SSPM: What is SaaS Security Posture Management (SSPM)?

SaaS products are attractive revenue streams, enabling founders to develop a single solution to support multiple customers and store user data. As a result, data security is a critical element, and they must understand the risks that their solutions expose. To support this, vendors offer security features such as SSO, RBAC, or ABAC, incident response, log ingestion, and data security. For users of multiple SaaS solutions, this creates an array of challenges:

• Consistency: Applications lack a consistent method of control enforcement, requiring security teams to evaluate each application individually, determine its threat model, and identify controls that can mitigate the risks they’re concerned with.

• Visibility: Organizations lack a centralized mechanism for SaaS management. They’re often managed by their primary user/team. This means that SaaS management is spread across the business, including marketing, finance, security, and engineering departments.

• Change Management: Unlike third-party applications or infrastructure dependencies, SaaS versions are inherited implicitly. This makes change management difficult and dependent on strict authentication and authorization controls. Additionally, the speed with which your SaaS vendor updates their code or dependencies to patch vulnerabilities is greatly dependent on the SaaS vendor's security proactiveness.

SaaS Security Posture Management (SSPM) products are automated solutions focused on monitoring and mitigating security risks within software-as-a-service applications. Similar to other security posture management solutions such as Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM), Application Security Posture Management, and Data Security Posture Management, SSPMs are focused on securing SaaS solutions like Atlassian, Snowflake, Github, and Slack. SaaS solutions appeal to startups, and small-to-medium-sized businesses due to the lack infrastructure deployment, software development, and maintenance. However, SaaS solutions hold many of the same risks as self-hosted solutions but reside out of the owner’s control. Furthermore, due to their often public nature, they amplify the impact of certain security risks, such as credential compromise or leakage. This article will cover what SSPM is, how it fits into a SaaS’s security posture, and how it compares with similar solutions.

Before we can answer what SaaS security posture is, let's define what "security posture" is. Security posture is focused on your organization’s overall cybersecurity readiness to predict, detect, manage, and mitigate security risks. It describes cybersecurity across your organization's stack, including data security, cloud security, risk management, and vulnerability management. Modern organizations heavily leverage SaaS solutions due to the ease of integration, maintenance, and simplified pricing models. SaaS security posture is focused on securing this new dependency of software delivery.

A strong security posture for SaaS applications consists of reducing the likelihood of misconfigurations, which could result in malicious or unauthorized access to sensitive data. Although the increase in SaaS applications has dramatically improved productivity and business agility, it has also created new opportunities for attackers to identify and exploit vulnerabilities, increasing the likelihood of data breaches and exposures. As a result, SaaS Security Posture Management is becoming a key part of every organization’s SaaS security strategy.

Without the appropriate tooling, securely configuring thousands of settings across tens or even hundreds of sanctioned SaaS applications can be a challenge. Identifying security misconfigurations—and ensuring compliance with remediation strategies—is even harder.

Gartner states that SSPM is a “tool that continuously assesses the security risk and manages the security posture of SaaS applications.” Fundamentally, an SSPM solution provides security teams with a view into how SaaS applications are configured. Through this visiblity, it enables them to identify misconfigurations and enforce secure standards and implementations.

After analyzing a SaaS application’s configuration, SSPMs offer solutions to remediate misconfigured settings, which reduces your organization’s risk exposure. Without the automation brought in by SSPMs, security teams and administrators must allocate time and resources to understanding how an application works, what its primary purpose is, who its main stakeholders are, and then continue to determine how the application should be configured to limit the risk exposed to the business by manually configure these settings. This likely won’t be an issue if you work with a small handful of SaaS applications. However, as with shadow IT, shadow SaaS is becoming a risk worth paying attention to. In today’s organizations, the number of SaaS applications can run into tens or even hundreds. Each app is unique and consumed by multiple users across several departments, making it difficult to configure properly at scale.

At its core, SSPM is focused on identifying security misconfigurations that could expose the organization’s data or functions to unauthorized bad actors. Common SaaS providers, such as GitHub, often store an organization’s most prized asset, their software’s source code or intellectual property (IP). In the past, remote source code management services were run out of local data centers, where in the event of a local misconfiguration, network authorization and authentication controls would help mitigate, to an extent, the risk of unauthorized access. However, with publicly accessible solutions such as GitHub’s SaaS, a single misconfiguration could expose your source code to unauthorized parties and affect its confidentiality, integrity, or both.

Authentication and authorization are key components of security. In the SaaS space, the security risks you could be exposed to depend on the offerings from your SaaS provider. Most SaaS products offer multiple mechanisms for controlling authentication and authorization, but they rarely provide a process for auditing their configuration. An SSPM will review what users can do within the organization's SaaS apps. Some SSPM tools detect inactive and unnecessary user accounts as part of this process. This pruning of user accounts can help reduce the number of attack vectors your business is exposed to.

Compliance and regulatory approval have always been focal points of business continuity. Today, compliance is also a key part of business development. SSPM identifies security risks that could put an organization out of compliance with data security and privacy regulations and those that could affect its ability to attain key certifications that its customers might expect.

SSPM is often compared with Cloud Access Security Brokers (CASB) and Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM); however, this is an improper comparison. This section will elaborate on the two other solutions and highlight how the three solutions can be used together to improve security posture, rather than individually.

