What is SSPM?
SaaS security posture management (SSPM) is a toolset designed to secure SaaS apps by identifying misconfigurations, managing permissions, and ensuring regulatory compliance across your organization’s digital estate. SSPM tools don't just monitor; they actively help prevent issues, safeguard sensitive data, and reduce security risks in real time.
Even though SaaS apps power your business, handling everything from sales to customer data, they can also open the door to security risks – (think misconfigured permissions, compliance gaps, and unmonitored access patterns.
According to a Statista report from 2023, 80% of companies were already using or planning to implement SaaS security posture management (SSPM) within the next 18 months to address these risks. In this post, we'll explain how SSPM works, compare it to tools like CSPM and CASB, and explain how platforms like Wiz integrate SSPM capabilities to supercharge your SaaS security.
How does SSPM work to improve SaaS security?
SSPM provides a multi-layered approach to securing SaaS applications, giving you the visibility, control, and flexibility you need to manage cloud-based applications. Here’s a deeper dive into SSPM’s core functions:
Continuous monitoring for real-time security
SSPM solutions are purpose-built to monitor SaaS applications and identify instances of security misconfigurations, excessive privileges, and suspicious behavior. This constant monitoring ensures that security settings stay in line with your organization’'s policies and that any deviations or configuration drifts are flagged immediately, allowing teams to take quick action.
Security gap analysis
Security gap analysis identifies vulnerabilities and misconfigurations across your SaaS applications before they can be exploited. SSPM tools automatically scan for unauthorized changes, policy violations, and security weaknesses.
Advanced SSPM solutions provide automated remediation capabilities. When issues are detected, the system can either fix them automatically or provide step-by-step guidance for manual resolution.
Compliance posture assessment
SSPM solutions monitor SaaS settings for compliance with regulatory standards, comparing current configurations to industry requirements. This makes it easier to prepare for audits and to stay compliant with frameworks like GDPR, CCPA, or PCI DSS.
Alerts and remediation recommendations
When SSPM tools detect an issue, they notify security teams with detailed information on the problem and recommended remediation steps. Alerts are often customizable, allowing you to prioritize the most critical issues.
Dashboards and reporting for centralized management
SSPM tools offer centralized dashboards that overview security posture across all SaaS applications. Dashboards help security teams visualize trends, track remediation progress, and manage your organization’s security posture from a single pane of glass.
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Why SSPM? Key SaaS security challenges
SaaS environments create unique security challenges that traditional security tools struggle to address effectively. Organizations need specialized solutions to manage the complexity and scale of modern SaaS adoption.
SSPM addresses these challenges by providing continuous monitoring and automated remediation across your SaaS landscape. Here are the key security challenges SSPM helps solve:
1.Increased attack surface
Attack surface expansion occurs when each new SaaS application creates additional entry points for potential security threats. Every SaaS tool brings its own security configurations and access controls.
These diverse configurations often conflict with existing security policies. Without centralized management, organizations struggle to maintain consistent security standards across their growing SaaS portfolio.
Example: An employee connects a third-party app to a project management tool without authorization. The app doesn't have strong security protocols, creating a weak point in the organization's otherwise secure network. SSPM tools monitor these connections and integrations, alerting teams about unauthorized access or risky configurations that could compromise security.
2. Misconfigurations
Misconfigured security settings are a major security issue with SaaS applications. Simple configuration mistakes can expose sensitive data, such as granting broad access permissions or not enabling multi-factor authentication (MFA), and with the average cost of a data breach reaching $4.88 million in 2024, the financial stakes are high. SSPM tools continuously check for these misconfigurations, reducing the chance of oversights that could lead to vulnerabilities.
Example: In March 2022, the FBI and CISA issued a warning about a security breach in an NGO's cloud environment, which was caused by a misconfigured account with a default MFA setting. Attackers exploited a vulnerability in Cisco's Duo MFA, highlighting how even large, well-established companies are not immune to breaches.
3. Compliance risks
SaaS applications must often meet regulatory compliance standardslike GDPR, HIPAA, or SOC 2 to ensure the secure handling of sensitive data. But many SaaS applications lack built-in compliance features, making it challenging for organizations to meet these industry requirements. SSPM can assess SaaS applications and their data architecture against regulatory frameworks to spot any compliance gaps.
Example: A healthcare provider relies on a SaaS-based patient management system to store and access patient data. Without appropriate compliance checks, they could be storing patient records non-compliantly. SSPM tools track compliance gaps and help ensure the provider's configuration meets HIPAA standards, reducing the risk of fines or legal action.
