Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications have become indispensable tools for many businesses, allowing them to streamline and improve their capability and feature set. These solutions offer agility, scalability, and flexibility, but can easily become the targets of cyber-attacks. As these solutions are managed by a third-party, ensuring they are secured becomes a complex challenge. SaaS Security Posture Management (SSPM) solutions are at the forefront of addressing this need. They offer tools to monitor, manage, and enhance the security posture of SaaS applications, thereby ensuring that your organization remains secure.
SSPM solutions provide a centralized overview of an organization’s SaaS application environment, helping to identify misconfigurations, enforce security policies, and manage access controls. By continuously evaluating and auditing the configurations and settings of SaaS applications, these platforms can ensure that security standards are always met and maintained.
In this article, we’ve put together a list of the top SSPM solutions on the market today. In each instance, we’ll identify a solution’s key features and their ideal use cases to help you decide on the tool that best suits your needs.
Adaptive Shield safeguards your organization’s SaaS tools from potential threats as well as providing comprehensive threat detection and response. It offers a seamless integration with over 120 SaaS applications right from the outset, facilitating continuous analysis and management of the entire SaaS infrastructure. Adaptive Shield ensures robust governance over SaaS users by consolidating visibility of user accounts, permissions, and high-privileged activities. It effectively manages potential SaaS misconfigurations through detailed security assessments, it can then offer automated and guided remediation, ensuring that this process is as straightforward as possible.
Adaptive Shield also allows security teams to identify and control all sanctioned and unsanctioned third-party applications connected to the core SaaS hubs, assessing the risk level they pose to the business. In addition to overseeing identity and access management, the solution grants a detailed view of the risks associated with SaaS users and their devices. The platform facilitates the monitoring of device vulnerabilities and misconfigurations, giving teams the ability to respond efficiently to identity-centric threats originating from the SaaS ecosystem. Adaptive Shield enhances operational efficiency by helping to prioritize configuration weaknesses and streamlining the remediation process.
AppOmni is a trusted SaaS security provider, used by over a fifth of Fortune 100 companies. The platform scrutinizes APIs, security controls, and configuration settings, enabling organizations to understand and manage the security of their critical and sensitive data. The tool integrates with a range of SaaS applications including Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, Zoom, and Salesforce. This technology also assists in setting up rules for data access and sharing, as well as the regulation of third-party applications, with continuous and automatic validation. AppOmni provides a suite of capabilities encompassing configuration management and data exposure prevention. The platform grants security team’s insight into the usage of business-critical SaaS applications within their organization, highlighting misconfigurations and other potential security gaps.
AppOmni also provides dynamic threat detection and activity monitoring features. It can monitor policy settings and permissions, while alerting the teams of any suspicious activities. This eliminates the need for manual data collection and normalization, seamlessly integrating into existing security infrastructures such as SIEM and SOAR. The platform provides comprehensive third-party app management, which helps in inventorying all connected apps, understanding their usage and the data access levels they possess. The platform also assists with adherence to regulatory compliance requirements with real-time dashboards to track the compliance levels of SaaS applications and policies.
Lumos offers a comprehensive SaaS management and identity governance solution that facilitates streamlined IT operations and secure access protocols within organizations. The platform is a reliable tool for IT and security teams, enabling them to reduce software costs, minimize IT ticket volumes, and enforce the principle of least privilege access for employees. By centralizing all vendor data (including shadow IT, software spending, and license information), Lumos provides a single source of truth, facilitating the efficient governance of all apps from a single platform. The platform integrates with a variety of SaaS solutions including SSO providers such as Okta, invoice systems, and contract lifecycle management tools. This enables it to provide powerful insights across renewal management and licensing workflows.
IT managers can use the software to remove inactive, redundant licenses and manage renewals proactively with improved insights into app usage and future needs. These ongoing management tools make Lumos a vital tool for controlling software spend and optimizing resource allocation, whilst ensuring that accounts are kept secure. Lumos enhances security and compliance protocols with features such as multi-stage approvals and time-based access. IT managers can set up advanced workflows for access requests and approvals. The platform facilitates compliance management by allowing quick generation of audit-friendly reports, making it easier to meet auditing requirements and ensuring the secure and efficient functioning of organizational IT infrastructures.
Netskope offers a robust SaaS Security Posture Management (SSPM) solution designed to protect data in SaaS applications, including Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, and Zoom. The solution provides in-depth visibility and control over SaaS configurations and associated third-party apps. This effectively reduces data breaches and compliance violations. Netskope enables admins to configure cross-app rules and correlate data between different applications. This effectively identifies and prevents hidden risks. Central to Netskope SSPM’s effectiveness is its comprehensive API-based protection for SaaS applications, which integrates seamlessly with their industry-leading Cloud Access Security Broker (CASB) service.
