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 applications such as Salesforce, Slack, or Office365.  

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

A limitation of standalone SSPM products is that they support a discrete set of applications.  Companies may find that their SSPM may not support all the SaaS applications they want to monitor.  Or they may not have the integrations necessary to address the configuration or use cases that need to be addressed. Some SSPMs include a shadow SaaS discovery feature, but these are often noisy and not effective. 

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

Related Blog Posts

SaaS Security Posture Starts with Grip

SSPM vs. SSCP: Why SSPM Is Not Enough for SaaS Security

FAQ: SaaS Security Posture Management (SSPM)