4.. Shadow IT
Shadow IT occurs when employees use unauthorized SaaS applications that the IT department hasn't vetted or approved. This creates significant security risks because these tools may lack adequate security or compliance configurations and can go undetected in routine audits. Gartner found that large organizations spend as much as 30–40% of their IT budget on shadow IT.
Example: The marketing team downloads an unapproved analytics tool to measure customer engagement. Without IT's awareness or oversight, this tool could introduce malware, lack proper security features, or expose customer data. Luckily, their SSPM solution monitors the SaaS environment to detect unauthorized applications, helping keep shadow IT in check—a challenge that affects 25% of organizations according to AI Security Readiness: Insights From 100 Cloud Architects, Engineers, And Security Leaders.
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Key benefits of SSPM
Implementing SSPM delivers measurable security improvements across your SaaS environment. Organizations that deploy SSPM solutions gain proactive protection against misconfigurations, streamlined compliance management, and comprehensive visibility into their entire SaaS portfolio. These benefits translate directly into reduced risk, lower operational overhead, and faster response times when security issues arise.
Reduced attack surface
SSPM proactively identifies and helps remediate misconfigurations and excessive permissions in SaaS apps, closing security gaps before they can be exploited. By continuously scanning your SaaS environment, SSPM detects vulnerabilities like publicly accessible sensitive data, overly permissive sharing settings, and accounts with unnecessary administrative privileges.
This proactive approach prevents attackers from exploiting common weaknesses that often go unnoticed in manual security reviews. Instead of discovering misconfigurations after a breach, security teams can address them immediately—often through automated remediation workflows that fix issues within minutes of detection.
The result is a significantly smaller attack surface across your SaaS portfolio. Organizations using SSPM typically reduce their exploitable vulnerabilities by identifying and fixing misconfigurations that would otherwise remain hidden across dozens or hundreds of SaaS applications.
Improved compliance posture
SSPM continuously monitors SaaS environments against regulatory frameworks like GDPR, HIPAA, and SOC 2, which simplifies audit preparation and helps maintain adherence to standards. Rather than conducting periodic compliance checks that provide only point-in-time snapshots, SSPM delivers ongoing validation that your SaaS configurations meet regulatory requirements.
This continuous compliance monitoring eliminates the scramble that typically precedes audits. Security teams can generate compliance reports on demand, demonstrating adherence to specific controls and quickly identifying any gaps that need attention. SSPM tools map your SaaS configurations directly to compliance frameworks, showing exactly which controls are satisfied and which require remediation.
For organizations operating in regulated industries, this capability is invaluable. SSPM reduces the risk of costly compliance violations and failed audits while significantly decreasing the time and resources required to maintain compliance across a growing SaaS environment.
Enhanced visibility and control
SSPM provides a centralized view of all sanctioned and unsanctioned (shadow IT) SaaS applications, giving security teams control over their entire SaaS ecosystem. This unified visibility extends beyond just knowing which applications exist—it includes detailed insights into how they're configured, who has access, what permissions they hold, and how data flows between applications.
Without SSPM, security teams often lack visibility into the full scope of their SaaS environment. Employees adopt new tools independently, creating blind spots that traditional security solutions can't address. SSPM discovers these shadow IT applications and assesses their security posture, bringing them under centralized management.
This comprehensive visibility enables security teams to make informed decisions about SaaS usage, enforce consistent security policies across all applications, and quickly identify risky configurations or access patterns that could indicate a security threat. Organizations gain the control they need to balance productivity with security across their entire SaaS portfolio.
Automated risk detection
SSPM automates the discovery of security gaps, reducing the manual effort required from security teams and allowing them to focus on high-impact risks. Traditional security assessments require significant time and expertise to manually review configurations across multiple SaaS applications—a process that becomes impractical as organizations scale their SaaS adoption.
SSPM solutions continuously scan your SaaS environment, automatically identifying misconfigurations, policy violations, and security weaknesses without human intervention. This automation ensures consistent coverage across all applications and eliminates the risk of human oversight that comes with manual reviews.
By automating routine security checks, SSPM frees security teams to focus on strategic initiatives and complex security challenges that require human expertise. The technology handles the repetitive work of monitoring configurations and detecting anomalies, while security professionals can concentrate on investigating high-priority threats and improving overall security strategy.
Faster remediation
SSPM delivers prioritized alerts with actionable guidance, enabling teams to resolve security issues more quickly and efficiently. When security issues are detected, SSPM tools don't just flag the problem—they provide specific remediation steps, often including the exact configuration changes needed to resolve the issue.
