Massive Adoption of SaaS and Cloud Services Lead to Bigger Security Challenges

The global revenue from SaaS and Cloud services market is projected to grow by 6.3% in 2020, according to Gartner. The SaaS and Cloud services economy is so volatile currently that it is hard to exactly pinpoint to the factors attributing to this kind of growth. Experts from the cloud and software DevOps industry point to the growing demands for Virtualized IT and Data management platforms, end-point security and storage, containerization, AIOps, and Security Ops as only some of the most important drivers for the market. However, with companies switching their global operations to remote workplace management, Cloud and SaaS services companies have a big challenge to tackle in the middle of an ongoing pandemic — the growing security concerns targeting Cloud and SaaS services.

According to a recent survey by AppOmni,  the security concerns of cloud SaaS applications have become more essential for enabling remote workers. More than 200 IT security professionals were surveyed, and two-thirds (66%) of organizations believe that their enterprise public SaaS application, above all others, would cause the greatest disruption to their business should there be an outage.

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AppOmni is a leading provider of SaaS Security Posture Management (SSPM).

At the time of this announcement, Brendan O’Connor, CEO, AppOmni said- “Due to COVID-19, IT teams are struggling to keep up with massive changes to day-to-day operations and the accelerated rate of cloud adoption associated with a remote and virtual workforce. This highlights the need for companies to work to better secure their current SaaS applications given that 90 percent of the respondents we surveyed noted that their usage of SaaS applications has increased in adoption since the beginning of the pandemic.”

Additional key findings include:

• 93% of respondents have received more responsibilities due to COVID-19;
• 66% of respondents experienced reduced time to spend on management and security of SaaS due to the shift to remote work;
• 68% of respondents rely on manual efforts to detect data exposures.

COVID-19 has led enterprises to fast-track their adoption of remote work technologies. Leveraging SaaS to enable this transition allows enterprises to overcome the hurdles associated with the traditional method of business operations. With an increase in the adoption of SaaS applications, the focus on managing and securing these applications is critical.

AppOmni’s study found that more than 90 percent of those surveyed have recently received additional responsibilities and two-thirds have less time to effectively manage and secure SaaS applications. Additionally, 68 percent of respondents rely solely on manual efforts to detect data exposures. This is not a realistic approach as it is not practical or cost-effective to staff up enough resources to have in-house experts across all critical SaaS applications.

A majority of respondents (52%) stated that their biggest challenge with existing cloud security solutions is their reactive nature. These solutions only alert security teams of a problem when an incident has already been detected rather than a proactive solution identifying data exposures before they can manifest into an incident.

“These days, more organizations are investing in preventative solutions and gaining visibility into their cloud attack surface than ever before,” continued O’Connor. “Even post COVID-19, businesses will need to offer remote work opportunities to stay competitive. Now is the time to implement a hybrid working strategy that includes mission-critical SaaS applications. Companies that wait until it’s too late are going to find themselves behind the curve, making them easy targets for attackers.”

AppOmni Enterprise Essentials secures top SaaS applications enterprises depend on today for day-to-day operations for remote workers. The platform implements guardrails for internal and external users of mission-critical SaaS applications, enabling employees to work productively and securely.