Aug 21, 2024
Aug 21, 2024
Identity Governance and Administration (IGA) solutions play a central role in ensuring that individuals have the appropriate access to resources while maintaining compliance with regulatory requirements. However, despite these tools' strengths, organizations still have SaaS security risks, namely, shadow SaaS.
As organizations increasingly depend on digital tools to drive productivity, managing and securing user access across various applications has become a critical priority. Identity Governance and Administration (IGA) solutions like SailPoint play a central role in this effort, ensuring that individuals have the appropriate access to resources while maintaining compliance with regulatory requirements. However, despite the strengths of these tools, organizations still have SaaS security risks: the growing use of shadow SaaS applications, which can introduce security vulnerabilities and governance challenges.
Traditional IGA solutions excel in managing known, managed applications within an organization. SailPoint especially provides a comprehensive framework for identity governance with capabilities such as access certification, provisioning and deprovisioning, access requests, separation of duties, and more. However, the rapid growth and adoption of SaaS applications, many of which are adopted by employees without the knowledge or oversight of IT departments, has introduced a significant blind spot. This trend, known as shadow IT, poses a serious risk to enterprise security and a major challenge to SaaS governance.
Employees often use shadow SaaS to enhance productivity, but the unmanaged nature of these tools means they bypass the traditional security controls enforced by IGA solutions. This lack of visibility and control increases the risk of data breaches and non-compliance and complicates the organization’s ability to enforce consistent identity governance policies.
While IGA solutions are designed to provide a centralized approach to identity management, they are designed to manage the applications that are known and integrated within their systems. What organizations may not realize is that their IGA solution does not manage the vast landscape of unmanaged SaaS applications that exists across their enterprise—that's just not what IGA solutions were scoped to do.
This gap becomes particularly concerning when considering that the average enterprise uses hundreds, if not thousands, of SaaS applications—many of which may not be sanctioned by the IT department. Without the ability to discover and govern these applications, organizations are exposed to many risks, including unauthorized access, data leaks, and compliance violations from improperly securing access to sensitive data.
Grip and SailPoint have teamed up to effectively manage the risks associated with shadow SaaS applications. This blended approach ensures that, in addition to managed applications, the organization can also govern the wide range of shadow SaaS applications that exist outside the oversight of the IT department.
Integrating Grip with SailPoint significantly extends the organization's capabilities, allowing security teams to discover and bring shadow SaaS applications under control, based on the identities using these applications. Further, by leveraging detailed information such as risk scores, usage patterns, and the application business owner, enterprises can optimize their SailPoint workflows, ensuring that access governance is applied consistently across all applications in the organization’s environment.
Let’s explore further how a blended approach can enhance an identity governance and administration program.
Traditionally, access certifications focus on managed applications, leaving a gap in governance. By incorporating shadow SaaS into these processes, organizations can ensure that all user access is properly reviewed and certified, regardless of whether the application is officially managed by the IT department.
This expanded scope of access certifications not only improves security but also enables scalable management. Business owners of various SaaS applications can be engaged in the certification process, ensuring that access decisions are accurate and based on the most current information. Moreover, the availability of rich metadata—such as asset type, usage, and governance status—allows for more informed certification decisions, further enhancing the security posture of the organization.
Provisioning and deprovisioning ensure that users have the appropriate access to necessary applications when they join an organization and that their access is promptly revoked when they leave. By integrating Grip and SailPoint, organizations gain comprehensive oversight of both managed and unmanaged applications. For example, Grip’s RPA-powered password rotation capabilities allow security teams to revoke access to apps not directly connected to SailPoint or any other identity provisioning tool, ensuring that the deprovisioning process is thorough, efficient, and that no user retains unauthorized access to any application, managed or unmanaged.
Because SaaS environments are constantly changing, enhanced visibility is essential to tracking and responding to new applications and changes, detecting drift and updating risk scores. The bottom line is, with Grip, SailPoint can remediate and revoke access to more apps.
An integrated approach combining identity governance and administration and SaaS identity risk management principles allows for the enhanced security of tens of thousands of SaaS applications, extending the value of your SailPoint investment and providing a stronger SaaS strategy.
Ultimately, this approach not only reduces risk by revoking access to shadow SaaS apps but also future-proofs identity management, ensuring that both current and future applications are protected.
To learn more about Grip and how it extends SailPoint's capabilities, we invite you to book time with our team. Additionally, Grip’s free shadow SaaS assessment will help you answer critical questions such as how many unmanaged apps exist in your SaaS environment, who is using them, and whether any former employees still have access to your SaaS. Book time now.
Gain a complete view of your SaaS usage—including shadow SaaS and rogue cloud accounts—from an identity-centric viewpoint. See how Grip can improve the security of your enterprise.
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