As SaaS adoption continues to explode, it’s become more important than ever to get deep visibility into the SaaS apps within your organization, uncover the interconnectivity of those apps and understand their security coverage and configuration.
Today’s SaaS applications feature countless configuration settings that can introduce security gaps and risk. Nevertheless, making the case for deploying a dedicated SaaS management solution is still a challenge for security professionals.
To tackle the issue, let’s first understand the key SaaS security challenges companies face these days.
What happens when an organization has a lot of applications in its SaaS stack? SaaS sprawl. This, in turn, introduces data sprawl.
SaaS data sprawl is the result of the decentralized distribution of information in different applications, making it difficult for IT to answer questions like:
Another driver of SaaS sprawl? Open APIs. As they have become a market standard, customers expect all their SaaS solutions to work jointly with one another to drive operational efficiencies.
Another problem introduced by SaaS sprawl is shadow SaaS — where employees use SaaS applications without the IT or security teams’ knowledge.
While employees have bypassed IT departments for ages, SaaS usage has introduced another shadow IT opportunity. Why? Because SaaS offerings present unique solutions to address specific user requirements that may not be addressed by the organization’s IT solutions.
Without SaaS apps getting the proper security and IT review upfront, numerous risks are introduced:
What’s escalating the SaaS security management challenge is the fact that SaaS apps have become more customizable. This creates two additional problem areas:
While processes for managing SaaS may differ from company to company, technologies have emerged to help teams tackle these challenges in isolation.
SaaS Security Posture Management (SSPM) platforms provide automated, continuous monitoring of SaaS applications to help security and IT teams minimize risky configurations, manage policies, and ensure SaaS compliance. While the SSPM market is gaining traction, SSPMs often don’t offer visibility into end-user devices accessing SaaS applications – meaning security teams only get a fragmented view of the whole picture.
Without an SSPM solution in place, security analysts spend up to 70 hours per month reviewing configurations across all SaaS apps (and up to 60 more evaluating SaaS security compliance).
Source: Axonius Value Calculator
Another market gaining traction over the last few years is SaaS Management Platforms (SMP). These solutions allow IT teams to manage the day-to-day SaaS operations, improve the employee onboarding and offboarding experience, track application usage, and gain some visibility into SaaS licensing.
But while some SMPs have basic security functionality built in, they often lack robust information on SaaS settings, misconfigurations, data flows, and user access levels – all of which are critical in reducing security risk.
SaaS offers tremendous value to organizations, but businesses need an easier path to rein in SaaS complexity.
The way forward? Adopting a comprehensive approach to SaaS management that solves IT, security, and risk teams’ challenges by giving them a single source of truth into the SaaS application landscape.
This modern approach to SaaS management should incorporate three main aspects to ensure its business value for the stakeholders:
Per our analysis, upon adopting a modern comprehensive approach to SaaS security, misconfigurations are flagged automatically — saving roughly 60 analyst hours per month, which equates to over $50,000 in cost savings in terms of annual analyst salary. This allows businesses to reallocate those employees’ time to other high-priority initiatives.
Managing SaaS Security Risk |
Monthly |
Annually |
% FTE Time |
Avg Salary - Sec Manager |
Potential Cost Savings With SaaS Management |
# hours identifying SaaS misconfigurations across all apps (per month) |
60 |
720 |
34.62% |
$150,000.00 |
$51,923.08 |
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