Reducing SaaS risk is, without a doubt, a difficult challenge.
Gaining visibility into all the SaaS apps used across an enterprise is hard enough, but it becomes an even greater challenge when only a portion of the apps go through the company's established policies for acquiring new tech.
As a result, organizations lack comprehensive insight into their SaaS landscape, and it's no wonder many IT and SecOps executives feel SaaS risk management is an unsolvable problem.
As the SaaS landscape changes and business-led IT becomes the norm, the strategies for managing SaaS risk must also adapt.
A modern SaaS risk management program identifies known and unknown SaaS usage enterprise-wide and helps secure unsanctioned SaaS and reduce vulnerabilities.
The organizations gaining control over their SaaS risks aren't using traditional risk assessment models-and neither should you.
SaaS usage is unique to your organization, and the conventional methods of evaluating SaaS risk don't provide the flexibility nor capture the risk nuances specific to your company.
Let's explore what other organizations are doing differently to reduce their SaaS risks more effectively.
Conventional SaaS security reviews face two primary challenges: how SaaS apps are acquired and used.
As a result, it's easy for any employee to start a free trial or initiate a new SaaS subscription without involving IT. According to Gartner, 41% of employees acquire, modify, or create SaaS apps outside of IT's visibility, and that number is expected to climb to 75% by 2027.
With the expansion of SaaS acquisition, managing SaaS has become a shared responsibility.
A LeanIX report reveals four or more departments are involved in SaaS management within a company.
In these examples, even though both companies use the same SaaS application, the nature and sensitivity of the data stored, the integration with other systems, the number of users, and the compliance requirements create different risk profiles that need a tailored risk management approach.
The traditional method of managing SaaS risk is to evaluate the SaaS vendor in the context of how the app will integrate with your systems and its access to sensitive data.
At Grip Security, we've talked with hundreds of organizations that struggle with the same challenge: a lack of SaaS visibility and a SaaS risk management program that isn't keeping pace with the organization's SaaS usage, largely due to the business-led IT movement.
The common denominator is that the old practices for managing SaaS risk are falling short.
Today, with our heavy dependence on digital tools, companies need a better way to tackle the vulnerabilities that arise from the easy access and widespread use of SaaS. While SaaS acquisition has spread across different business areas, keeping SaaS risk management centralized is crucial.
Going beyond monitoring network data and identifying more than sanctioned applications, SaaS identity risk management uses identity as the control point to overcome modern-day problems like SaaS sprawl and identity sprawl.
Today's SaaS risk management programs must prioritize securing the workforce in a way that supports their productivity, not restricts it.
With identity being a constant in every SaaS account, adopting an identity-centric risk management approach allows for a complete and clear view of the actual activity occurring within a company's SaaS environment, regardless of how the app was acquired.
This Cyber News was published on securityboulevard.com. Publication date: Mon, 15 Apr 2024 23:43:03 +0000