Nudge Security vs. SSPM Tools

The SSPM challenge

API-based SSPM can’t keep pace with modern SaaS and AI adoption

Your security posture now extends far beyond a handful of core apps. Employees can grant third-party access, create unmanaged accounts, enable AI features, or misconfigure security settings without IT awareness—and most of these risks are invisible to traditional security tools.

Traditional 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 and AI apps 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
Most IT and security teams don’t have a complete view of the SaaS and AI tools in use across their organization. Employees sign up for new apps daily, enable embedded AI features, connect third-party tools, and create additional tenants outside of procurement or SSO. Building an accurate inventory often requires weeks or months of piecing together network logs, expense data, and anecdotal evidence—and even then, blind spots remain. Shadow SaaS and shadow AI aren’t edge cases anymore; they’re the norm.
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‍The narrow scope of your SSPM
Even if you had a complete list of all your SaaS and AI apps, 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 app 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 apps. 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 apps, effectively giving a third party startup the keys to your SaaS kingdom.

Growing gaps in your SaaS security
Look at any SSPM vendor website and you’ll find a finite list of a dozen or perhaps even a hundred or so supported SaaS apps, often including Microsoft 365, Google Workspaces, Salesforce, Workday, and other high-profile enterprise SaaS apps. A simple request form acts as a catch-all for the other tens of thousands of possible B2B SaaS apps your workforce may actually be using. New and novel SaaS apps, such as emerging GenAI apps, go unsupported for months after market availability, leaving critical gaps in your SaaS security posture.

Dispelling the SSPM pipe dream

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 app and SaaS administration is too decentralized to fully automate. The head of marketing operations 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 only 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 apps used today.

Fortunately, with Nudge Security, you don’t have to.