Your SaaS Security Checklist
Assessing the security threats and risks in the context of your SaaS application can help you understand your application vulnerability. Once the vulnerabilities are understood, you can protect not only the vulnerable hotspots but also adopt solutions that protect your SaaS application from newer risks.
Your SaaS Security Checklist
The security champions are usually the go-to folks for all security-related challenges and solutions. Infusing security into your organizational culture makes security measures not only a top priority but also helps to implement the best-in-class solutions.
Dedicated or partially dedicated security resources are essential in the organization as they are your touch-points for dealing with defined security tasks. Accountability of security debt, if any, is straightforward when dedicated resources are in place.
Enforcing security guidelines can prevent security bugs from creeping in and eliminate significant setbacks. You can also use an excellent static application security testing (SAST) tool to analyze your application source code and highlight the security vulnerabilities if any.
Key Takeaways: SaaS security best practices ensure that your application stays unaffected by attacks. The commitment to adopting best practices percolates at all levels of the organization, creating greater awareness among employees and clients. The cohesive adoption of best practices brings in a robust SaaS application.
Key Takeaways: A SaaS security checklist can help you look at potential vulnerabilities and also examine your security principles. It is highly recommended to brainstorm within your organization and curate a checklist that best suits your organizational security needs.
Business-led IT has many similarities to the bring your own device (BYOD) movement, which was initially resisted by IT/security but eventually embraced as security tools and products came on the market to help solve the problem. Employees are now used to using the device of their choice to get their work done, largely enabled by SaaS. It helps them get their work done faster and increases job satisfaction.
BYOD became possible as consumer IT products became more powerful and able to support enterprise features. The same is happening in software, and the consumerization of SaaS is driving the growth of bring your own application (BYOA) in the enterprise. Employees are now able to purchase an app on their own without IT/security approval or going through the vendor procurement process.
When going through a SaaS security checklist, it is vital to understand the security implications and possibilities. It's important to start with locating and securing shadow SaaS. Grip can help with our SaaS Security Control Plane (SSCP) solution. This modern approach enables your business to discover, prioritize, protect, and organize SaaS security for authorized and unauthorized applications and managed and unmanaged devices.
Grip's SSCP requires fewer personnel and resources than competitors and takes less time to install. Our innovation allows your business an immediate return on investment and save money on SSO. To learn more about SaaS security with Grip, download the datasheet today.
You are encouraged to begin adopting these standards, prioritizing your systems by risk level. As cybersecurity is a rapidly evolving field that continuously presents us with new challenges, these standards will be revised and updated accordingly. In time, these standards will become requirements codified in the Administrative Guide.
SaaS security checklists contain security standards and best practices for SaaS and cloud-based applications. Chief Technology Officers (CTOs), Chief Security Officers (CSOs), and other executive-level decision-makers use these checklists to assess existing SaaS tools the organization uses and evaluate new SaaS solutions being considered.
Other checklist items can include data deletion policies that outline how sensitive data should be stored and when it should be deleted. This could be related to legal requirements, industry standards, or just general security best practices. These policies should be specific and scalable.
A secure SDLC deployment is mostly related to SaaS vendors. These checklists should include action items that pertain to each phase of the development process. This will help your organization perform effective security reviews at each stage.
Putting a strong emphasis on this part of your checklist will help you create a more robust application in terms of security standards. For example, items on this part of the list might involve running code tests before committing changes to a repository.
Once the software is complete, your checklist should also involve secure deployment action items for review. Using dedicated cloud providers like Amazon and Google can make your life easier here, as they typically handle things like data security, segregation, network security, and more.
These are just a handful of issues you need to be aware of. But once you identify the ones that pose the biggest threat to your business, it will be easier to create a SaaS security checklist around those vulnerabilities.
Software-as-a-service (SaaS) is becoming a defining factor of how companies operate and was an enabler of the sweeping transition to remote work that took place in 2020. However, moving data and storing it outside a company network is always a security risk. Read the Tresorit SaaS security checklist to learn about the factors you should consider when choosing a new SaaS provider.
A well-defined SaaS security checklist is a mandatory part of reviewing potential partners and should be considered for two already approved partners (when creating a new integration or connected service). To ensure compliance and safety, legal, GRC, security and IT teams should be involved in the process.
As this checklist shows, a security review is not a quick process. We know this because we conduct them regularly. Why? Because we believe in making security simple, and believe the best way to do that is to offer E2EE storage and only work with providers that meet our security standards.
While E2EE does not cancel out the need for a security review in itself, it fundamentally increases the security of the solution and drastically accelerates the steps a security review has to go through, not only making your team more efficient but even more secure.
We recommend directing your attention to the most demanded SaaS security standards. These are GDPR, PCI DSS, HIPAA/HITECH, NIST 800-171, CIS, SOX, and ISO/IEC 27001. You should check your SaaS solution for compliance with these standards.
Generating backups is an essential part of the SaaS security checklist as it is an unobtrusive safety measure. It takes no time or effort when configured properly. But it is excellent for dealing with business continuity and disaster recovery.
If a breach occurs, how does your supplier identify that? Do they have the capacity to investigate any illegal activity or intrusions? Can your contract enforce liability on the other party if the breach is caused by sheer negligence of your service provider's security services?
You will need to organize and launch security awareness campaigns for users in your organization to prevent security mishaps. If end users are not provided with the proper awareness about security mishaps in the cloud, they may become the point of entry for security threats and act as risk magnets.
The absence of a formal security awareness program for all users of a SaaS application can result in your data being exposed to many security risks, like social engineering attacks, phishing scams, accidental leaks of confidential data, and more.
Instead of waiting for SaaS providers to offer security training sessions, your organization should take charge of end-user training in cloud security. In addition, your internal security team must provide baseline training for everyone before they start using the application.
A solid SaaS security checklist will help you determine whether or not your cloud service provider can be trusted. It inserts a security checkpoint in the SaaS buying process, allowing you to assess your company's security needs and identify whether the supplier can fulfill expectations properly. In addition, this checkpoint prevents future surprises as you review cloud service providers thoroughly before using the system itself.
Today, many resources are available to help SaaS users create information security policies and guidelines. Even if you do not have a dedicated cloud security team, you must develop basic policies and supporting standards to guide your users when using a SaaS application.
As the SaaS stack promises to be ever-growing, businesses need to take a particular interest in their security measures to prevent expensive infosec blunders. Of course, you can have excellent SaaS security checklists, impressive risk assessment processes, and enlightened end users. Still, if you fail to adapt to the ever-changing security landscape, all your hard work will go down the drain.
Security collaboration is important because it gives an additional layer of security protection for SaaS buying, but it also gives your tech teams a chance to plan resources appropriately for any SaaS implementation and deployment requirements.
A SaaS supplier may not have security policies that meet every one of your internal security requirements, but this questionnaire allows your company to review its security best practices at a higher level.
Finding out how security-aware your team is a good foundation for a SaaS security audit. This can also help you decide whether you need to conduct specialized security awareness sessions for your employees.
Your code is one of the most important facets of your security, so make sure to assess it during your SaaS security audit. Secure code definitely helps in taking your security to the next level. By shifting the security earlier to the development stage, you can easily detect potential vulnerabilities or weaknesses in your applications early in the life cycle, and build a secure application.