What It Takes to Tackle Your SaaS Security

It’s not a new concept that Office 365, Salesforce, Slack,
Google Workspace or Zoom, etc., are amazing for enabling the hybrid
workforce and hyper-productivity in businesses today. However,
there are three main challenges that have arisen stemming from this
evolution: (1) While SaaS apps include a host of native security
settings, they need to be hardened by the security team of the
organization. (2) Employees are granting 3rd party app access to
core SaaS apps that pose potential threats to the company. (3)
These SaaS apps are accessed by different devices without their
device hygiene score even being checked.

1 — Misconfiguration Management

It’s not an easy task to have every app setting properly
configured — at all times. The challenge lies within how burdensome
this responsibility is — each app has tens or hundreds of security
settings to configure, in addition to thousands of user roles and
permission in a typical enterprise, compounded by the many
compliance industry standards and frameworks that organizations
strive to follow.

The complexity of securing SaaS apps is only increased by the
fact that often the SaaS app owner sits outside the
security team, in the department that most uses the app (think
Sales has CRM app, Marketing has automation app) — and they are
untrained and not focused on the security upkeep of the app. It all
amounts to just how burdensome and unrealistic it is to expect
security teams to be able to stay in control of the organization’s
SaaS stack.

2 — 3rd Party App Access

OAuth 2.0 has greatly simplified authentication and
authorization and offers a fine-grained delegation of access
rights. Represented in the form of scopes, an application asks for
the user’s authorization for specific permissions. An app can
request one or more scopes. Through the approval of the scopes, the
user grants these apps permissions to execute code to perform logic
behind the scenes within their environment. These apps can be
harmless or as threatening as an executable file.

When it comes to local machines and executable files,
organizations already have control built-in that enables security
teams to block problematic programs and files. It needs to be the
same when it comes to SaaS apps.

3 — Device-to-SaaS-User Posture

From the first entry through to the device posture, security
teams need to be able to identify and manage the risks coming from
SaaS users and their associated devices. A device with a low
hygiene score poses a high risk depending on which apps this
employee is using. In the case of a highly privileged user, an
unsecured device can pose an even higher level of risk for an
organization. The security team needs the ability to correlate SaaS
app users, their roles, and permissions with their associated
devices’ compliance and integrity levels. This end-to-end approach
enables a holistic zero-trust approach to SaaS security that is
only now coming into the picture.

SaaS Security Posture Management Handles the SaaS Stack
Challenges

That’s why Gartner named SaaS Security Posture Management (SSPM)
a MUST HAVE solution to continuously assess security risks and
manage the SaaS applications’ security posture in the “4 Must-Have
Technologies That Made the Gartner Hype Cycle for Cloud Security,
2021.” Other cloud solutions don’t offer preventative coverage. For
example, a CASB solution is event-driven; CASB will alert the
organization to a SaaS leak or breach only once it has
occurred.

An SSPM solution, like Adaptive Shield ^[1], comes into play to
enable security teams to identify, analyze, and prioritize
misconfigurations as well as provide visibility to 3rd party apps
with access to their core apps and Device-to-SaaS-User posture
management.

Click here to schedule a 15-minute demo of
Adaptive Shield’s SSPM solution ^[2].

Adaptive Shield lets you filter and slice the data by app,
domain, and compliance frameworks.

The core of the solution is the detailed and granular security
checks being continuously performed across the SaaS stack, while
security teams can address misconfigurations immediately or create
a ticket that integrates with any ticketing system: