What is SSPM?

Cloud security is the umbrella that holds within it: IaaS, PaaS and SaaS. Gartner created the SaaS Security Posture Management (SSPM) category for solutions that continuously assess security risk and manage the SaaS applications’ security posture.

With enterprises having 1,000 or more employees relying on dozens to hundreds of apps, the need for deep visibility and remediation for all the SaaS app attack surfaces, from misconfigurations and SaaS-to-SaaS
app access to Device-to-SaaS user risk, is only getting more critical.

The top pain points for SaaS security stem from:

Lack of control over the growing SaaS app estate

Lack of governance in the lifecycle of SaaS apps: from purchase to deployment, operation and maintenance

Lack of control over the growing SaaS app estate

Lack of governance in the lifecycle of SaaS apps

Lack of visibility of all the configurations in SaaS stack

Skills gap in ever-evolving, accelerating, complex cloud security

Laborious & overwhelming workload to stay on top of all settings and permissions

While the native security controls of SaaS apps are often robust, it falls on the responsibility of the organization to ensure that all configurations are properly set — from global settings, to every user role and privilege. The security team is burdened with knowing every app, user and configuration and ensuring they are all compliant with industry and company policy.

Adaptive Shield is a 2022 Gartner® Cool Vendors™

Adaptive Shield is named a Cool Vendor in the Application Security Report: Protection of Cloud-Native Applications.

“Digital business initiatives have accelerated, and this, in turn, has accelerated development of cloud-native applications. This creates challenges in terms of securing these applications. Attacks on the software supply chain have increased considerably, leading to loss of sensitive data.”

Want to learn more? Access the 2022 Gartner Cool
Vendors Application Security report now

Download

Want to learn more? Access the 2022 Gartner Cool Vendors Application Security report now.

Download

Gartner, Cool Vendors in Application Security: Protection of Cloud-Native Applications, Ravisha Chugh, Joerg Fritsch, Jeremy Fritsch, Jeremy D'Hoinne, Mark Wah, 12th April 2022.
The GARTNER COOL VENDOR badge is a trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates and is used herein with permission. All rights reserved.
Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

Why Do You Need an SSPM Solution?

Effective SSPM solutions come to answer the above listed pains and provide full visibility into the company’s SaaS security posture, checking for compliance with industry standards and company policy.

Why You Need Adaptive Shield

Adaptive Shield fully automates the remediation of security misconfigurations throughout the increasingly complex SaaS app stack.

SSPM vs Manual Audits

The amount of apps, configurations, user roles and privileges an organization must manage and monitor grows with every onboarded app. If you break it down by the numbers, a typical enterprise has hundreds of SaaS apps. Each app has as many as hundreds of global settings; multiply this by the number of users. Add in the dynamic, ever-changing environment. This requires security teams to stay on top of thousands to tens of thousands of configurations, equalling an impossible and unsustainable workload — without an automated solution in place.

SSPM vs CSPM

While the umbrella term as mentioned above, when specified as CSPM refers to infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) security solutions. An SSPM solution is one that is specialized in SaaS app technology and offers unique value to be able to integrate with any app in the organization’s SaaS app stack.

SSPM vs CASB

There is often confusion between Cloud Access Security Brokers (CASB) and SaaS Security Posture Management (SSPM) solutions, as both are designed to address security issues within SaaS applications. CASBs protect sensitive data by implementing multiple security policy enforcements to safeguard critical data. For identifying and classifying sensitive information, like Personally Identifiable Information (PII), Intellectual Property (IP), and business records, CASBs definitely help. However, where CASBs fall short is that they identify incidents after they happen.