Considering a SaaS security posture management (SSPM) solution? Learn how Nudge Security can help you gain visibility and control of your SaaS security posture without the limitations of SSPM.
Nudge Security is a perimeterless SaaS security and governance platform for distributed, cloud-first organizations. Our patented approach to SaaS discovery provides visibility of all cloud and SaaS assets, including historical, off-network, and unmanaged SaaS use.
Automated workflows and purpose-built playbooks make SaaS governance at scale a breeze by orchestrating and distributing admin work to the business units and individuals who manage SaaS apps day to day.
Nudge Security uses modern principles of behavioral psychology to work with employees—not against them—guiding them toward safe, compliant SaaS use without disrupting the pace of productivity.
SaaS security posture management (SSPM) describes the processes and technologies used to ensure that enterprise SaaS applications are continuously adopted, configured, and used in highly secure, compliant ways to satisfy an organization’s needs and policies.
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SSPM solutions commonly address SaaS access controls, misconfigurations, compliance risks, insider threat detection, and data loss prevention. While standalone SSPM vendors have emerged in recent years, mature CASB and SASE vendors also now offer SSPM capabilities as a feature set within a larger security service edge solution.
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Sample standalone SSPM vendors include Adaptive Shield, AppOmni, DoControl, and Obsidian.
Nudge Security
True shadow SaaS discovery. Our patented approach offers unrivaled visibility of all unsanctioned SaaS use within minutes of activation.
Nudge Security
32,000+ unique SaaS apps used by our customers—that’s what we’ve discovered to date. No API-based solution can match the scale of our SaaS security coverage.
Nudge Security
Our scalable, lightweight approach aligns to the reality of how SaaS apps are configured and managed, which often requires real human decision-making.
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Nudge Security
Engage SaaS owners and users to adopt the tech they need safely and in compliance with your policies—without disrupting productivity.
Nudge Security
Satisfy all your SaaS governance needs across security, IT, operations, legal, and finance on one central platform at a comparable cost to SSPM.
SSPM
Peer behind the marketing claims and you’ll learn that “shadow SaaS” discovery with an SSPM is limited to the apps you already know about.
SSPM
Dozens to hundreds of APIs for select enterprise SaaS apps. Coverage for the other thousands of apps in your estate, like emerging AI tools? You’ll need to fill out an integration request form online.
SSPM
Highly permissive access is required to write / delete data in your business-critical SaaS apps. You'll have to build complex workflows to automate even basic configs.
SSPM
Perpetuate the falsehood that security can and should only be handled by a small group of overextended security pros working behind the scenes.
SSPM
Waste time and money reconciling SaaS asset inventories and operations across multiple, redundant solutions purpose-built for SaaS security vs. HR vs. finance vs. compliance.
SSPMs suffer the same design flaw as CASBs and SPMs: they start in the middle of the problem. Before you can realize any value from an SSPM solution, you must first (1) know what SaaS applications are being used in your organization and (2) connect to each one by API, provided that the vendor supports the integration. This carries the following limitations:
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‍Knowing the unknown
‍First and foremost, most IT and security leaders simply don’t know what all SaaS applications are being used across their organizations. Building a complete SaaS application inventory can take weeks to months of mining network traffic logs, expense reports, or Slack threads to uncover unknown and unsanctioned SaaS use. And yet still, blind spots remain.
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‍The narrow scope of your SSPM
‍Even if you had a complete list of all your SaaS applications, an SSPM solution is likely to only support a small fraction of them. That’s because SSPM solutions rely on a direct API integration with each SaaS application in order to monitor events, users, and activities within that SaaS environment, not unlike the approach a modern SIEM takes in order to ingest user activity logs from SaaS applications. This not only creates a significant amount of upfront integration work, delaying any return on investment, but it also means that your SaaS security posture management can only extend as far as any given SSPM vendor’s set of available APIs. What’s more, the automated configuration management features of SSPM require highly permissive access to your business-critical SaaS applications, effectively giving a third party startup the keys to your SaaS kingdom.
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‍Gaps in your SaaS security
‍Look at any SSPM vendor website and you’ll find a finite list of a dozen or perhaps even 130 supported SaaS applications, often including Microsoft 365, Google Workspaces, Salesforce, Workday, and other high-profile enterprise SaaS applications. A simple request form acts as a catch-all for the other tens of thousands of possible B2B SaaS applications your workforce may actually be using. New and novel SaaS applications, such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, go unsupported for months after market availability, leaving critical gaps in your SaaS security posture.
The ultimate vision and promise of SSPM is to create a federated system of SaaS configuration management, with flexible, automated workflows that effortlessly eliminate permission drift and prevent data loss across your entire SaaS estate without end user interference. This is a pipe dream.
SaaS security configurations are too varied by application and SaaS administration is too decentralized to fully automate. The head of marketing administers Hubspot and allocates seats to sales and marketing folks as needed. UX owns your Figma instance and the product prototypes in it. The first person to experiment with Notion now acts as the technical contact for your organization’s Wiki, but didn’t budget for Business edition that supports SAML SSO. These non-IT SaaS admins must make highly contextual, highly dynamic decisions about who and what can access these apps and how, often without consulting their IT or security counterparts.
Using an API-based approach, there’s no feasible way to automate away all of the human decision-making involved in SaaS governance and security, and certainly not across the tens of thousands of B2B SaaS applications used today.
Fortunately, with Nudge Security, you don’t have to.
Instead of trying to eliminate the “human in the loop”, Nudge Security harnesses the human intelligence of your workforce for SaaS governance and security. This not only enables an infinitely scalable solution, but it also offers the benefits of influencing positive security behaviors and promoting an organizational culture of transparency and personal responsibility.
By avoiding the diminishing returns of an API-based approach, Nudge Security offers a near-immediate time to value with every setup, and is able to discover and inventory the full extent of your SaaS estate—including both known and unknown applications. Discover the advantages of Nudge Security:
