Over the last few years, Software-as-a-Service adoption in the enterprise morphed from a slow trickle to a deluge. According to Gartner research (registration required), the average organization uses between 600 and 1,000 SaaS apps – but most IT departments have insight into just 7% of them. The other 93% fall into the category of Shadow IT. This app explosion combined with IT teams’ inability to track it has created a perfect storm of cybersecurity vulnerabilities that jeopardize organizations and their customers.
Rogue SaaS adoption invites a host of risks, from unprotected corporate data, including personally identifiable employee or client information, payment card details and intellectual property, to wasted IT spend on unused SaaS subscriptions. And when the IT department has a SaaS blind spot, it may fail to catch instances of regulatory noncompliance, or revoke app permissions when an employee leaves the company.
Each month, new SaaS vendors emerge to capitalize on user demand for apps that meet the needs of a particular industry, organizational role, or use case. The more employees procure SaaS apps themselves, the more third parties gain access into organizations’ data. The perfect storm becomes a SaaS tsunami.
Yet, despite these threats, there is an upside to this phenomenon. In most cases, the intentions behind employees’ unsanctioned app usage are good; they crave resources that help them work faster, smarter, and more collaboratively. Organizations that ignore the SaaS tsunami will likely get swept up by its force but those that take action have an opportunity to not only avoid a crisis, but unlock business value.
With the emergence of cloud identity and access management solutions from a handful of vendors (including OneLogin), organizations don’t have to choose between security and productivity. Here are four concrete steps business and IT security leaders can take to ride out the storm:
Successfully making it through the SaaS tsunami isn’t a zero-sum game. With the right strategy, businesses can wind up stronger than when they started.
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