For a growing number of enterprises, software-as-a-service (SaaS) has become the primary means of accessing vital business applications. The strategy makes sense from a business standpoint because of the potential benefits: cost savings, increased agility and easier scalability to name a few.
Any cloud-based offering comes with security risks, however. How can an organization know for sure if its SaaS providers’ security provisions are up to its own standards?
“The challenge we have is gaining visibility into what the SaaS vendor is doing to secure their infrastructure, their change management procedures, and incident response process,” says Patrick Hevesi, vice president and analyst at research firm Gartner.
Not all SaaS providers are transparent about their security, according to a 2019 Gartner report. Organizations need to understand both the risk they’re taking by putting important user data in a cloud service and the trust they must place in the provider, the report said.
SaaS providers are vulnerable to many of the same malware and hacking attacks that plague any other organization. These threats can impact companies using the services. Focusing your SaaS provider evaluation process on the following areas will minimize that risk.
