In the IT world, protecting digital information from theft, unauthorized access, and other malicious practices is known as data security.
This concept is broad and encompasses all of your SaaS-reliant business’s security-related details, including how you control access and manage your devices’ physical security.
If properly implemented, SaaS data security strategies can protect your data against cyber attacks. In addition, it offers protection against human errors that can cause data breaches.
What Is Data Security?
As mentioned, it’s a practice that defines how individuals or entities protect their digital information from cybercriminal activities, such as theft, corruption, or unauthorized access.
Besides including all aspects related to key information and hardware or storage devices’ protection, data security also encompasses multiple organizational procedures and policies.
Why Is Data Security Important?
Many now rely on Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) apps to keep their businesses running. Hubspot and Dropbox are some of the most common. However, as more people use them, there are more security risks.
Different companies and brands can leverage all the benefits of the cloud, but SaaS services occur and are delivered online. Therefore, data leaks can happen. In other cases, hackers or cybercriminals can access your sensitive data.
You should have wondered if your cloud provider offers some data security solutions. The short answer is yes. However, most only protect cloud infrastructures in certain areas.
Also, these providers are in the shared responsibility model when it comes to cloud data security. In other words, you must handle endpoint security, access management, identity management, data encryption, and other aspects.
Fortunately, SaaS security best practices can help you protect your business and prevent data leaks from putting your operations at risk.
Whether your business relies on Google Drive, Office 365, Google Drive, or other SaaS apps, these are the best tips to improve your data security level.
#1 Pair Single Sign-On (SSO) with Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA)
SSO solutions are a must-have for SaaS-reliant companies that want to increase their data security level, especially if they have more than five employees.
Duo, Okta, and Microsoft Azure Active Directory (AD) are some of the most common. They all allow you to access your SaaS applications by entering your password or login credentials just once.
In addition, SSO solutions also make enforcing Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) across all online accounts much easier for all businesses. Consequently, it provides an extra level of security that can be crucial for many companies.
#2 Avoid or Manage SaaS Sprawl
The term “SaaS sprawl” defines those situations where businesses use so many SaaS apps that their IT teams and tools cannot manage them efficiently.
Some departments can use up to 60 SaaS solutions, accounting for over 200 apps for the entire company.
However, only 32% of these SaaS apps are IT-approved for most small businesses. Besides wasting money, SaaS sprawl can pose security risks.
If they manage too many SaaS apps, admins won’t have enough time to detect potential issues and solve them. Therefore, identifying security risks is much more difficult, and their sensitive data may be exposed.
Additionally, shadow IT (which refers to SaaS apps that bypass IT’s vetting processes) has been linked with SaaS sprawl.
Therefore, if you want to combat risks and define solid SaaS data security standards, solving SaaS sprawl issues is one of the first things you should do.
In order to tackle SaaS sprawl, you can do the following:
- Audit the SaaS apps your business uses, whether they’re IT-approved or not
- Educate employees about how risky it can be to use unauthorized apps
- Create a consistent vetting process to audit SaaS apps in terms of security and compliance
- Motivate your employees to approach IT experts to find out if the new apps they want to use are reliable
#3 Control Access to SaaS Applications and Manage Identity
Each employee or user has their own permissions and roles regarding access to cloud environments. Since hackers only need credentials to get there, this fact can become a significant risk.
However, businesses with solid and well-structured identity and access management (IAM) policies have better levels of data security.
With strong IAM, you can control the permissions and access that users have to cloud resources. However, if you have misconfigured policies or your credentials are leaked, you can suffer data breaches that greatly affect your business.
In simple terms, IAM is a framework with all the processes, technology, solutions, and policies that will increase your data security.
Some of the best IAM practices include the following:
- Define strict password policies
- Remove dormant accounts
- Control privileged access, giving it only to those who need it
#4 Build a Solid Software Security Edge (SSE)
“Security Service Edge (SSE)” is a term that has become increasingly popular over the past two years. It defines a business’s stack of cloud-based security tools intended to provide secure access to the Internet.
Many businesses also define a Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) to increase their SaaS data center security level.
#5 Don’t Forget the Cloud Malware Scanner
Finally, there’s malware. Since it is difficult to control the activity occurring in and out of SaaS cloud storage repositories, malware can manage to hide and reach the cloud.
Therefore, SaaS-reliant businesses must rely on cloud storage scanning to reduce those risks. As the name implies, this practice is just a way to scan for malware in different apps, including OneDrive or Google Drive.
Most SaaS apps have malware-scanning options, but having a second scanner could give you a much higher data security level. It works as a second line of defense to protect your cloud storage if your primary scanner fails to detect malware infection.
How Spin-ai Can Benefit Your SaaS Data Security
You can find many solutions to take your SaaS data security to the next level, but Spin-ai is one of the best.
It’s an all-in-one platform with everything you need to keep your data protected if your business relies on SaaS apps, such as Google Workspace, Salesforce, Microsoft 365, and more!
Final Thoughts
From poor access management to shadow IT and misconfigurations, different factors can put your data at risk. However, with these five tips, you can guarantee solid data security in SaaS apps and protect your business’s key details.