CASB and SSPM solutions are complementary solutions. They work together by mitigating risks across different aspects of data security. CASBs focus on applying corporate policies to cloud-based entities and have a wide range of uses. Traditional CASBs act like a firewall, where all connectivity to SaaS applications passes through a CASB proxy server, where it is monitored and all actions are approved.

Fundamentally, CASB solutions enable organizations to enhance their security by providing access control and visibility into cloud usage, data security measures such as encryption and DLP, threat protection through malware detection and anomaly detection, compliance with regulatory requirements, and robust access control and governance policies. These capabilities help organizations securely manage cloud services, protect sensitive data, and ensure regulatory compliance.

On their own, however, CASB solutions are unable to secure the SaaS applications as comprehensively as SSPMs for several reasons, including:

• Limited discovery: CASBs rely on event logs, causing it to miss user-SaaS context and giving it limited visibility of SaaS apps

• Lacking visibility: CASB products focus on pathways and looking at the app “from the outside,” causing it to miss user behavior details

• Poor change management: CASB solutions struggles with tracking history and unmanaged apps in the SaaS lifecycle

CSPMs provide automated monitoring of configurations for cloud platforms such as AWS, GCP, and Azure. Businesses use runtime infrastructure, such as IaaS, which allows companies to manage elements such as networks, servers, and data storage, or PaaS solutions, which facilitate the hosting, building, and deploying of customer-facing applications. As a result, these cloud instances contain critical company components.

CSPMs are tasked with monitoring the security posture of the cloud services hosted in IaaS and PaaS. In practical terms, this means scanning cloud settings and identifying any misconfigurations that could introduce elements of risk to the service. In circumstances where using a complex architecture, such as using containers in a Kubernetes system, the configurations are particularly detailed, and securing them without a CSPM can lead to configuration drifts that expose data to the public. Additionally, CSPMs can be leveraged to control governance and support compliance checks such as PCI DSS, SOC2, and ISO27001.

Several characteristics should be considered when evaluating SSPM solutions.

Security teams monitor various aspects of their estate, such as access control, data security, unauthorized access, and compliance regulations. SSPMs that offer comprehensive evaluations can ensure that security teams and engineers can appropriately assess SaaS applications for compliance with organizational policies and standards.

Continuous monitoring and proactive remediation are crucial for countering threats. Addressing misconfigurations in business environments can be complex and sensitive. An effective SSPM solution should streamline monitoring and alert creation, enabling vulnerabilities to be addressed before hackers can exploit them.

For completeness, we’ve listed some of the most popular SSPM solutions available on the market below:

• Adaptive Shield
• AppOmni
• Obsidian Security
• Valence

Conducting manual security checks provides a snapshot of SaaS security. In most cases, it requires reviewing excessive checkboxes, toggles, activity logs, and switches covering the entire SaaS stack across employees and multiple applications. Unfortunately, despite these efforts, your organization’s data would still be vulnerable to third-party SaaS applications that are onboarded beyond the view of the security team. It also doesn’t provide visibility into the devices used to access these applications or users with poor security hygiene.

Manual checks lack immediacy and leave SaaS data vulnerable to configuration drifts between checks. The greater the time between checks, the greater the duration of sensitive data exposed. Additionally, security teams will be stuck relying on yesterday’s checks to secure against future threats unless security checks are maintained with the developments in the threat landscape. Continuously automating these checks through SSPM provides visibility across the entire SaaS stack. It protects data against threats from connected applications, misconfigurations, high-risk users, and unhygienic devices.

Due to their continious automated nature, SSPMs can provide security teams with real-time access to application misconfigurations. Without an SSPM, security teams are required to routinely monitor SaaS applications, and identify configurations that fall out of accordance of company policies. If you assume this process can be automated, it still requires the deployment of a process to trigger on a set cadence, and the integration of reporting with existing alerting and monitoring solutions. As previously mentioned, using an SSPM that’s focused on the identification of misconfiguration removes the need to manage the rulesets and associated alerts, reducing development and maintenance costs while improving solution efficacy.

Solutions used within the industry are used by a variety of clients and therefore support a vast quantity of SaaS applications. This can support your business’s growth as it’s more likely that your current SSPM provides will support any new or replacing SaaS applications. Unlike a manual process, or in-house solution, new rulesets will need to be developed with the adoption of each SaaS application. This process can be cumbersome, slow and expensive, depending on the complexity of the SaaS application and the frequency of it’s updates.

As organizations increasingly rely on SaaS applications to drive productivity and business agility, maintaining a robust SaaS security posture cannot be overstated. SSPM solutions have emerged as a critical component of modern cybersecurity strategies, addressing the unique challenges posed by the widespread adoption of cloud-based software solutions. SSPMs offer continuous monitoring and real-time threat detection, enhanced compliance with regulatory requirements, and comprehensive visibility across the entire SaaS stack, amongst other benefits.

Furthermore, as the SaaS landscape continues to evolve and expand, adopting a robust SSPM solution will become increasingly essential for organizations of all sizes. By proactively managing their SaaS security posture, you can confidently leverage the benefits of cloud-based applications while maintaining a strong security stance in an ever-changing threat landscape.