With the increasing reliance by organizations on a multitude of SaaS applications for core business functions, managing the security posture of these applications can be a complex challenge. These applications have evolved to become complex platforms, with many unique configurations distinct from other platforms, which security executives acknowledge is one of their top SaaS security challenges. These new features result in complexity that requires security teams to develop specific expertise in SaaS applications and to stay up-to-date as they rapidly change. In addition, many mission critical SaaS applications, such as GitHub, Salesforce, and Workday, are administered by specific business units, outside of the purview of IT or security teams.
This is where SaaS Security Posture Management (SSPM) comes in. An SSPM solution provides continuous visibility and control over your business-critical SaaS applications, helping you identify, prioritize and remediate security misconfigurations, identity threats, excessive data exposure, and risky SaaS-to-SaaS integrations.
Establishing a SaaS security and compliance checklist can help your security and IT teams identify the top SaaS security challenges and efficiently mitigate SaaS security risks.
As your organization explores the role SaaS Security Posture Management plays in your security stack, it is important to focus on some key deliverables. For each category, the SSPM solution should deliver value that aligns with your company’s strategy. Below is a list of key functions that an SSPM platform should deliver for your organizations.
The SaaS Security Checklist was created by SaaS Security experts to help your Security and IT teams build successful SaaS security programs. It is modeled on best practices as outlined by the NIST Cybersecurity Framework, ISO-27001, CIS Critical Security Controls and the NCSC’s Shared Responsibility Model.
The first step in effective SaaS security is to map out existing business-critical applications, as well as to verify the range of applications your SSPM covers as you adopt new applications as your organization grows.
SSPM should make it easy to know your SaaS risk exposure
Get a detailed assessment of your SaaS security posture with detailed recommendations for remediating risks for one of your core SaaS platforms like Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, or Salesforce.
SSPM tools allow you to measure compliance of your SaaS applications against industry standards.
SSPM should make it easy to fix any security issues. To meet SaaS security compliance standards and reduce risks, the SSPM should include manual and automated remediation options that align with your security policy.
SSPM should be easy to operate and manage
As organizations adopt more SaaS applications, emerging risks—such as unauthorized AI integrations, unmonitored SaaS-to-SaaS integrations, and shadow IAM—pose significant threats. Additionally, the growth of Generative AI tools heightens data privacy risks and complicates compliance efforts. Valence proactively addresses these evolving challenges by monitoring for risky integrations, providing insights into shadow IAM, and securing data flow across AI-powered applications.
For organizations managing multiple mission-critical SaaS applications, selecting the right SSPM platform is key to addressing today’s SaaS security challenges. Our SSPM Buyer’s Guide provides an in-depth look at SSPM features, SaaS coverage needs, and remediation options to help you make an informed decision. Discover how SSPM can enable your security team to build a proactive, effective SaaS security program.
Business-critical SaaS applications contain highly valuable information, and can often be used by cybercriminals as an entrance point to your environment. While many of the security products deployed appear effective, they leave gaps in coverage and do not mitigate individual SaaS applications risk. To close these gaps, an SSPM platform is needed to help security teams enable the business while keeping up with the rapid pace of SaaS adoption.
To best understand the unique risks of your SaaS environment, integrate a chosen SSPM platform with your business-critical SaaS and begin generating actionable insights. Since the deployment of SSPM is agentless and very lightweight, using real data will not impact business operations and will speed up the correction of any identified SaaS security risks. This process should prove the value of SSPM, with a detailed report on critical SaaS security risks showing the wider security team where to focus their attention in the short term. The best SSPM platforms are quick to integrate and take less than 48 hours to generate a detailed report on key areas of SaaS security risk.
Our comprehensive SSPM checklist ensures you're asking the right questions, but true security comes from actionable data.
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Valence enables security teams to find and fix SaaS risks. As SaaS complexity and distributed management present security challenges, the Valence SaaS security platform provides unparalleled and actionable insights into configuration, identity, data, SaaS-to-SaaS integration, and GenAI risks. The Valence platform offers comprehensive SaaS security posture management (SSPM), risk remediation, and identity threat detection and response (ITDR). Valence’s unique remediation by choice capabilities allow security teams to leverage manual remediation, automated workflows and business user collaboration to scale their risk reduction and proactively secure their SaaS. Leading organizations leverage Valence to empower their business to securely adopt SaaS.
If you’re looking to invest in SaaS Security, here’s the 2024 Buyer’s Guide that covers everything you need to know when buying an SSPM solution.
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