FAQs About SaaS Security Posture Management (SSPM) Platforms

As companies increasingly depend on SaaS applications for critical functions like sales, marketing, and finance, the importance of securing these tools has never been greater. Ensuring that SaaS applications don't serve as backdoors to potential attacks is crucial for maintaining both security and compliance. SaaS Security Posture Management (SSPM) plays a pivotal role in this effort, especially as the adoption of SaaS continues to grow.

What is SaaS Security Posture Management (SSPM)?

SaaS Security Posture Management (SSPM) is a category of products that continuously evaluate, measure, and help remediate risks in a SaaS application.  SSPM has become important as companies continue to adopt SaaS, and as SaaS becomes a more common attack vector.  When monitoring SaaS applications, these products identify risks such as misconfigurations, dormant user accounts, compliance risks, and privileges based on user profiles.  SSPM products focus on specific SaaS applications such as Salesforce, Slack, or Office365. 

How do SSPM platforms work?

SSPM platforms can integrate directly with SaaS apps to assess and monitor the following:

User permission settings: SSPM products can identify users and detect dormant or unused accounts.  Additional telemetry such as authentication method, frequency, and role assessments can also be provided.

Configuration issues: SSPM products look for configuration issues—settings and options within a SaaS platform are not properly aligned with the organization's security policies—that may expose sensitive data.  Configurations are constantly monitored to ensure that changes follow compliance policies.

Compliance: SSPM products evaluate a SaaS application’s security posture to help companies understand if any data security or privacy laws have been violated.  Automated compliance checks are done against industry standards, company policies, and best practices. 

Do SSPM platforms secure every SaaS app?

The short answer is no.  Many SSPM product companies market themselves as providing a complete control and visibility of all their SaaS apps.  However, there is a big caveat to this statement—SSPM platforms only work with the apps with which they have integrated.  In addition, the level of integration depends on the APIs available from the SaaS app.  Most SSPM platforms integrate with most primary enterprise apps such as Salesforce, Office 365, and Slack, which are used by most companies.  But even small companies may use 100 or more apps, and SSPM products will likely not integrate with most of them. 

Do I need an SSPM solution?

SSPM platforms are an important part of a SaaS security program.  However, it is not sufficient to secure all of a company’s SaaS estate.  Monitoring and reviewing SaaS app security can be done manually, but many have hundreds of configurations with user accounts being created or closed constantly, making it impossible to do manually.  Similar to how endpoint detection and response products help security teams monitor, investigate, and remediate threats targeted to endpoints, SSPM products serve a similar function for SaaS apps.   

How do SSPM products discover SaaS apps?

SSPM products do not discover SaaS apps on their own.  They can discover users, SaaS-to-SaaS apps, and device access.  They cannot discover and provide security teams a complete inventory of all the SaaS apps being used in a company.  Because SSPM products rely on API integrations with SaaS apps, they will need to be turned on individually and authorized by the security team.  Beyond the obvious core enterprise apps such as email, collaboration, or CRM apps, security teams will need to select and add additional apps to the SSPM product—assuming the SSPM vendor has completed the integration.  

Do SSPM products provide access control for my users?

SSPM can provide user and device access control for those apps with which they are integrated.  If the SaaS app provides the appropriate APIs, the controls can be very granular and provide functions such as user discovery, user classification, guest status, privileged users, and user visibility (user information from internal systems and organization charts).  Access control for all apps will not be equal, however, and it depends on the types of APIs available from the app and whether the SSPM platform has built the integration to those APIs.  The challenge for companies is that they usually deal with hundreds of apps, and SSPM products cannot help security teams monitor or control access to those.  These are often left to secure web gateway (SWG or proxy) products or cloud access security broker (CASB) products, which are incomplete and do not scale for the volume of SaaS companies use today. 

What are the limitations of an SSPM?

While SSPM tools offer valuable security insights, they do come with certain limitations. One significant drawback is their support for a limited set of applications. Companies often rely on a diverse range of SaaS tools, and it's common to find that an SSPM solution doesn't cover all the applications in use. This gap can leave some SaaS applications unmonitored, potentially exposing the organization to risks that go undetected.

Another limitation is that SSPMs are not designed to discover new or unauthorized SaaS applications within an organization. Shadow IT—where employees adopt SaaS tools without the knowledge or approval of the IT department—remains a persistent challenge. SSPMs primarily focus on managing and securing known SaaS applications, which means they may miss emerging risks associated with newly introduced tools that haven’t yet been integrated into the security framework. This limitation underscores the need for complementary solutions that can help identify and monitor the full spectrum of SaaS usage within a company.

How can I get the most value from an SSPM solution?

The first step is to conduct a comprehensive inventory of all the SaaS apps being used in a company. The apps should then be prioritized from a risk perspective that factors in data such as number of users, type of data used, growth in users, authentication method.  Once this has been completed, SSPM solutions that support the highest number of apps can be selected, but this number will still be only a small fraction of the total number of SaaS apps used in the company. 

Grip Security provides a SaaS Security Control Platform (SSCP) solution that helps companies discover, prioritize, secure, and orchestrate SaaS security across the enterprise.  The discovery method Grip uses can discover 5X more SaaS apps than other leading solutions on the market, including shadow SaaS and shadow AI that SSPMs overlook. The Grip SSCP can also control access to the hundreds of SaaS apps that an SSPM cannot, offering a more comprehensive security solution.  Grip's SSCP solution can help companies realize the most value from their SSPM investment by maximizing their security coverage and safeguarding the applications that traditional SSPMs may not fully protect.

For a demonstration of the Grip SSCP or a free SaaS risk assessment, talk to a SaaS security expert today.

‍

This article was first published in October 2022 and updated in August 2024 to ensure accuracy and relevance.