What are the Best Practices for SaaS Security?

Organizations must ensure that they protect their sensitive data from potential threats. To manage these threats, IT security teams must implement best practices that will empower them to manage SaaS security and protect the organization. 

With the adoption of SaaS apps, employees can streamline their work processes and improve productivity. However, it also increases the risk of cyberattacks, data breaches, and other significant cyber incidents. These risks can harm an organization's reputation and result in financial loss. Therefore, organizations must implement and maintain robust SaaS security measures to mitigate these risks.

SaaS security is a set of practices that help organizations to protect their sensitive information. It is a shared responsibility between organizations and SaaS providers, as both parties must adhere to relevant security regulations and standards.

SaaS security is a crucial component of SaaS management, which encompasses tasks such as discovering SaaS apps, tracking their usage, eliminating shadow IT, duplicating apps, removing unused licenses, and more. 

SaaS security poses various challenges, including potential insider threats, limited visibility into the SaaS infrastructure, and the need for privileged access management. Additionally, IT teams often require more control over SaaS data and security, which can add to these challenges. Failure to effectively address these challenges can result in financial and legal liabilities. 

Therefore, adopting SaaS security best practices will help you ensure foolproof security. 

This article will walk you through 4 best practices for SaaS security.

4 Best Practices for SaaS Security

Implementing the below-mentioned practices for SaaS security will empower IT teams to protect all data from cybersecurity risks.

1. Discover and gain visibility into your SaaS landscape

Gaining visibility into the SaaS environment in organizations is a complex task. For example, in the world of SaaS decentralized, employees can choose their own apps for their daily tasks. In this situation, it becomes complicated for IT teams to identify the complete SaaS stack in the organization. This leads to a need for more visibility into the SaaS landscape. 

As a result, IT teams need more control over the SaaS landscape to monitor and protect the SaaS apps from potential security risks. 

Employees use various tools to complete their job efficiently, often independently acquiring SaaS apps without the knowledge of IT teams. As a result, there needs to be more visibility and monitoring of the complete SaaS stack and potential security risks associated with these apps. Hence, the SaaS security gets compromised, making the organization and sensitive information vulnerable. 

To mitigate this risk, organizations must implement a SaaS management platform to discover and monitor the SaaS landscape and ensure the security of the organization and its sensitive information.

Zluri is an enterprise SaaS management software that helps you discover, track, and manage SaaS apps. Its 5 discovery methods can discover over 2,25,000 apps and is integrated with 800+ applications. This feature makes tracking and identifying events within the organization easier.

In addition, Zluri provides IT admins with a view of critical apps with high threat levels and risk scores. It alerts users not to use critical apps that can impact data confidentiality and prevent data from cyber-attacks.

Each SaaS app can be further evaluated by looking at factors like threat levels, risk scores, scopes, etc., that will determine the risk related to SaaS apps. The threat level is determined based on what level of data is shared between the SaaS app and the SSO. For example, if an app has access to Google Drive and can modify or delete the drive files, then the app is considered to have a high threat level.

2. Understand the SaaS provider's security certifications, policies, and compliance

When partnering with any SaaS provider, it is crucial to understand their security certifications, policies, and compliance measures. Organizations must ensure that their SaaS providers know the security requirements to mitigate these risks. 

As a result, organizations are required to validate the documents associated with security policies and certifications. This will help to stay secure and compliant. Also, it will help you avoid hefty penalties during the audit.

Suppose your partnered SaaS provider is not compliant with the required regulations, then at the time of the audit, you will be penalized for not validating the compliance certifications.

For example, an organization dealing with patients' health details may partner with a SaaS provider to procure a tool to store patients' details. However, the SaaS provider is not certified with HIPAA compliance regulations, which is a must for protecting patient information. 

Before confirming this deal, you did not validate it, and this ignorance and lack of understanding will lead to a financial loss during the audit. 

