Last year, 2020, was a turning point in how organizations are understanding cloud security. First, the market created a definition of what are the differences between IaaS Security (how can I secure my production environment) and SaaS Security (how can I secure my data in 3rd party services). In addition, companies realized that cloud environments required a different security lifecycle than the classic network security.

Understanding the lifecycle of cloud security is mainly based on the shared responsibility model, which means that in SaaS environments the customer is only responsible for protecting the data they are storing.

Sounds easy now? Not so sure. In 2020, McAfee’s report says that the number of threats targeting cloud services has increased by a huge figure of 630%, and by 2022, Gartner projects that 95% of cloud security failures will be the customer's fault.

As a SaaS customer protecting your data in including mainly seven routines:

1. Risk Assessment

Assess the risks of your SaaS provider. 70% of companies trust their providers to secure their data. However, only 8% of cloud services actually meet the data security requirements. Only 1 in 10 providers encrypt data at rest, and just 18% support multifactor authentication.

2. Privileged Access Management

Detect rogue services and shadow accounts. The average organization uses 1,935 unique cloud services. Unfortunately, the IT departments believe they use only 30 cloud services. Moreover, nearly 9% of those cloud services were rated as high-risk services.

3. Identity Protection

Apply identity and access management (IAM). An organization can apply role-based permissions to data so that end-users will see only the data they're authorized to view. A role-based identity and access management solution can ensure that end-users do not gain access to more resources than they require for their jobs.

4. Data Compliance

Encrypt cloud data. Data encryption protects both data at rest (in storage) and data in transit between the end user and the cloud or between cloud applications. Government regulations usually require encryption of sensitive data.

5. Data Protection

Enforce data loss prevention (DLP). DLP software monitors for sensitive data within SaaS applications. DLP software detects and prevents sensitive data from being downloaded to personal devices and blocks malware or hackers from attempting to access and download data.

5. Insider Threats

Monitor collaborative sharing of data. Collaboration controls can detect granular permissions on files that are shared with other users. Employees may inadvertently or intentionally share confidential documents through email, team spaces, and cloud storage sites such as Dropbox.

5. Continuous Validation

Validate your security posture against real-world scenarios while taking cyber attackers’ perspective and stress-test its security stance to validate the cloud security posture effectiveness.

Automate the Cloud Security Routines with Saasment “Cloud Security Automation Platform” to:

1. Reduced Human Error

Avoid manual scripts and auditing to manage and validate complex security scenarios on a large scale.

2. Save Time

Automate all of the security controls across SaaS applications into a single, easy-to-use platform.

3. Increased Efficiency

Fully utilize your security stack - identify missing or misapplied products and security controls.