request a demo today to see how you can enable safe, seamless SaaS adoption without compromising visibility or control.
The post Tenant Matters: Enabling Safe SaaS Adoption with CASB Tenant Awareness appeared first on Cato Networks.
