Palo Alto Next-Generation CASB: Visibility and Control Across SaaS and AI Applications

Palo Alto Networks Next-Generation CASB, known in the product family as SaaS Security, is a cloud-delivered security service that discovers, risk-scores and controls users' interactions with SaaS applications and cloud services. Palo Alto positions it as a SaaS security solution born inside the SASE architecture and powered by Precision AI. Corporate data no longer lives on file servers; it travels through dozens of SaaS applications and, increasingly, AI assistants.

A Four-Layer Approach

Discovery: Machine learning finds, categorises and risk-scores the SaaS applications in use across the organisation. Palo Alto says this discovery draws on community data from more than 70,000 customers, and it extends to copilots, plugins and AI agent deployments.

Inline protection (SaaS Security Inline): Risks from unsanctioned applications and shadow IT are managed as traffic flows: a risky application can be blocked, and uploads or sharing can be limited in an allowed one.

API-based protection (SaaS Security API): Data already stored in sanctioned SaaS applications is scanned for data protection, threat prevention and compliance, for example to detect a sensitive file shared publicly.

SaaS Security Posture Management (SSPM): Misconfigurations in SaaS applications are found and fixed, settings drift is prevented and multi-factor authentication is hardened; coverage extends to AI applications, plugins, identities and agents.

Data and Threat Protection

AI-augmented data loss prevention recognises sensitive data; Palo Alto states that this approach reduces false positives by up to 95%. It also offers ML-based inline malware prevention, blocking of malicious links shared in collaboration chats, and user and entity behaviour analytics (UEBA). With the AI Access Security extension, sanctioned and shadow AI applications are monitored and sensitive data is kept from leaking into them.

Management and Integration

SaaS Security works integrated with Prisma Access and is managed through Strata Cloud Manager or Panorama, so SaaS policies are defined in the same place as network and remote access policies.

Benefits for Organisations

Which cloud applications are in use, and which data is shared within them, becomes centrally visible. Shadow IT and data leakage risks are reduced without halting cloud transformation, and a controlled SaaS and AI usage model is established across security, compliance and business teams.

To map the risk of SaaS and AI usage in your organisation and evaluate Next-Generation CASB, get in touch with ATEON's specialists.