How SaaS Management Platforms helps in Eliminating Security Risks

With the emerging SaaS usage, there is an increase in the security concerns. Every SaaS-using company experiences several security issues due to less visibility in their SaaS stack.

An efficient SMP will help you gain visibility and eliminate any security risks in your organization.

In today's world, SaaS adoption is increasing as many critical organizational tasks, like sales, communication, collaboration, project management, etc., are supported by SaaS applications. These apps have become a crucial part of the organization in streamlining day-to-day tasks.

But with the growth of SaaS adoption, there is a growth in security risk. Due to the sensitive nature of data stored and shared in the cloud increases the SaaS risk. These apps have become an attractive target for cyber attackers.

On the contrary, when you have a SaaS management platform, you will have visibility to all the SaaS apps used in the organization. Therefore, you will have better clarity on your SaaS landscape and help you understand how SMPs will help you reduce security risks.

How SMPs Eliminate Security Risks

​​This post will briefly explain how SaaS management platforms can help eliminate security risks in an organization.

1. Discover the SaaS stack and prevent shadow IT

Easy adoption of SaaS applications has led users to use them without the knowledge of IT teams. You need to provide your email address and credit card details, and you can sign up for apps within a minute. Some SaaS providers don't even ask the users for their credit card details to try it. This contributes to a significant portion of shadow IT.

On the other hand, when there is an SMP, it offers visibility to the SaaS landscape of your organization. It empowers the IT teams to discover the SaaS apps used in the organization and helps in eliminating shadow IT.

An SMP gives a central place to automatically discover SaaS apps in use throughout the organization. It helps to manage and secure users, apps, data, files, folders, and user interactions within SaaS apps. It gives data-driven visibility into sanctioned and unsanctioned SaaS applications, allowing IT to control and secure the SaaS environment.

Zluri, a SaaS management platform, helps the organization eliminate shadow IT with adequate sources of SaaS discovery. The visibility that Zluri provides to the IT teams facilitates the empowerment of their business units, can measure value, determine thresholds for centralized governance, and benchmark costs.

Zluri has the largest app library in the world, with over 2,25,000 SaaS apps. It uses nine discovery methods to accurately find 100% of SaaS apps in your organization. This includes MDMs, IDPs & SSO, direct integration with apps, finance & expense management systems, CASBs, HRMS, directories, desktop agents (optional), and browser extension (optional).

Zluri’s nine discovery methods

A SaaS management platform identifies new SaaS applications and changes in settings, such as user, group, file, and folder settings, that could indicate suspicious activity. It then uses that information to send IT teams real-time notifications.

IT configures remediation utilizing administrator actions in SaaS applications, such as modifying settings, suspending the user, or sending an email or Slack notification to the appropriate teams.

2. Prevent ex-employees from accessing your SaaS apps

Lack of visibility to the SaaS stack leads to data loss in the organization. When the employees leave the organization, and there is no track of apps used, the access to confidential data remains with them. This might entice a data breach.

Even if they keep an inventory of SaaS subscriptions, it is done in google sheets/Excel, Airtable, etc. This way of manually managing SaaS has many challenges and is prone to human errors.

For example, you need to update the apps and license details every time there is a change in existing licenses, or a new app is purchased. Not only is it very time-consuming, but these sheets also have many errors.

But SMP plays a role in automating user onboarding and offboarding. It helps in removing access from systems while offboarding any employee. This supports tracking the data and prevents any data breaches.

With Zluri, you can automate the process of offboarding. It will notify the respective teams to revoke the ex-employees' access and retrieve the required data. This eliminates the security risk.

Furthermore, with Zluri, you get a data migration feature. For example, when terminating the user's Google account, the automation workflow in Zluri takes a backup of the account data, pushes it to AWS, and stores it there.

You can read how Zluri revoke access here during offboarding of employees.

3. Mitigate insider threats by tracking users' SaaS usage trends

Compared to any external agents, insider factors pose more threats and challenges to the SMPs being used by organizations. These insider agencies are difficult to detect and are more harmful.

A certain type of data loss indicates the challenge of insider threats. It is mainly due to employees' privileged and intimate access to company data and systems. Employees have various levels of access to SaaS applications depending on their job requirements.

The roles and permissions are adjustable in SMPs, allowing users to access only their required controls. In addition, IT teams may limit access to critical data and settings and improve security across the board with custom roles.

Allowing very granular permissions is how the best SaaS management tools secure SaaS applications. Least privileged access can prevent insider threats.

One of the primary benefits of applying the principle of least privilege is the decrease in harm in case of a malicious entity gets into the organization. For example, if a system is infected by malware in an organization that follows the principle of least privilege, then it will not be able to spread to other devices.

The above instance means that the chances of viruses, worms, or rootkits being executed minimizes because most of the other employees don't have the admin rights that enable their installation.

SMPs audit the number of administrators in an environment, alerting IT if the number exceeds the set threshold or preventing that threshold from being surpassed.

4. Ensure compliance with third-party SaaS apps

An SMP offers you to manage, secure, and view all the files and folder contents across your IT infrastructure. You can also view audit details about particular items, filter and search files, and take action against items you select. This attracts more stringent protocols to be followed and more compliance standards to be maintained owing to their several layers of activities and touchpoints.

To get added security, SMPs are becoming more statute compliant to provide their users with a hassle-free experience.

Zluri, being an SMP, helps you stay secure and compliant with ISO 27001, SOC 2, GDPR, and more compliance frameworks. Such compliance enforcement framework platforms prevent the SMPs or their users from falling prey to any threats posed by internal and external organizational factors.

In Zluri, we help you maintain such compliance and make you audit-ready, thus eliminating any intimidation.

We offer you security and compliance information, including events, statistics, shared data, and compliance and security probes for SaaS applications. We work towards meeting every compliance requirement while helping your business achieve compliance as well.

Zluri encrypts all sensitive data and has secure encryption algorithms. We offer you comprehensive and auditable logs of key activities, which keeps you informed. All your data is stored in an encrypted state and is backed up to 60 days. All the data collected, such as SaaS-app usage metrics, will be retained indefinitely unless you request it to be removed.

To sum up, entirely, Zluri brings in all the essential requirements like preventing shadow IT events, preventing usage by unauthorized users like ex-employees, eliminating insider threats, and making the organization statutory compliance and audit-ready to have the edge over its competitors and letting its users enjoy a hassle-free SMP experience.