What is SaaS Security Posture Management (SSPM)?

SaaS Security Posture Management (SSPM) is a category of products that continuously evaluate, measure, and help remediate risks in a SaaS application. SSPM has become important as companies continue to adopt SaaS, and they become a more common attack vector. When monitoring SaaS applications, these products identify risks such as misconfigurations, dormant user accounts, compliance risks, and privileges based on user profiles. SSPM products focus on specific SaaS application such as Salesforce, Slack, or Office365.

SaaS security posture is becoming more important for modern security because companies are relying more and more on SaaS applications for everything from sales, marketing, and finance. Understanding whether a system is prepared to mitigate attacks is critical to a company’s security and compliance initiatives.

Some limitations of SSPM products are that they support a discrete set of applications. Companies may find that their SSPM may not support all the SaaS applications they would like to monitor. Another limitation is that SSPM does not help in discovering all the SaaS used in a company or monitoring for new SaaS applications that are being used in the company.

To overcome these limitations, SSPM products are best combined with a SaaS Security Control Plane (SSCP) product. The combination of these two products can help companies implement a holistic SaaS security program.