SaaS Security Posture Management Explained

SaaS Security Posture Management (SSPM) is a set of automated tools or capabilities for security risks of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications. SSPM identifies misconfigurations, dormant or over-privileged user accounts, compliance risks, and other security risks, helping to ensure that your SaaS environment adheres to security best practices.

In today's ever-connected business world, the indispensable role of SaaS applications is undeniable. Platforms like Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, Salesforce, Slack, or GitHub facilitate business intelligence, collaboration, and productivity and are used by departments across organizations. However, their fast and easy adoption by business users presents a unique challenge: effective security management.

What is SaaS security posture?

SaaS security posture refers to an organization’s overall readiness and resilience against security risks within its SaaS applications. It encompasses the configuration settings, permissions, data sharing practices, and compliance measures that dictate how secure a SaaS environment is from unauthorized access, data leakage, and misconfigurations.

Why Do Enterprises Need SaaS Security Posture Management (SSPM)?

SSPM solutions provide continuous visibility into security risks, such as misconfigurations, data exposure, risky third-party integrations, and over-permissive access. With a growing number of apps and users, organizations need SSPM to ensure security settings are consistently applied and compliant with internal and regulatory standards. SSPM mitigates the risks posed by both intentional and accidental security gaps, reducing the likelihood of breaches that could lead to financial losses or reputational damage.

SaaS applications are often managed outside of IT and security teams, creating a complex web of distributed ownership, particularly in large, global enterprises. This lack of centralized oversight leads to visibility gaps for security teams and increases the chances of human error and misconfigurations. Attacks on SaaS apps are a growing concern, as a simple misconfiguration—like an exposed Google Drive folder—can compromise sensitive data for millions. One out of every ten breaches stems from employee mistakes or other non-malicious actions. This highlights the importance of automated tools like SSPM to bolster overall SaaS security.

This is where SaaS Security Posture Management (SSPM) comes in.

5 SaaS Security Posture Management (SSPM) Benefits

Configuration Management: SSPM identifies and (to varying extents) facilitates the remediation of misconfigurations, ensuring that your SaaS settings align with security best practices and organizational policies. SaaS applications are prone to configuration drift, where settings gradually deviate from established security controls. SSPM helps maintain consistency in security by identifying and correcting these drifts to prevent security risks from accumulating.
Identity Permissions Management: SSPM tools review both human and non-human identities, such as service accounts, OAuth tokens, and API keys, and assess their privileges within your SaaS applications. This includes detecting unnecessary permissions, weak authentication settings such as a lack of multi-factor authentication (MFA), inactive identities, and over-privileged access that could pose a risk if exploited.
Reducing Data Exposure: Unsecured data, whether through risky external data shares, excessive privileges, or third-party SaaS integrations, poses a significant risk. SSPM provides visibility into these data sources, governs access, and enforces least privilege, minimizing data exposure to unauthorized parties.
Compliance Monitoring: SSPM helps you identify and address security gaps that could lead to non-compliance with both internal best practice guidelines and external data security and privacy regulations, including SOC 2, ISO 27001, HIPAA, and others.
Threat Detection and Response: Beyond monitoring SaaS risk posture, advanced SSPM solutions can identify suspicious user activities, providing identity threat detection and response (ITDR) capabilities to mitigate potential security breaches.

SSPM Tools

SSPM works by integrating directly with your SaaS applications via APIs, allowing the tool to assess and monitor the security configurations, permissions, and data sharing practices across all connected SaaS platforms.

SSPM tools follow a familiar security governance workflow:

Data Collection:
Use the APIs provided by SaaS applications to obtain data about security issues like misconfigurations, identity issues, data shares, and integrations

Issue Prioritization:
List and prioritize findings based on severity and impact. Some issues are common across SaaS apps, like enforcing multi-factor authentication (MFA), while others are specific to individual platforms

Action and Remediation:‍

Integration with External Systems: Create tickets for findings in platforms like Jira or ServiceNow
Collaboration with SaaS Administrators: Establish stronger collaboration with non-security SaaS admins to analyze and remediate issues manually
Automated Remediation: Some advanced SSPM solutions provide automated risk remediation using predefined policies for specific issues

Progress Monitoring:
Track security posture improvements over time, compare against industry standards and historical performance

Grow SSPM coverage:
Onboarding new business critical SaaS applications as needed, or as support emerges

Security and Compliance Risks Addressed by SSPM Solutions

SSPM tools can help identify and remediate various security and compliance risks associated with SaaS applications, including:

