One word characterizes everything about the benefits and risks of using SaaS apps in your organization: speed. SaaS apps are faster to implement, scale, and deliver higher productivity and efficiency more quickly than traditional on-prem solutions.
Yet, for all these positives, the dynamic nature of the cloud means security threats affecting SaaS apps can change in the blink of an eye. From configuration drifts to shadow IT, and app-to-app connectivity to integration challenges, the volume of threats is overwhelming. For fast-growth organizations, visibility into these risks is often limited, and manual intervention can’t address all of them quickly enough.
Reaction time is critical, and delayed responses can allow small risks to become imminent threats. That’s why SaaS security automation isn’t just an option, it’s a necessity. Automated remediation can mount a thorough response much faster than even the most experienced security expert. The result is a cost-effective way to protect company data without hindering business processes.
Best practices for successfully engaging SaaS remediation and policy automation
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Understand your current status
The strongest defenses always start with complete visibility into your environment. CISOs and security practitioners should assess not only the SaaS applications in use across the organization but also the app-to-app connectivity and the critical workflows they support. This “SaaS discovery” is crucial to your security; identifying approved and shadow IT apps, file sharing, and user access permissions gives you a baseline for creating an effective security strategy.
This is also the time to identify targets that present the greatest financial, operational, and reputational risks to your business, if attacked. Security teams should also map other applications or workflows that could be affected in case of a SaaS security breach, or even by the automated response itself.
The goal is to have a complete picture of how data is used and shared across and outside the enterprise. This provides visibility into data exfiltration and destruction, which can stem from insider risk, breaches, and other vulnerabilities. At the same time, to avoid unintended consequences, it’s crucial to identify the relationships between all of your SaaS applications and the connectivity between them. This is essential to understanding where and when to deploy an automated SaaS remediation solution.
Rollout automation in small doses
Automation helps reduce your attack surface by closing off gateways into and out of your applications and data. While activating SaaS remediation tools is recommended for most workflows, there will be exceptions. As noted above, some business-critical processes could be negatively affected by an automated response. In those cases, you may choose to continue manual responses to suspected security incidents, supported by automated monitoring and alerts.
A key step is to introduce pilot programs that automate repetitive tasks first, such as revoking access for employees who have left the organization, enforcing multifactor authorization (MFA), or enforcing password rests for orphaned accounts. This enables you to see the impact of the changes and avoid business interruptions. Lessons learned must be documented and applied as the rollout touches more apps and workflows. At the same time, communicating with users, training staff, and updating security procedures to account for automation are critical steps that can make or break the success of the rollout.
Establish smart, responsive security workflows
How do you tell your security automation tool what it should respond to and what actions to take? Auto-remediation establishes workflows that can perform multiple steps, even across systems and domains. The system can require a response within a certain time frame, instantly revoke privileges or OAuth tokens, request immediate review by security staff, or any number of other actions that can run in order or concurrently.
An automation solution needs to integrate easily with your existing security infrastructure, including ticketing systems, SIEMs, and internal workflows. The system should also deliver alerts that support collaboration and route issues to relevant stakeholders. This ensures a seamless flow of information and response, to avoid duplicated effort and gaps in coverage.
An effective tool, such as Wing Security’s remediation solution, should allow you to set up each of these steps with point-and-click ease. Straightforward “do this, then this” actions should be built in, and customization should allow every enterprise to create workflows that make sense for how it operates. After a simple setup, security teams can resolve complex issues with a single click, or handle recurring issues automatically.
Interpret results, then move forward with confidence
Teams should interpret remediation results by focusing on the risk reduction achieved and verifying whether security gaps have been fully closed. Trust in the outcome can be built through thorough logging of automated actions, continuous monitoring of the application post-remediation, and performing post-remediation audits to ensure no new issues have emerged.
While your internal security team can validate the results of your remediation efforts, that could take them away from more pressing tasks. Wing Security provides comprehensive evaluations based on the CWSS MITRE framework—including the SaaS ecosystem health score, security state, and the number of open issues by severity—that increase confidence in the remediation outcomes.
Automation replaces hesitation
SaaS security vulnerabilities crop up with little to no warning. Yet, every second of exposure could lead to huge risks for your business and users. Realistically, threats will always outnumber human responders, and those threats are growing daily.
Automation can deliver the best of both worlds: spotting and closing SaaS vulnerabilities even as apps and threats evolve while enabling your security team to focus on ensuring your business can move forward safely and productively.
