As 2022 draws to a close, it’s time to begin protecting your business for the year ahead. However, it’s easy to forget about SaaS applications that work in the background. But with a recent survey finding that many recent breaches and data leaks have been tied back to SaaS misconfigurations, causing it to be a top concern for many organisations.
Adaptive Shield has released a brand new checklist to prevent businesses from experiencing these issues in the new year that irons out any potential issues. The preventative measure was developed to support companies in their plans to integrate new SaaS features within their organisation’s operations.
In their 2022 report, Adaptive Shield found that businesses were using an average of 102 applications, with the maximum number of applications reported being over 5000. These figures alone highlight how fundamental SaaS applications can be within an organisation, but how do they actually
These figures reveal how truly widespread the use of SaaS is, which is why it is imperative that preventative measures are taken to avoid the potential issues that can develop when SaaS applications are implemented at speed, and go unchecked.
Issues Businesses Can Face With SaaS Without Preventative Measures
With SaaS implementation becoming increasingly popular, the pain points that arise can be complicated. To help businesses prepare properly and avoid these, Adaptive Shield has simplified them with the “3 V”s:
Volume
Each app can have hundreds of global settings, such as which files can be shared, whether MFA is required, or recording is allowed in video conferencing. Multiply this number by thousands – or tens (or even hundreds) of thousands – of employees. Security teams must first be able to discover all the users who are using each application, as well as familiarize themselves with every application’s specific set of rules and configurations, and ensure they are compliant with their company’s policies.
Visibility
With this incredibly high volume of configurations, user roles and permissions, devices and SaaS-to-SaaS access, security teams need multi-dimensional visibility to monitor them all, identify when there is an issue, and remediate it swiftly.
Velocity
The speed of change that SaaS apps bring is incredibly hard to govern. SaaS apps are dynamic and ever-evolving — apps’ settings need to be modified on a continuous basis from security updates and app feature enhancements to employees added or removed, and user roles and permissions set, reset, updated, etc. There are also continuous, compliance updates to meet industry standards and best practices (NIST, SOC2, ISO, MITRE, etc.) that need to be checked and modified.
The Ultimate Solution – Adaptive Shield’s SaaS Checklist
SaaS Security Posture Management (SSPM) solutions come to answer these pains to provide full visibility into the company’s SaaS security posture, checking for compliance with industry
standards and company policy. Some solutions even offer the ability to remediate from within the solution.
As a result, an SSPM solution can significantly improve security-team efficiency and protect company data. As one might expect, not all SSPM solutions are created equal. The Misconfiguration Management use case sits at the core of SSPM. However, there are more advanced use cases that tackle the emerging and growing challenges existing in the SaaS landscape.
- Misconfiguration Management: Deep visibility and control of all configurations, settings, and built-in security controls across all SaaS apps for all users.
- SaaS-to-SaaS App Access: Monitoring and management of all third-party apps connected to the company’s core SaaS stack.
- Identity & Access Management Governance: Consolidation and validation of User Identity and Access, enabling attack surface reduction, efficient SecOps programs, and operational integrity (for example, identifying dormant accounts or external users with administrative access).
- Device-to-SaaS User Risk Management: Manage risks stemming from the SaaS user’s device based on the device hygiene score.
