A recent review by Wing Security, a SaaS security company that analyzed data from over 500 companies, revealed some worrisome information. According to the study, 84% of company employees had an average of 3.5 of his SaaS applications compromised in the last three months. This is a concern, but not too surprising. With SaaS usage growing exponentially, security and IT teams are struggling to keep track of which of his SaaS applications are being used and how. This is not to say that SaaS should be avoided or blocked. On the contrary, he must use SaaS applications to ensure business growth. However, using them requires some caution.
Identify risky SaaS applications
The most intuitive risk factor for determining if an application is dangerous is to examine the application to see if it has been compromised. With more and more SaaS-related attacks, SaaS applications are clearly a target. A compromise is a clear sign to stay away from at least until the SaaS vendor has fully remediated and recovered (which can take time). However, there are other criteria to consider when determining whether a SaaS application is safe to use. There are two more considerations.
- compliance – The security and privacy compliance that an application’s vendor has or does not have is a good indicator of its safety. Securing SOC, HIPAA, ISO (the list goes on…) requires a long and rigorous process in which companies must adhere to strict regulations and conditions. Knowing your company’s compliance is essential to understanding its level of security.
- Marketplace presence – Seeing whether the application exists in a well-known and well-regarded marketplace can also help determine its completeness. This can be related to its security measures. Reputable marketplaces require your application to go through a review process. It goes without saying that one of the most important indicators of an application’s legitimacy is her user reviews.
Understanding which applications are potentially dangerous is an important but not trivial task. Also, it’s not the first step. According to Wing Security, he had high triple-digit numbers of his SaaS applications in use across all the companies we surveyed. So the first basic questions security teams should ask are:
How many SaaS applications are your employees using?
Clearly, it is impossible to determine whether SaaS is being used safely without identifying how many SaaS applications are being used and which applications are being used. This is basic, but not simple. SaaS is used by all employees. Enforcing SSO and using IAM systems is important and useful, but the decentralized, accessible, and often self-service nature of SaaS applications means that employees can find almost anything they need just by searching. You can get started with our SaaS. You can easily bypass IAM by going online and connecting to your company’s workspace. This is especially true when considering the many SaaS applications that offer free tools or free versions of them.
With that in mind, SaaS application discovery is also offered as a free self-service tool. So answering the above question is easy. Once you have a clear mapping of SaaS usage, the next step is to identify risky SaaS applications. Once a risky application is so classified, it is important to revoke tokens received from users who connected the application to your organization. This can be a time-consuming and tedious process without the right tools (Wing offers dangerous application removal as a separate feature in the free version, but there are some limitations in the premium version. is released).
To make sure your SaaS use is safe, you need to ask and answer two more questions.
1. What permissions are granted to SaaS applications?
Needless to say, not all applications pose risks all the time. It’s also worth adding that even if a SaaS application is compromised, the risk it can pose depends heavily on the permissions granted. Almost all SaaS applications require some degree of permission to access corporate data in order to provide the services for which they are designed. Permissions range from read-only to write permissions that allow SaaS applications to act on a user’s behalf, such as sending email in the user’s name. Managing a good SaaS security posture means monitoring the permissions users grant to applications and ensuring that only the permissions they need are granted.
2. What data flows between these applications?
At the end of the day, it’s all about protecting critical corporate data such as business information, Pii, and code. Data comes in many forms and flows in many different ways. Every business unit and team, and the unique way everyone in the organization uses her SaaS, introduces the risk of sharing data using SaaS applications that were not designed for secure data sharing. There is also the risk of data being shared between SaaS applications. There are many SaaS applications connected today, and onboarding one gives you access to a subset of many others. It’s a huge mesh of interconnectivity and data sharing.
Start with the basics – understand the SaaS layer
SaaS security can be overwhelming. It’s a new, robust frontier that’s constantly evolving. This is also one risk in a long list of risks that security teams need to face. The key to solving SaaS security is knowing which applications are being used. This fundamental first step sheds light on the challenges of SaaS Shadow IT and enables security teams to properly assess the urgency and magnitude of SaaS security risks. Getting a solid grasp of the amount and nature of her SaaS in use shouldn’t be complicated and expensive. There are many tools that can solve this. try wings.Free Security Solution to get an idea of what you are facing.
