Comparison: Nudge Security vs. SSPM

The SSPM challenge

A very long tail of unmanaged SaaS apps

SSPMs suffer the same design flaw as CASBs and SPMs: they start in the middle of the problem. Before you can realize any value from an SSPM solution, you must first (1) know what SaaS applications are being used in your organization and (2) connect to each one by API, provided that the vendor supports the integration. This carries the following limitations:

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‍Knowing the unknownFirst and foremost, most IT and security leaders simply don’t know what all SaaS applications are being used across their organizations. Building a complete SaaS application inventory can take weeks to months of mining network traffic logs, expense reports, or Slack threads to uncover unknown and unsanctioned SaaS use. And yet still, blind spots remain.‍

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‍The narrow scope of your SSPMEven if you had a complete list of all your SaaS applications, an SSPM solution is likely to only support a small fraction of them. That’s because SSPM solutions rely on a direct API integration with each SaaS application in order to monitor events, users, and activities within that SaaS environment, not unlike the approach a modern SIEM takes in order to ingest user activity logs from SaaS applications. This not only creates a significant amount of upfront integration work, delaying any return on investment, but it also means that your SaaS security posture management can only extend as far as any given SSPM vendor’s set of available APIs. What’s more, the automated configuration management features of SSPM require highly permissive access to your business-critical SaaS applications, effectively giving a third party startup the keys to your SaaS kingdom.‍

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‍Gaps in your SaaS securityLook at any SSPM vendor website and you’ll find a finite list of a dozen or perhaps even 130 supported SaaS applications, often including Microsoft 365, Google Workspaces, Salesforce, Workday, and other high-profile enterprise SaaS applications. A simple request form acts as a catch-all for the other tens of thousands of possible B2B SaaS applications your workforce may actually be using. New and novel SaaS applications, such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, go unsupported for months after market availability, leaving critical gaps in your SaaS security posture.‍

Dispelling the SSPM pipe dream

The ultimate vision and promise of SSPM is to create a federated system of SaaS configuration management, with flexible, automated workflows that effortlessly eliminate permission drift and prevent data loss across your entire SaaS estate without end user interference. This is a pipe dream.

SaaS security configurations are too varied by application and SaaS administration is too decentralized to fully automate. The head of marketing administers Hubspot and allocates seats to sales and marketing folks as needed. UX owns your Figma instance and the product prototypes in it. The first person to experiment with Notion now acts as the technical contact for your organization’s Wiki, but didn’t budget for Business edition that supports SAML SSO. These non-IT SaaS admins must make highly contextual, highly dynamic decisions about who and what can access these apps and how, often without consulting their IT or security counterparts.

Using an API-based approach, there’s no feasible way to automate away all of the human decision-making involved in SaaS governance and security, and certainly not across the tens of thousands of B2B SaaS applications used today.

Fortunately, with Nudge Security, you don’t have to.

Discovertrue shadow SaaS discovery.

Manage and secure 100% of your SaaS estate—not just the 1%.

Engage your workforce in smart SaaS governance.