SaaS Security Solutions You Need To Consider

According to studies, data breaches increased by 40% in 2016 and this means that organizations need to rethink their strategy and put security on their priority list. While the previous year didn't go so easy on enterprises, we can probably expect that 2017 will bring some more challenges as well. This is going to the year to analyze all Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solutions to keep business as much secure as possible. Here are a few security components that needs to taken care of as an integral part of SaaS application.

Data Security

In a legacy on-site application deployment model, data continues to remain within the premises, which is conditional to control policies. But that's not the case with SaaS model. Here, the enterprise data resides off-site, at the vendor's location. Thus, the vendor must ensure data security by implementing security features to curb threats via network or through employees with wrong intention. Encryption and fine-grained access control can be the best techniques to implement.

Network Security

In this deployment model, data is acquired from the company, processed by SaaS application and stored at the service provider end. The data that flows overs this network requires protection to avoid security breach. In order to prevent data leakage, vendor needs to implement robust network traffic encryption solutions that includes Secure Socket Layer (SSL) and Transport Layer Security (TLS).

Backup

Backup is an integral part of every security strategy. SaaS vendor need to make sure that data generated is backed up in real-time so that in case of disaster, users can recovery their data quickly and effectively. For additional security, vendors can consider using encryption solutions to secure the backup in order to avoid accidental data damage.

Data Segregation

As application instances and data stores are shared between a range of enterprises in a highly-advanced SaaS infrastructure, it enables the service provider to utilize resources efficiently and reduce overall overhead. Moreover, service provider need to ensure a secure environment always and keep unauthorized access to data of one tenant by users from other tenants. For that purpose, vendors need to consider data and application hardening to ensure data segregation. But if the SaaS application is installed at a third party cloud service provider then there's a need to adopt more security features to make sure that one tenant are not able to gain access to the other tenant's data.