The platform accommodates a range of customization options, allowing organizations to define rules and policies specific to their security requirements, alongside a selection of predefined rules across industry benchmarks and standards. The solution also accelerates the remediation process by offering step-by-step guidance to swiftly address identified security risks. This platform is equipped to support compliance with several industry standards, including CIS, PCI-DSS, NIST, HIPAA, and GDPR. As a part of Netskope’s integrated Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) architecture, it complements other Netskope offerings like Data Loss Prevention (DLP) and Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA).
Obsidian’s SaaS security and compliance solutions allows teams to build a secure and regulated application environment. The platform expands the visibility of your SaaS security posture and assists in fostering ongoing compliance with regulatory standards and mitigating data exposure. Admins can secure SaaS configurations and pinpoint vulnerabilities, to prevent potential security incidents. The platform provides key insights with a comprehensive security posture score, helping teams to understand and enhance their security standing in comparison to other environments monitored by Obsidian.
Obsidian also provides a fluid tracking of your SaaS security performance developments over time. The solution provides real-time compliance monitoring against internal security standards and known regulatory frameworks such as NIST 800-53, SOC 2, and CCM. It offers analytical tools to manage and adjust user privileges effectively, thereby minimizing potential risks without causing disruptions to business operations. This involves scrutinizing sudden privilege escalations and understanding access to sensitive business data areas, ensuring the maintenance of your organization’s well-rounded, robust security posture.
Varonis DatAdvantage Cloud is a SaaS security posture management solution that helps businesses identify and address critical misconfigurations in cloud data. The solution allows teams to spot and fix SaaS security gaps or misconfigurations. This enables them to enhance their overall SaaS security posture. It also enables businesses to maintain compliance with various regulations such as NIST, HIPAA, SOX, and GDPR, providing real-time alerts for abnormal behavior and any significant changes in org-wide security configurations across multiple platforms including Salesforce, Google Workspace, and AWS S3.
The solution provides a comprehensive features set, including data loss prevention capabilities, shadow identity discovery, and SaaS permissions remediation. This range of features facilitates a clear perspective on permissions across your cloud services and can suggest viable steps to eliminate unnecessary or inappropriate privileges. The platform conducts swift cross-cloud investigations, offering simple solutions to intricate queries regarding external user permissions in any SaaS app, admin logins, and configuration changes made by watchlist users. With Varonis, teams can also efficiently manage privileged account monitoring and secure offboarding, ensuring a secured and compliant cloud ecosystem.
Everything You Need To Know About SaaS Security Posture Management (SSPM) Solutions (FAQs)
What Are SaaS Security Posture Management (SSPM) Solutions?
There are hundreds and thousands of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications that companies can use in order to streamline data management and other workflow processes. SaaS applications provide integration capabilities as well as scaling easily as part of a growing organization. They are easy to use and typically help to lower overall costs, which makes them an attractive alternative to on-premises solutions. However, as with all cyber offerings there is a risk that SaaS applications may become a target for malicious attacks. Ensuring that you solution can withstand these attacks is on the principal purpose of SaaS security posture management solutions.
A SaaS security posture management solution is an automated security tool designed to monitor security risks in Software-as-a-Service applications. They aim to strengthen an organizations overall security posture by implementing technology and automating processes that will grant users full visibility into the ongoing security status of each asset.
How Do SaaS Security Posture Management (SSPM) Solutions Work?
At their core SSPM solutions monitor activities and events within SaaS solutions to understand their security posture. This allows organizations to:
- Help manage and control user access
- Maintain necessary compliance with industry regulations
- Identify potential vulnerabilities and threats (both internal and external)
- Take proactive steps towards reducing security risk
An SSPM solution will support you in identifying these threats that may cause harm to your business. In addition to this, they will help to ensure you meet SaaS security standards even when errors occur.
What Features Should You Look For In SaaS Security Posture Management (SSPM) Solutions?
- 24/7 Monitoring. A good SaaS security posture management solution will monitor SaaS applications around the clock to ensure they are configured correctly. They will also monitor privacy and security rules automatically, thereby ensuring that security management is as simple as possible.
- Security Posture Control. These solutions are programmed to run regular security checks in accordance with industry benchmarks and standards, ensuring compliance is maintained and providing threat data and application control. They also often offer risk assessment and scoring, with a risk dashboard to explain prioritized security efforts.
- Prevent User Misconfigurations. SSPM solutions will enable you to manage configuration drifts within your SaaS environments. This means that you solutions will continue operating as you set them up, without the need to reconfigure or realign them.
- Manage compliance. Compliance is critical to SaaS usage but can be overlooked by organizations who become overwhelmed by the sheer volume of applications being used daily. Simplifying compliance is a key benefit of SaaS security posture management solutions. These platforms can automatically notify administrators and security teams of instances where compliance requirements fail to be met.
- Adaption. Transitioning from one SaaS solution to another (or migrating to a different platform) can leave you vulnerable to oversight and attacks. SSPM solutions will ensure that new platforms are effectively onboarded, meaning that you are always protected and that your security is never compromised.
