While brick-and-mortar retailers and e-commerce sellers may be in a heated battle for market share, one area where they can agree is the need to secure the SaaS stack. From communication tools to order management and fulfillment systems, much of today’s essential retail software is built into his SaaS apps on the cloud. Ensuring the security of these applications is critical for ongoing operations, chain management and business continuity.
A breach in retail causes a seismic shift. Ten years later, many people still remember the 40 million credit card records stolen from a national retail store. Such attacks continue. According to Verizon’s data breach investigation report, there were 629 cybersecurity incidents in this area last year. Clearly, the retailer needs to take concrete steps to protect his SaaS stack.
Still, securing your application is complicated. Retailers tend to have multiple app tenants, leading to confusion about which instances of the application are already protected and which are vulnerable to attack. Employee turnover is also high, and employees need to be laid off quickly when they move on to other opportunities.
Learn how to secure your entire SaaS stack with an SSPM solution.
multiple app instances
Retailers tend to use multiple tenants of the same app to manage different regions within a chain or different product lines across chains. Consider a scenario where a retailer has 50 different instances of her CRM or ticketing system. Each tenant must be individually secured according to the retailer’s guidelines.
Some instances of that application are arguably safe, while others exist rather as black holes and no one in the company knows what’s going on. In some instances he has SSO, requires MFA and is provided with restricted role-based access, but in other instances if every user can login locally with only her one factor there is.
strategy wrench
Data protection is a concern when most organizations discuss SaaS security. This also applies to retailers, but many of them tie their operations to his SaaS apps. ServiceNow is reimagining the retail experience, empowering retailers to better solve problems, manage their supply chains and streamline operations.
The risks of such apps are deadly for retailers. You could lose visibility and control over your entire supply chain, ordering system, and franchise support platform. This is not an inconvenience. Now that many retailers have completed their digital transformation, the security of the applications that drive their operations must be a top priority.
Controlling access governance in industries with high turnover
According to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, research shows that nearly 70% of all retail job openings are vacant, and 74% of retail employees plan to change jobs this year. These figures show a temporary workforce that needs to be onboarded quickly and de-provisioned from his SaaS application by the company even faster.
Many of these processes are automated. However, his SaaS applications, which are not integrated with the company’s Identity Provider (IdP) software, allow employees to continue to access these applications. Additionally, employees with local access to the app are often prevented from logging in with SSO, but can still enter directly into the application.
As part of any retail SaaS security program, ex-employees should be taken care of. Revoking access immediately reduces the chances of a data breach, breach, or other cyberattack.
Securing the Full Retail SaaS Stack
Manage your SaaS security posture (SSPM) enables enterprises to quantify the risks to their SaaS applications and take necessary actions to secure their stack. SSPM monitors each tenant of an application individually on her single screen, enabling security teams to identify poorly protected applications and take necessary actions to prevent unauthorized access. To further enhance security, SSPM helps users find the most secure tenant and use it as a baseline to protect other tenants.
SSPM also monitors users. You can search for users to identify those that need to be deprovisioned and instruct your security team on how best to remove access. SSPM’s threat detection capabilities, on the other hand, can issue alerts when a threat actor intrudes into your application.
By implementing an SSPM program, retailers can take control and secure their SaaS stack and benefit from digital transformation.
Learn how to protect your entire stack in 15 minutes.
