In today’s fast-paced digital world, businesses rely on Software as a Service (SaaS) more than ever to drive productivity and innovation. While these apps offer flexibility and scalability, they also introduce new identity security challenges. Traditional identity and access management (IAM) systems and processes struggle to keep up with the rapid pace of decentralized SaaS adoption, leading to visibility gaps and security vulnerabilities.
Zero-touch integrations (ZTIs) are a game-changer in this modern IT landscape. By eliminating the need for manual setup and providing seamless integration with existing IAM infrastructures, ZTIs enable organizations to gain unprecedented control over their SaaS environments. This blog will explore how ZTIs can help organizations modernize identity strategies, address SaaS security challenges, and support new IT adoption models.
Challenges in Identity and Access Management
As industry trends like digital transformation projects, remote work, and federated IT ownership have become more popular, identity and access management has become more critical and complex. Traditional IAM tools, once sufficient for managing on-premises applications, now face significant limitations in the SaaS era.
Visibility: One of the biggest challenges is maintaining visibility for all apps and identities. When departments and individual employees implement their tech solutions, it often leads to shadow IT that bypasses official oversight. This makes tracking and managing user identities and access rights across various systems challenging. Without oversight, there’s no visibility to the identity hygiene issues these apps may harbor.
Complexity: The number of SaaS and other web apps in use has increased dramatically over the past decade. As IAM teams work to track user access, enforce security policies, and ensure compliance, the sheer volume and implementation differences across these disparate systems lead to massive complexity issues. IAM teams must contend with inconsistent identity data, multiple authentication mechanisms, and differences in app security capabilities.
\Incomplete Offboarding: Ensuring user accounts are appropriately de-provisioned when employees leave the organization is crucial. Without proper SaaS governance, however, shadow accounts are invisible and makes offboarding impossible. Even with the necessary visibility, traditional IAM tools often lack the automation needed to offboard effectively, leaving dormant accounts active for months or years, creating a hidden attack surface that malicious actors can exploit.
Tech Debt: IAM tech debt can reduce the effectiveness of the IAM team and organization-wide security controls. For example, even when teams gain knowledge that a SaaS app is in use, the traditional method of gaining visibility and control requires them to integrate with the app via server-side APIs. This requires knowledge of who the app admin is, obtaining administrative access, and gaining proficiency with the app. As the volume of active apps increases, the tech debt of integration requests piles up. This backlog means that even if you know about an app, you’re stuck waiting for someone on your team to integrate it to gain visibility. It also leads teams to prioritize mission-critical apps for integration while the jungle of SaaS Sprawl grows unchecked.
Zero-Touch Integrations: All-New Levels of Visibility and Control
Savvy empowers businesses to seamlessly integrate and secure all their SaaS apps, sanctioned or unsanctioned, without manual setup or app expertise. ZTIs introduce visibility and control that simply wasn’t possible before, shortening time to visibility, eliminating volumes of tech debt, and driving down SaaS identity risk.
The patent-pending approach leverages existing client-side sessions to eliminate the need for manual server-side configuration. With Savvy’s ZTIs, you get visibility and control to better govern SaaS, improve identity hygiene, and eliminate the toxic combinations of risk that leads to security incidents.
See a 90-second demo of Savvy in action below.
Augment IAM tools with Savvy
Savvy is designed to complement existing IAM tools, like SSO, MFA, IGA, PAM, and others. With technologies like ZTIs, Savvy helps to improve your discovery of apps and identity hygiene issues. With Savvy, teams can quickly resolve accounts not protected by SSO, unmanaged privileged access, dormant and stale accounts, and rogue tenants, as well as ensure consistent and continuous security controls are in place.
Real-Time Detection: Savvy leverages multiple data telemetry sources to maximize detection, and its browser extension enables it to identify identity hygiene issues, app-to-app connections, and toxic combinations of risk in real time.
Just-in-Time Security Guardrails: Operating in real-time allows Savvy to interact with users in critical moments of decision, guiding users toward proper security hygiene and preventing incidents.
Automated Workflows: Savvy also goes beyond detection and drives automated offboarding and issue remediation using prebuilt playbooks that can easily be customized with its no-code editor.
By streamlining processes like user provisioning and de-provisioning, Savvy ensures timely and secure access, reducing the burden on IT teams and improving overall security posture.
The Future of Identity Security
As the digital landscape continues to evolve, several trends are shaping the future of identity security.
Identity Hygiene: As a key strategy for reducing risk, focusing on identity hygiene ensures that identities are properly managed, updated, and secured. This practice is becoming increasingly important as organizations strive to protect sensitive information and maintain compliance.
Identity-First Security: IAM has become the only perimeter for many SaaS apps, driving IAM strategy to become more integral to an organization’s overall security strategy.
IAM teams reorganized: It’s no surprise to see teams reorganizing to model identity’s growing importance. IAM teams are increasingly moving under the CISO or even gaining a C-level seat of their own.
SaaS Governance: A new generation of tools, like Savvy, has emerged to extend the value of Identity Governance and Administration (IGA) investments. These tools provide the necessary visibility without adding layers of complexity or increasing IAM tech debt, enabling organizations to manage their SaaS environments more effectively.
Next Steps
Savvy Zero-Touch Integrations represent a pivotal advancement in identity security, offering modern strategies that align with the demands of the SaaS era. By embracing Savvy ZTIs, organizations can achieve unparalleled visibility, streamline IAM processes, and protect against emerging threats.
To learn more about how ZTIs can transform your identity security strategy, join our upcoming webinar and take the first step toward a more secure and efficient future.
