Your security team is operating with a dangerous blind spot. Your SaaS environment is likely the most vulnerable aspect of your security posture due to unremediated and escalating cyber risk. Even if you're using a first generation SaaS Security Posture Management (SSPM) solution, the uncomfortable truth is that you have a significant degree of unremediated risk.
This is because manual remediation simply cannot scale with your expanding SaaS ecosystem. The average enterprise now uses in excess of 100 SaaS applications on the low-end, with thousands of SaaS-to-SaaS integrations and millions of external data shares constantly occurring and accumulating.
Read on to understand why automated remediation workflows are non-negotiable for a successful SaaS security strategy.
SaaS Beyond Security’s Control
One challenge of identifying risks is that most SaaS apps exist outside of the security team’s direct control. Unlike on-premise systems, that were typically administered by IT, IT/security teams cannot simply login and change settings or implement controls.
This decentralized landscape is today’s reality: Marketing owns Hubspot, Finance manages NetSuite, HR runs Workday, and Sales drives Salesforce—each SaaS application has its own administrators and security configurations.
When security teams identify a risk—like thousands of files being shared externally, they face the manually impossible task of remediating it. The same goes for SaaS-to-SaaS integrations—these non-human identities grow each day, are long-lived, and are often over-privileged.
Enter Automated Remediation Workflows
First-generation SSPMs deliver excellent risk visibility but leave security teams without the tools to operationalize response. It's common to hear that these tools do a great job of "lighting up all our SaaS risk,” for example, showing thousands of instances of sensitive data shared externally. The same applies to SaaS integrations sprawl.
But now what? How do you realistically remediate these risks with manual processes, and stay on top of them consistently?
Valence solves this gap, enabling scalable remediation workflows for known risks across SaaS data, access, and integrations.
- One-click remediation: Manually fix data exposure risk directly from the console, with full context
- Business-user collaboration: Engage with app owners via Slack or email to review, validate, and get additional context about SaaS risks before remediating them
- Automated remediation: Configure automated workflows with a no-code interface that allows you to define the desired triggers, outreach and actions required to enforce your security policy
The impact extends beyond efficiency. With automated remediation workflows, security teams can reduce data exposure and integration risk instead of simply documenting unaddressed issues.
Real World Success Stories
As a CISO, your skepticism about automation is well-founded. Legacy security automation tools often created more problems than they solved. However, modern SaaS security platforms like Valence have redefined the approach. The key is to focus on “automation” and not “automatic” remediation—this means a focus on automating manual tasks that are well-defined. If needed, our business user collaboration can keep a human-in-the-loop, but the human is the actual business user who has the context. This keeps the process collaborative without increasing your security team’s workload.
The concern that "automation will break things" is contradicted by Highspot’s experience, where thousands of external data remediations occurred without a single business disruption—reducing unnecessary external file shares from Google Workspace by 55%.
The worry that "our environment is too complex" actually underscores why automated remediation is necessary—human analysts cannot manage the complexity of external data exposure or third party integrations across numerous SaaS apps at scale. And the fear that "our users will resist" was disproven at Lionbridge, where users actively participated in remediation of SaaS integrations when given the right tools and context.
During Lionbridge’s proof of concept with Valence, they uncovered over 1,000 SaaS-to-SaaS integrations across their global operations, most of which were independently adopted without security oversight. According to Doug Graham, Chief Trust Officer at Lionbridge, “the ability to automatically mitigate SaaS security risks is a game changer” that “eliminated manual and labor intensive workflows,” while educating users about risks.
Lionbridge revoked 95% of obsolete or inactive OAuth tokens immediately, with 20% revoked by business users themselves. They’ve since expanded remediation workflows to address external data oversharing, overprivileged and inactive user accounts, and unrestricted email forwarding rules. Similarly MIO Partners, achieved a 90% reduction of inactive file shares from OneDrive and a 65% reduction of SaaS-to-SaaS integrations in their Microsoft 365 environment.
Why Manual Remediation Fails
The economics simply don't work. Consider the math: If your team spends just 15 minutes reviewing and remediating each risky integration, and you have 5,000 such issues, that's 1,250 hours of work—more than 31 weeks of full-time work for one analyst. For external data shares, the challenge is even greater. With organizations having thousands, or even millions of shares, manual remediation becomes humanly impossible.
Meanwhile, new SaaS apps, new integrations, and data shares accumulate daily. Ask yourself a question: when was the last time you revoked an integration or unshared a file? The backlog grows faster than you can address it. This isn't a reflection on your team's capabilities—it's a fundamental SaaS scalability problem that no amount of hiring can solve.
From Manual to Automated
While concerns exist over security automation gone wrong, Highspot eliminated 38% of their external Google Workspace data shares on day one—with zero business impact. Within six months, they reduced their risk surface by 55% while freeing their security team for strategic initiatives. Lionbridge’s complex operation across 23 countries benefitted similarly. Automated remediation workflows transformed SaaS security into a collaborative process, engaging users without disrupting them.
Security as Competitive Advantage
In today's digital economy, security can no longer be a cost center or compliance function. Forward-thinking organizations like Highspot, Lionbridge, and MIO Partners have transformed SaaS security into a competitive advantage—enabling SaaS-first business agility while reducing risk.
The question isn't whether you can afford to adopt automated remediation workflows. Given the scale and sprawl of modern SaaS environments—and the risk posed by unmanaged data sharing and third-party integrations—can you afford not to?
Your manual processes aren't just inefficient—they're increasingly ineffective against the growing complexity of your SaaS ecosystem. Automated remediation workflows aren’t just the future of SaaS security—they’re the only viable path forward.
Find and fix SaaS risks. See how Valence transforms SaaS risk remediation.
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