Understanding and validating the SaaS provider's security policies and certifications is crucial for businesses. For this reason, a centralized solution like an SMP can provide a view of all the SaaS providers and their granular details within the organization. 

Zluri offers security and compliance information solutions, including events, statistics, shared data, and compliance and security probes for SaaS applications. The goal is to work towards meeting every compliance requirement while helping businesses achieve compliance as well.

Zluri encrypts all sensitive data by using secure encryption algorithms. It offers a comprehensive and auditable log of key activities, informing you about the apps' security. All data is stored in an encrypted state and is backed up for a period of 60 days. All the data collected, such as SaaS-app usage metrics, is retained indefinitely unless a removal request is made. 

3. Streamline user lifecycle management

Large organizations often have a high turnover rate of employees, with new hires joining and current employees leaving regularly. The crucial part of these organizations is managing the users' lifecycle, which includes onboarding, offboarding, and mid-lifecycle change. For multiple employees joining, giving access to the right tools becomes difficult.

In cases where IT teams miss out on giving appropriate access to employees can lead to security risks. Further, giving wrong access to an organization's sensitive information can increase a high-security risk level. Therefore, streamlining users' lifecycle management in a company is necessary.

A SaaS management platform can manage and streamline the user's lifecycle. In addition, the platform will help to ease the provisioning and deprovisioning of the users in organizations, which will help maintain security and keep your organization compliant.

The tool automating the users' lifecycle management will reduce human error and prevent unauthorized users from accessing sensitive information in the organization.

Here, Zluri automates the onboarding and offboarding process. It enables the creation of multiple workflows to smoothen repetitive IT tasks and reduce security risks. 

Zluri creates customized workflows depending on the individuals' various roles, departments, and seniority levels and accordingly gives access to the required tools. Additionally, it provides in-app suggestions, like recommendations in Slack, allowing the IT admin to know which channels to add new hires.

Further, the workflow can be saved as a "playbook" for future reference. Furthermore, Zluri ensures that only authorized individuals have access to the system and data by eliminating unwanted access. 

In addition, when an employee leaves the organization, Zluri's system allows for the revocation of access for that individual with just a few clicks. The workflows created to revoke access can be saved as a "playbook" and used for future offboarding processes.

Additionally, Zluri offers a self-serve model—an Employee app store for any mid-lifecycle changes like a change in roles. This provides access to applications for new employees and automates the whole SaaS access management process.

With Zluri, IT teams decide the apps be made available for the employees in the app store, and the control over employee access remains with IT teams. It enhances the visibility of the apps available in the organization and approved by the IT teams.

Zluri manages the different stages of users' lifecycles and makes the organization secure by giving secure access to the employees. This prevents the organization from cyber threats or data breaches leading to a company's financial loss.

4. Ensure your data security and compliance

Many organizations are now making security improvements to ensure their data is secure and compliant with government regulations. Data security is a vital problem in organizations using multiple SaaS applications. When employees log in to SaaS applications, data is shared between the app and SSO systems, providing access to sensitive organizational data and increasing cyberattack risks.

Cyberattacks on companies have become more complex, making them difficult to detect or defend against. But organizations should be aware of potential undetected security gaps that could enable attackers to access and exploit their systems. 

An appropriate SMP offers you to manage, secure, and view all the data contents across your IT infrastructure. You can view audit information about specific items, filter and search files, and take suitable action against items you select. To get added security, SMPs are becoming more compliant to provide users with a hassle-free experience.

Zluri 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.

SaaS data security is a challenge for IT teams. But SaaS security appropriately managed can benefit organizations by protecting their sensitive information from cyber-attacks and data breaches. For this reason, companies relying on SaaS applications should take proactive measures to protect their data and reputation.

Zluri, a SaaS management platform, can help you gain visibility into the organization's SaaS landscape and empower IT teams with granular insights associated with security and compliance. Also, Zluri streamlines the user lifecycle management, from onboarding and mid-lifecycle changes to offboarding.

Book a demo today to implement the SaaS security best practices with Zluri!