Is Savvy an SSPM?

Savvy Security vs. SSPM Solutions: Understanding the Key Differences

What is SSPM?

SSPM (SaaS Security Posture Management) tools are designed to monitor and manage the configuration and compliance of SaaS apps within an organization. These tools help ensure that SaaS apps are correctly set up to minimize security risks and that they comply with relevant regulations. SSPM solutions offer great value by focusing on application-level security, assisting organizations in managing their SaaS environment and maintaining compliance through API-based integrations.

What is Savvy Security?

Savvy, on the other hand, takes a more holistic approach to SaaS security. It focuses on identity security, specifically addressing the risks associated with decentralized SaaS adoption. Savvy’s automation playbooks, just-in-time security guardrails, and zero-touch integrations ensure real-time discovery and remediation of identity risks. By guiding users at scale towards proper credential hygiene, Savvy plays a pivotal role in preventing toxic combinations of risk, such as MFA misconfigurations, unmanaged accounts and SSO bypasses.

The Key Differences: Savvy vs. SSPM

While both solutions help secure SaaS environments, they differ in their scope and approach. SSPM tools monitor SaaS configurations and compliance, whereas Savvy takes an identity-first approach, focusing on users’ actions and access to SaaS apps, offering more comprehensive visibility into potential security gaps and identity blind spots.

SSO Bypass Detection

• Savvy Advantage: Savvy provides real-time detection of SSO bypass events, utilizing its integration with Identity Providers (IdPs) and monitoring login activity via browser extensions and email APIs. This ensures that even when users bypass the organization’s SSO portal, Savvy can identify these logins and flag them for security review.
• SSPM Approach: SSPM tools rely on API access to SaaS apps for login data. If an app doesn’t log or expose SSO bypass events via its API, SSPM tools might miss critical security risks. While SSPM tools are effective at monitoring managed apps, they lack visibility when users bypass SSO configurations outside of the platform’s reach.

Toxic Combinations of Risk

• Savvy Advantage: Savvy continuously discovers unmanaged SaaS accounts in real time, detecting risky behaviors such as accounts with compromised credentials and without MFA or privileged access in unsanctioned apps. This allows organizations to proactively address shadow IT and other potential security gaps before they lead to breaches.
• SSPM Approach: SSPM tools monitor managed apps but are often limited to what IT has integrated. This can leave shadow IT and unmanaged accounts undetected unless discovered through manual processes. SSPM tools typically focus on ensuring compliance and secure configuration within known apps but may not catch identity hygiene issues like compromised, weak, reused, or shared passwords or lack of MFA across all accounts.

Zero-Touch Integrations

• Savvy Advantage: Savvy’s patented zero-touch technology enables automatic discovery and monitoring of SaaS apps without requiring manual configuration or API integration for each one. This makes Savvy a highly scalable solution for rapidly evolving SaaS environments.
• SSPM Approach: SSPM tools rely on API-based connectors to integrate with SaaS applications. While effective for managed apps, this approach requires manual setup and ongoing maintenance. SSPM tools can face challenges scaling in fast-growing environments, where new apps are frequently introduced.

App-to-App Integrations

• Savvy Advantage: Savvy tracks and monitors app-to-app integrations, ensuring organizations have visibility into how SaaS apps share data and communicate with each other. This proactive monitoring helps identify risky or unapproved app connections that could lead to data exposure.
• SSPM Approach: SSPM tools can monitor app-to-app integrations, but they depend on API access. If an app doesn’t provide detailed data on its connections, SSPM tools may miss these interactions, leaving gaps in monitoring.

Automated Offboarding

• Savvy Advantage: With Savvy’s automated offboarding capabilities, organizations can eliminate orphaned accounts across all apps. Savvy’s zero-touch integrations ensure that offboarding is comprehensive, even in environments with decentralized SaaS adoption.
• SSPM Approach: While SSPM tools assist with offboarding, their capabilities are limited to managed apps with API access. Manual intervention is often required for certain applications, which can increase the risk of error and leaving orphaned accounts behind.

Deployment

For SaaS security, the speed and efficiency of tool deployment play pivotal roles in an organization’s ability to quickly adapt and protect its digital assets. Traditional SSPM tools, however, often face challenges in this regard. Deploying these tools can be a lengthy process, taking anywhere from a few weeks to several months. This extended timeframe is typically due to the complexity of the environment, the need for integrations with existing systems, extensive data collection, and varying levels of vendor support. Such prolonged deployments can delay critical security measures, leaving organizations vulnerable and hindering their agility in responding to emerging threats.

Contrastingly, Savvy Security offers a significantly expedited deployment process that addresses these challenges head-on. With Savvy, organizations can start uncovering potential threats within minutes of initiation. The rapid deployment capability of Savvy involves:

• A comprehensive scan of your Identity Provider (IdP) that is completed in just 15 minutes.
• An analysis of emails that can be done within 2 to 24 hours, depending on volume.
• A full browser extension assessment that produces meaningful insights in just a few days.

Importantly, this swift deployment is achieved without installing agents, rerouting traffic, or decrypting SSL, which are common requirements with traditional SaaS Security tools that can add complexity and risk.

This streamlined deployment process reduces the initial setup time and allows organizations to quickly achieve a proactive and responsive security posture. By minimizing the deployment interval, Savvy ensures that organizations can rapidly adapt to the ever-evolving security landscape, effectively safeguarding their SaaS environments against potential threats with minimal disruption to their operations. 

The Bottom Line: Different Tools for Different Needs

Both SSPM tools and Savvy offer essential functionality to secure SaaS environments, but they address different aspects of the challenge. Savvy consistently outperforms traditional SSPM tools in critical areas like user-guided remediation of identity hygiene issues, detecting SSO bypass, identifying toxic unmanaged SaaS accounts, monitoring app-to-app connections, automating offboarding, and delivering seamless Zero-Touch Integrations for simplified governance. SSPM tools rely heavily on APIs, making it impossible to cover all managed apps and creating security gaps. In contrast, Savvy’s Zero-Touch technology ensures comprehensive, automatic coverage, making it the superior choice for dynamic, fast-growing SaaS environments.

• SSPM Tools: Focus on SaaS app configurations, compliance, and security posture management. These tools are excellent for ensuring that apps are set up correctly and for identifying configuration issues that could lead to compliance violations or security gaps.
• Savvy Identity-First Security: Prioritizes identity and access management, detecting and remediating risks like SSO bypass, unmanaged accounts, and app-to-app integration vulnerabilities. Savvy ensures that users maintain proper security hygiene across all SaaS usage and offers automated solutions for offboarding, making it ideal for dynamic environments where new apps and risks are constantly emerging.

While SSPM tools remain important for managing the security posture of SaaS apps, Savvy goes a step further by discovering every app in use and addressing identity risks that can often go undetected, providing comprehensive coverage with minimal manual effort.