In the era of hacking and malicious actors, a company's cloud security posture is a concern that preoccupies most, if not all, organizations.

Yet even more than that, it is the SaaS Security Posture Management (SSPM) that is critical to today's company security. Recently Malwarebytes released a statement on how they were targeted by Nation-State Actors implicated in SolarWinds breach. Their investigation suggested abuse of privileged access to Microsoft Office 365 and Azure environments.

Often left unsecured, it's SaaS setting errors like misconfigurations, inadequate legacy protocols, insufficient identity checks, credential access, and key management that leave companies open to account hijacking, insider threats, and other types of leaks or breaches in the organization.

Gartner has defined the SaaS Security Posture Management (SSPM) category in 2020's Gartner Hype Cycle for Cloud Security as solutions that continuously assess the security risk and manage SaaS applications' security posture. Many don't realize that there are two sides to securing company SaaS apps.

While SaaS providers build in a host of security features designed to protect the company and user data, potential vulnerabilities and configuration weakness still arise stemming from the company's management of those configurations and user roles.

At best, security teams spend their days manually checking and fixing setting after setting, only needing to go back and do it all again when there are software updates, new users added or new apps onboarded. At worst, organizations turn a blind eye to the threats they are exposed to and operate in ignorance -- unable to protect themselves from what they cannot see.

The right SSPM solution can provide visibility, detection, and remediation for the company's SaaS security posture and save security teams a significant amount of time, reduce workload and stress. Clearly, the right SSPM solution cannot come fast enough.

• How to secure your SaaS estate

SaaS Security Posture Management (SSPM) Tools Ensure Continuous SaaS Security

SSPM solutions, like Adaptive Shield, provide proactive, continuous, automated surveillance of all SaaS applications. With a built-in knowledge base to ensure the highest level of SaaS security available today, Adaptive Shield is set up for security teams to easily and intuitively use -- and it takes just five minutes to deploy.

SSPM solutions should provide:

• 24/7 monitoring —It's not just a one-time assessment; once policies are set, they are continuously monitored and enforced.
• 40+ Integrations —While some apps are more heavily used than others, any misconfiguration or erroneous user role and privilege can leave a crack open for a breach or leak. You want to be able to monitor all your SaaS apps, from video conferencing platforms, customer support tools, HR management systems, dashboards, and workspaces to content, file-sharing applications, messaging applications, marketing platforms, and more.
• Remediation — Seeing the problem is just one part; remediation is the next critical part in avoiding risky SaaS misconfigurations. In Adaptive Shield, you can open a ticket in the security check and send it to someone to fix with no go-between and no lengthy additional steps. For simple scenarios, you can remediate it directly from the portal.
• Built-in security frameworks & benchmarks — Security checks can be run and risks determined based on your company's policies, industry compliance standards, and best practices. With an SSPM solution like Adaptive Shield, you can tailor the security and compliance levels to your standards.
• Fast and easy implementation — Quickly connect to the company's SaaS app ecosystem and within minutes have all the security risks laid out in an easy-to-understand dashboard.
• Built for the security team, usable by any business professional — Clear, intuitive, and highly visual, Adaptive Shield enables security teams to easily see, monitor, and remediate all their company's SaaS (mis)configuration and user role information. The system also allows scoped users, so the security team can assign access to specific SaaS apps to specific owners. The Adaptive Shield portal is built so this scoped user will have not only clear visibility into their SaaS apps but also be able to remediate any problems, taking off some of the workloads from the security team.

To Conclude…

The reality is that the company is only as safe as the weakest SaaS security configuration or user role. And the possibility that there are SaaS configuration errors and misappropriated user roles and privileges is high.

To mitigate the risks, get more information on how to ensure your company's SaaS security.