What are SSPM Tools?
As the IT industry continues to flourish, more and more new technologies are being added to the industry pool. However, along with the new technologies come new security challenges that attract cyber criminals.
What are SaaS Security Posture Management Tools?
Introduction
As the IT industry continues to flourish, more and more new technologies are being added to the industry pool. However, along with the new technologies come new security challenges that attract cyber criminals. SaaS, short for Software-as-a-Service, is a relatively new technology that is still growing, and security in SaaS infrastructure presents unique challenges and requires unique expertise.
SaaS security posture management or SSPM is a domain that involves automated continuous monitoring of SaaS applications to mitigate security risks, risky configurations, configuration drift, and compliance management.
Security Posture
The security posture of a system refers to its overall capability to mitigate any potential cyber threats. It includes detecting and analyzing threats before they do any damage. It also includes having policies and procedures in place to ensure that employees follow best security practices, such as using strong passwords and regularly updating software.
What is SaaS security posture management (SSPM)?
Furthermore, it encompasses strategies and policies to safeguard against:
The stronger an organization's security posture is, the more it is able to reduce its risk exposure, protect against potential threats, and comply with security regulations and standards.
The fact that SaaS applications are hosted remotely and are publicly accessible from any device increases the risk of unauthorized access to data or accidental disclosure of personal information. This makes SaaS security different from traditional network security.
SaaS security posture is the same concept applied to cloud-based software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications. SaaS Security Posture Management (SSPM) is tasked with maintaining the security of SaaS applications such as Slack, Salesforce, and Microsoft 365 through continuous monitoring. This monitoring helps minimize security risks by identifying and reducing harmful configurations, maintaining consistency in configurations to prevent drift, and ensuring compliance with industry standards. It eliminates security gaps in SaaS applications by automatically detecting security risks and preventing manual errors.
With SSPM, organizations can protect their sensitive data and critical workloads in the cloud. It provides visibility, control, and compliance management capabilities to combat the challenges of data exposure, permissive entitlements, non-compliance, and threats such as malware. SSPM simplifies the process of developing and enforcing security policies across applications and users by continuously monitoring SaaS configurations against pre-built policy profiles.
Why Do Enterprises Need SaaS Security Posture Management (SSPM)?
The use of Software as a Service (SaaS) applications brings certain risks with it such as improper software configuration. It is more related to the nature of the application than to security flaws within the software. While the majority of cloud applications offer options and guidelines for securing sensitive data, the manual configuration of security settings for numerous SaaS services can prove to be a challenging task for IT operations and security teams who already have a lot to deal with.
To mitigate these challenges, many organizations have adopted the use of SSPM solutions. These solutions facilitate the management of cloud security and access controls by employing efficient and intelligent processes, such as Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML). In this manner, SSPM enables organizations to execute security configurations without the need for excessive manual intervention.
SaaS risk | What SSPM does about it | Manual alternative |
|---|---|---|
Misconfiguration (a sharing setting or public link left open in Microsoft 365, Salesforce or Slack) | Checks settings against a policy profile and alerts or auto-corrects | Periodic admin review of each app's settings |
Configuration drift (correct at rollout, changed later by an admin or vendor update) | Continuous comparison to the approved baseline | Quarterly re-check against a written baseline |
Over-permissive access | Regular permission review with alerts on excess privilege | Access reviews run from exported user lists |
Dormant accounts | Detects inactive accounts for removal | Offboarding checklist tied to each app |
Compliance evidence | Ongoing compliance status against internal policy and regulatory standards | Screenshots and spreadsheets gathered at audit time |
Multi-app blind spots | Single view across supported applications | A named owner per app and a shared register |
How does SSPM work?
SaaS Security Posture Management (SSPM) is a comprehensive security solution that systematically examines the following aspects of an organization's SaaS applications:
Simplifies compliance management
Following the ever-evolving, dynamic, and distributed nature of SaaS products, organizations are left with no choice but to redefine their compliance strategies. SSPM provides a constant ongoing review of compliance status according to both internal policies and regulatory standards. It also detects security risks that could lead the organization to non-compliance with data security and privacy regulations. In case of inadequate data management practices or security standards, SSPM promptly informs administrators or can automatically initiate remedial measures.
Prevents cloud mis-configurations
The frequency of data breaches has seen a sharp increase in recent years, frequently caused by the incorrect configuration of cloud services. Although resources may be correctly set up initially, they often deviate over time and lose compliance. Despite changes to the application, the data it contains, or the users accessing it, it is imperative to consistently maintain secure configurations. To mitigate this, SSPM evaluates the security setup for potential misconfigurations and other mistakes that may leave the data vulnerable to exposure on the internet.
Detects overly permissive settings
Maintaining a secure environment for SaaS applications requires close supervision of who has access and the extent of that access. SSPM evaluates each user's permissions on a regular basis and notifies for those who have excessive or unnecessary privileges. In this process, some SSPM solutions can also detect inactive and redundant user accounts, which can be pruned to decrease the attack surface. This permission-based approach ensures that only authorized individuals can access sensitive information, systems, devices, and resources.
Key Features of SSPM
In the event that SSPM identifies risks in the above-mentioned areas, it has the capability to automate notifications to security teams. Certain SSPM tools also possess the capability to automatically address these risks. Some further common features of SSPM tools include:
Continuous surveillance
An SSPM solution maintains a constant watch over SaaS applications in an organization, ensuring they adhere to privacy and security regulations.
Automated correction
The active remediation measures provided by SSPM solutions enhance an organization's ability to respond to security issues, eliminating the need for manual intervention by the IT team.
Multi-Application Support
SSPM systems are compatible with a wide range of applications, making it simple to integrate with other SaaS tools an organization may already be using, such as messaging platforms, workspaces, dashboards, video conferencing platforms, HR management systems, and customer support tools. The SSPM solution can detect potentially problematic roles, privileges, or misconfigured settings in all such applications.
When you don't need this
You do not need an SSPM tool if you run fewer than a handful of SaaS applications and one person administers them all. At that scale a written baseline for each app, a quarterly settings review and a proper offboarding checklist cover most of the risk, and they cost nothing but time.
You also do not need it if you have not yet done the basics inside the apps themselves: enforce single sign-on and multi-factor authentication, turn off public sharing by default, and remove admin rights from people who do not use them. An SSPM tool that reports a hundred findings against apps with no baseline gives you a backlog, not a posture. And if your core exposure is your own product rather than the tools you subscribe to, put the budget into application security, API security and penetration testing first.
SSPM starts to make sense when you have many applications, several admins, frequent changes, and a customer or auditor asking for continuous evidence that configurations stay correct between reviews.
Conclusion
With the highly dynamic and distributed nature of SaaS, manual monitoring and configuration of security settings can be a challenging and time-consuming task. To mitigate this, organizations can incorporate different SaaS Security Posture Management tools to ensure security and compliance. By continuously monitoring configurations, user permissions, and compliance posture, SSPM tools provide real-time visibility into security risks and can automate remediation measures. The integration with different SaaS tools, support for industry benchmarks, and single-pane-of-glass visibility make SSPM a valuable solution for businesses seeking to improve their security posture and mitigate the risks associated with cloud services.
Talk to a Cybersecurity Trusted Advisor at IRM Consulting & Advisory
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