The Weakest Link in Your Security Posture: Misconfigured SaaS Settings

Eliana Vuijsje, Marketing Director

In the era of hacking and malicious actors, a company’s cloud security posture is a concern that preoccupies most, if not all, organizations.

Yet even more than that, it is the SaaS Security Posture Management (SSPM) that is critical to today’s company security. Recently Malwarebytes released a statement on how they were targeted by Nation-State Actors implicated in SolarWinds breach. Their investigation suggested abuse of privileged access to Microsoft Office 365 and Azure environments.

Often left unsecured, it’s SaaS setting errors like misconfigurations, inadequate legacy protocols, insufficient identity checks, credential access, and key management that leave companies open to account hijacking, insider threats, and other types of leaks or breaches in the organization.

Gartner has defined the SaaS Security Posture Management (SSPM) category in 2020’s Gartner Hype Cycle for Cloud Security as solutions that continuously assess the security risk and manage SaaS applications’ security posture. Many don’t realize that there are two sides to securing company SaaS apps.

While SaaS providers build in a host of security features designed to protect the company and user data, potential vulnerabilities and configuration weakness still arise stemming from the company’s management of those configurations and user roles.

At best, security teams spend their days manually checking and fixing setting after setting, only needing to go back and do it all again when there are software updates, new users added or new apps onboarded. At worst, organizations turn a blind eye to the threats they are exposed to and operate in ignorance — unable to protect themselves from what they cannot see.

The right SSPM solution can provide visibility, detection, and remediation for the company’s SaaS security posture and save security teams a significant amount of time, reduce workload and stress. Clearly, the right SSPM solution cannot come fast enough.

SaaS Security Posture Management (SSPM) Tools Ensure Continuous SaaS Security

SSPM solutions, like Adaptive Shield, provide proactive, continuous, automated surveillance of all SaaS applications. With a built-in knowledge base to ensure the highest level of SaaS security available today, Adaptive Shield is set up for security teams to easily and intuitively use — and it takes just five minutes to deploy.

Misconfigured SaaS Settings

Adaptive Shield’s Landscape View

SSPM solutions should provide:

To Conclude…

The reality is that the company is only as safe as the weakest SaaS security configuration or user role. And the possibility that there are SaaS configuration errors and misappropriated user roles and privileges is high.

To mitigate the risks, get more information on how to ensure your company’s SaaS security.

This was first published in The Hacker News.

About the writer

Eliana Vuijsje, Marketing Director

Eliana is a marketing strategist with a passion for technology and storytelling. With an MA in conflict management and negotiation and a BA in Communications, Eliana hit the ground running after moving to Israel. Eliana’s work has been featured in places like Slashdot, the RSA conference and Facebook’s PyTorch publications. Since joining Adaptive Shield, Eliana has grown into a SaaS app security lobbyist telling everyone to secure their SaaS app estate. Oh, and she loves steak.