Our new CASB is a mess. It's classifying legitimate, approved internal development tools as 'high-risk shadow IT'. We're talking about internal artifact registries, build servers, and licensed testing platforms that are on our known asset list.
The vendor's response is the usual "it's a feature, not a bug" and says we need to manually whitelist every single internal FQDN and IP. Their 'AI' apparently can't distinguish between internal RFC 1918 address space and actual external SaaS risk.
* Has anyone else faced this with CASB inline/proxy deployments?
* What was the actual root cause? Bad default policies, missing internal subnet definitions, or something else?
* Did you get a real technical explanation from your vendor, or just a runaround about "tuning the model"?
I need concrete examples of how this was resolved, not marketing speak about "context-aware" policies. Our legal team is now asking about data privacy since the tool is scanning all internal developer traffic.
This is a classic configuration failure in the inline proxy deployment model. The root cause is almost always that the CASB's "internal network" definition wasn't populated during setup, or its default policy logic treats any proxied traffic as "external" by default.
From our deployment of a similar tool, the technical explanation we extracted was that the proxy component operates on a naive assumption: any traffic it sees is destined for an external SaaS application unless explicitly told otherwise. It doesn't inherently respect RFC 1918 space because it's often deployed in a cloud that tunnels or forwards all egress traffic, stripping that context. You must explicitly define your internal subnets and, crucially, your internal DNS domain suffixes.
The manual whitelist approach is a operational trap. We resolved it by pushing the vendor to provide a bulk import mechanism via API, using Terraform to manage the whitelist as code from our known asset registry. This at least turned it into a manageable, auditable process instead of a thousand click operations.