8 Ways To Secure Your SAAS Application

Software as a service (or SaaS) is a way of delivering applications over the Internet—as a service. Instead of installing and maintaining software, you simply access it via the Internet, freeing yourself from complex software and hardware management.

Now more than ever, software as a service (SaaS) applications not only enable communication and collaboration, but are also a lifeline for the remote workforce and help organizations effectively manage internal operations, advance and deliver faster than the competition. Greater customer value.

SaaS environments are becoming an attractive target for cybercriminals as businesses store large amounts of confidential data in SaaS applications, including payment card data and personally identifiable information (PII), as well as business activities such as financial transactions, records, and more. Therefore, businesses need to secure SaaS applications to protect their customers’ data from cyber criminals and not become a target for cyberattacks. We must implement high-level security practices to adequately protect SaaS applications. Let’s look at some best practices for securing SaaS applications.

How to Secure SaaS Applications?

Validation, continuous monitoring and auditing of SaaS vendors

Choosing your SaaS providers carefully is one of the important ways to meet the challenge of ‘how to secure SaaS applications’ now and in the future. Take your time rigorously and thoroughly to track down the vendor, and understand the safety procedures and regulations. Don’t compromise on compliance certifications like PCI-DSS and GDPR. These certifications let you know that the SaaS provider has invested in security.

But don’t stop with a one-time check of SaaS providers. Continuously monitor and regularly audit to ensure the highest security standards are maintained amid rapid change.

Create a security review checklist:

By creating a security checklist, you can quickly assess your current SaaS security needs. That way, you can periodically review and update your checklist with new security-related issues or risks; This will help prioritize application security and quality.

Stronger Authentication

As organizations deploy more SaaS applications, login credentials are lucrative targets for attackers, and passwords are no longer sufficient to authenticate users. More robust authentication measures are necessary, including strong passwords, multi-factor authentication, single sign-on, etc.

Data encryption

Implement data encryption techniques to guarantee the security of your SaaS application. Data encryption protects both data at rest and in transit from unauthorized users. Malicious hackers cannot decrypt encrypted data without encryption keys. SaaS applications typically use Transport Layer Security (TLS) to protect data during transmission.

Educate employees

Provide security training to educate your employees about current threats and how to avoid common phishing, vishing, cross-site scripting, and other attacks to protect their SaaS applications. Educate your employees on thorough zero-trust policies, data loss prevention (DLP) technology, and identity and access management (IAM) practices to keep them and their SaaS applications secure. Employees can easily combat various malicious hacking techniques through security awareness training.

Incorporate real-time protection into your SaaS applications:

Incorporating real-time monitoring into your SaaS applications increases the visibility, control, policy management, and compliance of your SaaS applications and protects your data from exploitation. Real-time monitoring protects your SaaS applications from attacks such as cross-site scripting, SQL injections, and account takeover. You can incorporate real-time security technologies during the development phase, enabling you to quickly detect attacks and take action to mitigate SaaS security issues.

Stringent Access Controls

Strict access controls based on principles of least privileges should be implemented for superior SaaS security. This helps segregate users and ensure they only have access to the data required for their roles in the organization. This makes it easy to monitor user-level data security.

Stay up to date

Use a central identity provider to manage user authentication for application provisioning and de-provisioning, so that SaaS console access is automatically removed when an employee leaves the organization or his role changes within the organization. This is critical so that users don’t continue to access cloud services they don’t use or need. It is a best practice to enforce least privilege, where all identities have only the minimum qualifications required to perform their current responsibilities and make it difficult for attackers to escalate privileges.

Conclusion

SaaS is the most popular software delivery model because it’s convenient and cost-effective. However, given that SaaS applications are cloud-based, the security of SaaS applications becomes the main concern. SaaS providers store lots of customer data so they are a perfect target for hackers. Follow our simple advice to stay focused on security and to prevent possible attacks before they occur.

Fortunately, this issue is not insurmountable, and solutions exist to manage this risk. Smarteer’s automated data store inventory and data flow audits provide a method of preventing the loss of exposed SaaS data and mitigating the risk of a ransomware attack. In addition, the Company provides a solid means of avoiding compliance violations.

Do you want to build a highly secure SaaS solution?

Talk to Smarteer SaaS experts and learn how to quickly bring your idea to reality.