This actionable intelligence dramatically reduces the time between detection and resolution. Security teams no longer need to research how to fix each misconfiguration or determine which issues pose the greatest risk. SSPM solutions prioritize findings based on severity and potential impact, ensuring teams address the most critical vulnerabilities first.
Many SSPM platforms also support automated remediation, where approved fixes are applied automatically without manual intervention. This capability is particularly valuable for addressing common misconfigurations that occur repeatedly across multiple applications, reducing response times from hours or days to minutes.
Core SSPM capabilities and features
SSPM solutions offer a range of functions to secure the SaaS environment. Key capabilities include:
Misconfiguration management: Scans for and identifies security settings that deviate from best practices or organizational policies, such as public-facing sensitive data or disabled MFA.
Identity and access governance: Manages user permissions and roles within SaaS applications to enforce the principle of least privilege and prevent unauthorized access from over-permissioned accounts.
Third-party app management: Discovers and assesses the security of third-party applications that connect to core SaaS platforms, managing risks from integrations that could serve as entry points for attackers.
Compliance monitoring: Maps SaaS configurations to specific controls required by industry and regulatory standards, providing continuous compliance validation and reporting.
Threat detection: Monitors for suspicious user activity or configurations that could indicate a threat, such as unusual data access patterns or privilege escalations.
A comprehensive security strategy integrates these capabilities into a broader platform. For example, Wiz integrates with leading SSPM tools to consolidate security data from across your SaaS environment, creating a unified view of risks and vulnerabilities that might otherwise remain hidden in isolated systems.
SSPM vs. CSPM vs. CASB: Key differences
To understand SSPM's role in cloud security, it’s helpful to explore the differences between SSPM vs. CSPM and CASB. Comparing these solutions shows how SSPM addresses SaaS-specific security needs, while CSPM and CASB focus on broader cloud infrastructure and access control.
SSPM: SaaS security posture management
SSPM, or SaaS security posture management, focuses exclusively on SaaS applications and their unique security requirements. It ensures that SaaS configurations align with security standards by monitoring access, permissions, and compliance across all SaaS tools.
CSPM: Cloud security posture management
CSPM, or cloud security posture management, focuses on securing cloud infrastructure and services. This includes public cloud platforms like AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud. CSPM ensures the security of cloud services such as virtual machines, storage volumes, networking protocols, and serverless functions.
CASB: Cloud access security broker
A CASB, or cloud access security broker, bridges users and cloud services, controlling access to the cloud and protecting data. Its primary focus is access management and safeguarding data as it moves between devices and cloud applications.
While SSPM, CSPM, and CASB each focus on different aspects of cloud security, they all complement each other to provide comprehensive protection. By integrating all three, you can count on a well-rounded security strategy that covers every layer of your cloud ecosystem—creating a more secure, compliant, and resilient environment across the board.
How does Wiz enhance SSPM's capabilities?
Wiz is a cloud security solution that integrates with SSPM tools to bring deeper visibility into the various parts of your organization’'s cloud stack. Here’'s how Wiz works with SSPM to improve SaaS security posture:
Seamless integration: Wiz integrates with leading SSPM tools to consolidate security data from across your SaaS environment, creating a unified view of risks and vulnerabilities that might otherwise remain hidden in isolated systems.
Centralized dashboards for streamlined management: Wiz’'s centralized dashboard consolidates data from multiple SSPM tools, making it easy for teams to monitor security across SaaS applications in real time. This unified view enables security teams to identify and respond to security issues more efficiently.
Automated remediation actions: Automated incident response enables Wiz to immediately address security issues detected by SSPM tools. When misconfigurations or vulnerabilities are identified, Wiz can automatically implement fixes without waiting for manual intervention. This automation reduces response times from hours to minutes while eliminating the risk of human error in critical security situations.
Continuous compliance monitoring: Continuous compliance monitoring ensures your SaaS applications maintain regulatory compliance throughout their entire lifecycle. Wiz automatically identifies non-compliant configurations and provides immediate remediation recommendations or automated fixes.
As organizations adopt more SaaS tools to support their teams and projects, there's a growing need for a structured, consistent security posture. SSPM offers a way to effectively manage these tools, address security gaps, ensure compliance, and control shadow IT.
By implementing SSPM as part of a broader cloud security strategy, you can ensure that all SaaS configurations align with security best practices. Integrating SSPM with advanced tools like Wiz strengthens your approach, giving security teams the tools to monitor, manage, and automate security tasks across your entire SaaS ecosystem.
Ready to learn how Wiz can amplify your SSPM capabilities across code, cloud and runtime with centralized dashboards, continuous monitoring, and automated remediation? Schedule a no-pressure demo today.
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