WHAT IS SSPM?

SaaS Security Posture Management (SSPM) is a set of security tools that an organization’s security team can use to gain visibility and manage security for their Software as a Service (SaaS) applications.

SaaS is an increasingly popular model for consuming software. SaaS providers manage security via a shared responsibility model, in which customers protect their data and user access, while the SaaS vendor is responsible for the infrastructure, hypervisor, network traffic, operating system, and application management. Organizations can use SSPM to manage their side of the shared security responsibility for SaaS applications.

The security posture in a SaaS environment is the overall security status of software and hardware assets, code repositories, SaaS applications, data pipelines, networks, and services. SSPM enables system hardening, protecting applications from cyberattacks and allowing security teams to enforce security policies across a portfolio of SaaS applications. SSPM is a critical part of an organization’s ability to detect cyberattacks, mitigate incidents, and recover.

THE IMPORTANCE OF SSPM

Cloud security is an umbrella term encompassing IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS. Gartner established the SaaS Security Posture Management (SSPM) category for solutions that evaluate security risk on an ongoing basis and manage the security posture of SaaS applications.

Organizations of all sizes depend on numerous SaaS applications – research shows that with 1,000 employees or more, an organization tends to have hundreds of applications. This complex structure creates a need for visibility. Given this, SaaS security configurations are becoming increasingly important.

Here are key challenges SaaS security needs to address:

• Insufficient control over a growing portfolio of SaaS applications.
• Insufficient governance in the SaaS application lifecycle: from purchase through to deployment, maintenance, and operation.
• Insufficient visibility of configurations in SaaS application portfolio.
• A skills gap in an accelerating, complex, and evolving cloud security environment.
• Overwhelming workload required to monitor and evaluate hundreds to tens of thousands of permissions and settings.

The native security controls of SaaS applications are generally sturdy. Nevertheless, it is the organization’s responsibility to ensure that all configurations are set correctly—from user roles and privileges to global settings. If an unaware SaaS user shares the wrong data or changes a setting, they could expose confidential company information.

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