The Challenge
SaaS misconfigurations can lead to serious risk exposure. Difficult to check and highly variable, they open the door to breaches, unauthorized access, data leakage, lateral movement between SaaS apps and ransomware.
Each SaaS app comes with a range of possible configurations. This is usually a great advantage for administrators to adapt SaaS apps to meet the company’s business needs. On the other hand, the wide scope of configuration options, also creates security risks.
Part of the problem is simply the scale of what the SaaS organizations have. If a company is using hundreds of SaaS apps, and each app has dozens of settings to configure, the result is an environment with hundreds of potential misconfigurations, making manual management a non-realistic option.
Another aspect of the problem is the reliance on default configurations. SaaS vendors, naturally, wish to make the use of their services as easy and smooth as possible. As a result, the default security configurations tend to be more lenient, and if left unchanged, they will pose a security risk for the organization.