Misconfigurations: The distributed management of SaaS applications often leads to misconfigurations due to misalignment between IT and the SaaS admins or due to lack of knowledge of security best practices. Ill-advised settings, such alack of MFA, can expose sensitive data, grant unauthorized access, or hinder crucial security functionalities. SSPM tools help identify these misconfigurations and accelerate remediation.‍
Excessive User Permissions: Do you know which accounts in your SaaS application have administrative access? Are these privileges up-to-date with the actual needs and usage of that user or role? Overprivileged users pose a significant risk, as they may accidentally or maliciously access or modify sensitive information. Furthermore, if an account is compromised by an attacker, they potentially have wide privileges to do a lot of damage. Better to reduce the attack surface, and reduce SaaS account permissions to only the levels deemed absolutely necessary.
Failed Offboarding of Employees: It’s essential to properly offboard ex-employees and contractors in order to ensure they don’t have the ability to access critical SaaS applications, corporate resources and sensitive data after they leave. In most cases, IT can complete the process of revoking a user’s privileges easily and quickly through the organization’s Single Sign-On (SSO) system or identity provider (IdP). Offboarding users from SaaS applications managed outside of those services, however, can be more challenging. SSPM tools which have visibility into each SaaS application, can better ensure that complete offboarding steps are taken.
Lifecycle (Mis)management: Another common misconfiguration in SaaS applications are abandoned resources - which could be dormant accounts, legacy API/OAuth tokens, inactive external data shares, and more. Unmanaged identities and configurations are a SaaS security Achilles' heel. Attackers exploit weaknesses in human and non-human identity lifecycles. These neglected elements create blind spots for security teams, offering attackers a perfect entry point for unauthorized access. SSPM tools help fortify your defenses, enforce a rigorous lifecycle management process for all SaaS identities, tokens, data shares, and security configurations. This eliminates unnecessary access points, minimizes risk, and shrinks the attack surface.
SaaS-to--SaaS Integrations: Unauthorized or overprivileged third-party integrations can compromise security. SSPM tools offer visibility into these connections, helping assess risks and ensure only vetted integrations access corporate data. This extends to managing non-human identities—like OAuth tokens, API keys and service accounts—and can include monitoring integrations with generative AI tools, which may pose additional privacy and data security concerns.
Data Leaks: SaaS applications increasingly host extensive amounts of sensitive data. Whether it’s a file in Box, Google Drive, OneDrive, or SharePoint; a source code repository in GitHub or GitLab; a knowledge page on ServiceNow or Confluence; a recording in Zoom, ensuring least privilege access for external collaborators has become critical for modern businesses. Unsecured data storage or sharing can lead to data breaches and regulatory penalties. SSPMs govern data access, enforce least privilege, and monitor data sharing settings, ensuring sensitive information is adequately protected.
Compliance Violations: Failing to meet industry standards or data privacy regulations can result in hefty penalties and reputational damage. SSPMs help governance and compliance teams to demonstrate SaaS compliance for regulatory bodies, partners, and internal stakeholders.

Benefits of SSPM Solutions

Implementing SSPM capabilities like Valence offers numerous benefits for your organization, including:

Enhanced Security Posture: By continuously monitoring and addressing security weaknesses, SSPM tools significantly reduce the attack surface and improve your overall security posture.
Improved Compliance: SSPM helps ensure your SaaS applications adhere to relevant data security and privacy regulations, mitigating compliance risks.
Increased Operational Efficiency: Automating security tasks associated with SaaS applications frees up your IT team's time and resources for other critical activities.
Reduced Costs: By proactively managing risks, SSPM helps prevent costly breaches and fines.
Better Collaboration: Advanced SSPM tools enhance collaboration between security teams, SaaS administrators, and business users, making security a business enabler rather than a blocker. It empowers business units to adopt SaaS securely.
Improved Visibility and Control: SSPM provides a centralized view of the SaaS security posture, supporting better decision-making and control over cloud environments.

By understanding the role of SSPM capabilities and the challenges they address, businesses can make informed decisions about adopting these tools to strengthen their security posture and ensure safe and compliant usage of SaaS applications. Ultimately, proper configuration management, human and non-human identity management, and protection of sensitive data are critical components of a comprehensive cloud security strategy, and investing in SSPM tools can help organizations stay ahead of evolving threats and protect their critical data and assets.

What is the Difference Between SSPM vs CASB?

CASB (Cloud Access Security Brokers) tools primarily focus on controlling access and monitoring user behavior across cloud applications, providing a security layer between the organization and the cloud. SSPM solutions, on the other hand, dives deeper into the security configurations of specific SaaS applications, ensuring that best practices are followed and that the application’s internal security settings are aligned with corporate policies. While CASBs focus more on data loss prevention and user activity monitoring, SSPMs focus on configuration management and continuous posture improvement within SaaS environments.

SaaS Security Posture Management FAQs

How does SSPM differ from other security tools?
SSPM focuses specifically on securing SaaS applications, providing visibility into configurations, permissions, and data sharing practices that are often overlooked by traditional security tools.

Can SSPM work with multiple SaaS platforms?
Yes, SSPM solutions are designed to integrate with multiple SaaS applications, providing a unified view of security risks across all platforms.

Is SSPM suitable for small businesses or just enterprises?
While SSPM is particularly valuable for enterprises with large SaaS portfolios, even small businesses can benefit from the continuous monitoring and automated remediation of security gaps in their SaaS environments.

SaaS Security Posture Management Buyer’s Checklist

Our SaaS Security Posture Management Buyer’s Checklist offers a detailed guide to evaluating SSPM solutions, tailored to the unique challenges that organizations face in managing their SaaS environments. Below is a preview of the essential components covered in this checklist:

Configuration Management: Does the SSPM tool automate detection and correction of misconfigurations across all critical SaaS applications?
Identity and Access Management: Can the tool monitor both human and non-human identities, assess permissions, and enforce least privilege access?
Data Protection: Does the solution provide visibility into data shares and risky integrations to minimize unauthorized access?
Compliance Monitoring: Can it continuously check for alignment with regulatory and internal compliance requirements, like SOC 2 or ISO 27001?
Threat Detection and Remediation: Does the tool offer real-time detection of suspicious activities, alongside manual or automated remediation options?

Download the full checklist to dive deeper into each of these considerations and equip your team to select the SSPM solution that best fits your needs.

SSPM Vendors - Valence Security

Valence combines the breadth of support for all your most critical SaaS applications with the depth of analysis necessary to find the most critical SaaS security issues. Custom, automated policies can both engage business users in correcting security issues, and clean up massive amounts of SaaS issues overnight. Valence’s policies continue to work without additional input from the security team, ensuring SaaS security issues don’t ‘grow back’ over time.

Learn more about Valence’s SaaS Security platform, or schedule a demo today to see it in action.

What is SaaS Security Posture Management (SSPM)?