It’s no secret that across nearly every industry and organization, SaaS adoption has soared over the last five years. We can thank evolving work environments and business models for skyrocketing SaaS app growth.
But while organizations were quick to onboard as many SaaS apps as possible to improve productivity and collaboration, in turn, they also opened themselves up to significant security risks.
Among them? Non-compliance.
SaaS applications introduce various unknowns and added complexity to attack surfaces, making SaaS security compliance a critical component of ensuring the security, privacy, and integrity of data being accessed and processed by each app.
For organizations, that means taking proactive measures to adhere to established industry frameworks or regulations that provide security standards and comprehensive strategies for cyber threat defense. While compliance frameworks are unique to the industry or organization, some of the most common security frameworks are SOC 2, ISO 27001, CIS Controls, and NIST.
The benefits of abiding by cybersecurity frameworks are multifaceted – doing so helps organizations maintain organizational trust, build reputation, and strengthen credibility. As companies continue to onboard more SaaS applications and software, SaaS security compliance measures help organizations manage and mitigate cyber risks and vulnerabilities. These measures also allow organizations to understand and improve their security posture, and show stakeholders and customers that their data, networks, and infrastructure are safeguarded.
Identifying SaaS security compliance challenges
As regulators and government entities bolster measures to ensure customer and consumer data protection, the penalties for non-compliance are rightfully increasing. Time and time again, we've seen organizations face massive security breaches and incidents, causing reputational downfalls, and burdens from colossal fines and penalties.
However, implementing and maintaining SaaS security compliance can be challenging for organizations. This is especially true for those with hundreds of SaaS apps, which are often interconnected and complex – and because they’re easy to download – security issues like SaaS sprawl and misconfigurations make them difficult to identify, vet, and secure.
Let’s explore a few components that make SaaS security compliance challenging:
- Lack of understanding and visibility of the SaaS environment: Industry frameworks like CIS, ISO 27001, and NIST specify the importance of identifying assets to secure SaaS and cloud-based assets. But, when organizations don’t understand which SaaS assets they have and how their data is flowing between them, compliance is hardly possible. Issues like shadow SaaS, unregistered, unmanaged, or unsanctioned apps compound IT visibility challenges, making it harder for IT to understand their IT environment.
- Dynamic and evolving regulations: Compliance standards are robust for good reason. But, keeping up with evolving regulations is no easy task. With IT and security professionals spending an average of 4,300 hours a year to achieve or maintain compliance, staying up to date with emerging and evolving regulations can be difficult – especially for small IT and security teams challenged with skills shortages.
- Departmental collaboration: SaaS security compliance is a shared responsibility, but can only be achieved when all teams and employees adhere to their requirements. As organizations grow and operational demands increase, meeting compliance across teams requires ongoing training, policies, and education.
How to ensure SaaS compliance with Axonius
While SaaS compliance is challenging, implementing the right solutions can help IT and security teams adhere to various frameworks and regulations.
Axonius SaaS Management identifies all SaaS applications, including sanctioned and sanctioned, shadow, and unmanaged apps, giving organizations an accurate and comprehensive view of their entire SaaS landscape. Offering multi-layered visibility and accurate data on how SaaS apps comply with existing frameworks, including whether an application’s security policies include single sign-on or multi-factor authentication, Axonius allows IT and security teams to facilitate reporting on business unit compliance and vendor risk.
Using the Enforcement Center, the right teams are alerted on asset conditions at the right time to quickly remediate assets that don’t adhere to framework or IT policy requirements and reduce mean time to compliance. This helps teams not only avoid fines, but security incidents. Axonius SaaS Management automatically enforces security controls and configurations across SaaS applications, helping save IT teams time that can instead be spent on maintaining compliance baselines and addressing critical risk factors and audit requirements.
