SaaS are bundled softwares crafted and molded to solve specific problems. Thousands of SaaS services exist today, attempting to solve interesting problems. They are the driving forces and enablers of business enhancements and growth. They exhibit common traits such as productivity boosts, ease of use, and more.

When something is efficient and comes in multiple forms to solve diverse problems, the tendency to leverage and apply its capabilities is high. The known fact is that generalized solutions are hard to maintain and scale. So, every SaaS service aims to solve a specific problem.

Adopting different SaaS services to address existing requirements is one way of tackling the problem. The benefits of SaaS aren’t risk-free. Many security vulnerabilities and compliance issues arise when multiple SaaS handling is involved. Let us demystify the complexities of SaaS management and how SSPM helps with security challenges.

SSPM and Its Existential Purpose

SSPM is a tool designed to efficiently streamline the management of commonly encountered SaaS security anomalies and vulnerabilities. It offers cross-platform integrations and generic features to apply security solutions and best practices across multiple SaaS.

Most SaaS solutions thrive in providing security offerings to help businesses and enterprises apply security features with minimal overhead. The real challenge arises when multiple SaaS services are involved and interconnected to accomplish bigger tasks. Here, SSPM comes to the rescue as it is equipped with features and functionalities to address security requirements and challenges that can be more straightforward.

SaaS Security Expectations vs SSPM Capabilities

Software applications must adhere to and necessitate security requirements, and SaaS is no exception. Irrespective of how well the security practices are followed and implemented, breaches, vulnerabilities, and misconfiguration are imminent. A security manager like SSPM, who schedules and handles all the necessary implementations, follow-ups, and audits, is a critical requirement when multiple SaaS services are involved.

Keeping It Simple

Confidence and trust in a service are built based on the security level. Regardless of software complexities, security implementations must be simple and manageable. When complexities are introduced into security implementations, both the software/service and underlying security can become unmanageable, causing havoc. Handling multiple SaaS services is a maintenance nightmare as account management, anomaly detection, and much more need to be set up and consistently reviewed.

Imagine when a SaaS does not expose any integrations or APIs to implement custom security implementations. This puts the security team in a tough spot to develop and maintain use case-specific security scripts and modules. SSPM tools come pre-packed with integrations and SDKs to apply internal and external security measures. They make security adherence a simpler task when compared to traditional security implementations.

Dynamic Security Implementations

Applying identical security measures on different SaaS services is error-prone and time-consuming. Some SaaS services have identical functionalities with varying configs that need to be managed. Businesses attempting to handle the security for respective functionality need to generate individual integrations with the SaaS and apply the same security capabilities with slight modifications. External factors, human errors, and other conditions can contribute to security vulnerabilities.

When the security measures are wrapped into generic functionalities, applying them to multiple SaaS services with the same requirements becomes easy. This does not offer 100% security guarantees as various factors can compromise the security. SSPM, on the other hand, bundles battle-tested security implementations and exposes them as part of SaaS functionalities. Every SaaS onboarded onto SSPM will have default configurations and proven features crucial to secure the SaaS.

Scheduled Audits

Applying security controls and adhering to security standards is one part of the process. Ensuring all security measures are being applied when required and reacting as desired is more important. Performing ad-hoc audits is crucial to understanding the security posture of all SaaS services.

To trigger these audits manually with dynamic configurations applicable to different SaaS is error-prone. They can result in inconsistencies and confusion if audit implementations that deliver consistent results are not used. SSPM offers an audit mechanism that can be configured and scheduled as per the requirement.

Comprehensive Observability with Remediations

Infrastructural, environmental, network, third-party dependency, and other factors can impact the security posture. Considering every scenario beforehand and applying security measures to all aspects of SaaS is costly and inefficient. A simpler interface where all the security features can be monitored and analyzed for anomalies and inconsistencies is more viable. Using the information from the monitoring stage, teams can implement reactive measures for various scenarios.

Alerts and triggers can be involved when anomalies or inconsistencies are encountered. Custom solutions should be applied to remediate the vulnerability. Enabling SaaS observability and remediating using custom and generic solutions via traditional security implementations is difficult. SSPM tools offer monitoring capabilities and allow teams to apply custom solutions to remediate.

Conclusion

Securing SaaS services is very critical. Possibility of data leaks, unauthorized accesses, and targeted attacks are possible if SaaS services are not securely integrated into the enterprise stack. Managing and improving the security posture of SaaS applications is not straightforward with traditional security approaches. SSPM is a proven and efficient tool responsible for the security of SaaS applications from a multitude of security issues.