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 SaaS security settings is only getting more critical.

The SaaS Security Challenge

Volume

Each app can have hundreds of global settings, multiply this by the number of employees and number of apps in use, making it impossible for security teams to cope with the volume.

Visibility

With this incredibly high volume of apps, users, configurations and interconnected apps, security teams lack visibility into the SaaS security posture and as a result, lack control.

Velocity

The speed of changes within each SaaS app makes it incredibly hard to govern. On top of this, provisioning and deprovisioning of users makes it challenging for security teams to keep up with the pace.

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.

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.