Cloud or On-premise? The dependency of different organizations on SaaS applications has increased in different sections such as file sharing, collaboration, and marketing. In fact, this pandemic has made enterprises realize that SaaS solutions can offer great benefits, and the biggest of them is business continuity. Work practices have significantly shifted to remote work and cloud because employees were instructed to stay at home due to the pandemic.
However, organizations are facing different challenges in the smooth implementation of Saas applications because of insufficient resources for configuring apps to prevent data breaches, cyber-attacks, and similar cybersecurity threats. Security teams are either facing excessive workload issues or don't have the required experience and expertise to handle these SaaS solutions.
SaaS security configuration errors have been mostly hit by a lot of criticism and blame for devastating and costly data breaches. According to stats, Saas misconfiguration has caused almost 33 percent of the data breaches. Not only this, but Saas misconfiguration is also considered as the second biggest reason for data breaches. Often, Saas misconfigurations have left databases and file systems exposed on the cloud. The vulnerability of any business to security threats increases with weak Saas application settings. Security experts have succeeded in identifying location errors that have left enterprises highly vulnerable to corporate espionage and data breaches with just one click. Apart from that, few basic mistakes have exposed the entire cloud of many businesses.
If organizations want protection from different types of risks, security teams must learn the proper configuration of Saas applications. Here is a list of some of the most common Saas configuration errors that your security team must be aware of to minimize the risks.
Ensure That Admins Are Using MFA
The SSO control is a vital feature that can be used to ensure security while accessing Saas applications. But, some users may bypass the SSO control intentionally. During maintenance sessions and other similar situations, Saas vendors give system users the option of logging in through their usernames and passwords while the SSO is still turned on. Apart from that, superusers can be given access after multi-factor authentication. Moreover, if every admin is using the same usernames and passwords and admins' credentials are compromised, the attacker will have easy access to all accounts.
With Saasment you can automatically find and fix security risks to prevent human error across your cloud assets.
Fix Easily Targetable Shared Mailboxes For Hackers
Companies often use a shared mailbox for sensitive information such as customer and financial data, and this itself is a big challenge for those organizations. In fact, 20 employees sharing one mailbox is common in companies. There are two major problems with shared mailboxes:
- There are no clear or specific owners
- Every user has to use an unchangeable static password
Turn On Auditing For Visibility And Control Maximization
It is a fact that you cannot know or understand what you cannot see, and that is why your security needs to be at the top of information or matters you are missing. Saas applications have built-in auditing actions that are good enough for many organizations. However, there are some organizations that need extra auditing features due to security issues. Businesses need to dig deeper and ensure maximum optimization against any possible security gaps.
Look Up For Loose Ends To Ensure That No One Can Access Data Subset Anonymously
It is important that no one should be able to access your business data without you knowing about it. It is not that simple to have complete control over your corporate data, and if you are using Saas, it will be even more difficult to maintain your control. You can start with finding out all publically exposed resources such as dashboards, discussions, forms, other data entities. If you see any gaps, fix them immediately so that there is no data breach and ensure all possible preventive measures to maintain your complete hold over your data.
Maintaining Saas Security- How To Do It?
All Saas applications and platforms have default configurations and security features. However, it is up to the users to configure them correctly to avoid data or network threats. It is the responsibility of the user/client to configure Saas for maximum security. However, if a business doesn't have an in-house expert, it can hire a consultant for similar services.
If a business doesn't choose the above-mentioned option, its security teams will have to bear sheer workload for proper maintenance of thousands of app settings. To counter that problem, it is best for your to get services of a consultant secure configuration and to ensure maximum security.
