A Guide to SaaS Security Posture Management (SSPM) Solutions for Microsoft 365

SSPM Solutions for Microsoft 365 Summary:

In this article we discuss the importance of SaaS Security Posture Management (SSPM) solutions for protecting mission-critical SaaS applications, with a focus specifically on Microsoft 365. SSPM helps protect M365 data against cyber threats, ensuring compliance, and improving security posture through continuous monitoring, automated threat detection, and remediation.

SSPM Solutions Key Points:

• SSPM helps mitigate cyber threats like ransomware, data breaches, and credential theft by continuously monitoring Microsoft 365 security risks.
• Essential features of an effective SSPM solution include continuous monitoring, automated threat detection, centralized dashboards, real-time alerting, and remediation workflows.
• Choosing the right SSPM tool involves evaluating security needs, features, cost, integrations, and compliance capabilities.
• Leading SSPM solutions include SentinelOne, Cynet, and SpinSPM, with SpinSPM offering AI-powered risk assessments, automated incident response, and granular security controls.
• SpinSPM stands out by providing risk assessments based on a database of 400,000+ apps/extensions, Shadow IT discovery, and advanced posture management, helping businesses secure their Microsoft 365 environments effectively.

In the last three months of 2024, two hacking groups launched numerous cyberattacks against Microsoft 365. Through these incidents, they aimed to deploy ransomware and steal sensitive data from victim organizations. In some cases, they also stole the credentials of some legitimate users to move laterally within affected networks, raising concerns that they may be able to cause further damage on those networks.

Microsoft 365 is a world-class productivity suite that enables users worldwide to optimize their productivity and efficiency. Millions of users leverage this subscription-based platform to work better, collaborate with others, store documents, and “turn ideas into reality”.

These are all important benefits. However, Microsoft 365 also has one crucial drawback – it is not immune to cyberattacks. As the 2024 incidents show, threat actors can exploit weaknesses in the environment to attack organizations and gain unauthorized access to sensitive systems and data. Such incidents can cause untold damage to your organization.

Fortunately, you can avoid such potentially devastating threats. The key is to continuously monitor the security state of your Microsoft 365 cloud environment, identify and assess its risks, and then proactively remediate those risks.

Here’s where SaaS Security Posture Management (SSPM) comes in.

SSPM solutions provide detailed and continuous visibility into the Microsoft 365 platform and all its apps. This will help you to identify and mitigate potential risks, protect sensitive and business-critical data, and ultimately, strengthen your security posture in an expanding threat landscape.

This article will tell you everything you ever wanted to know about SSPM, including:

• What is SSPM
• Key features of effective SSPM solutions
• How to choose the right SSPM solution for your organization

What is SaaS Security Posture Management?

Your company’s security posture refers to its ability to detect and respond to security threats, and to recover from security incidents. Simply put, it indicates overall cybersecurity readiness. A strong posture means an organization that can effectively deal with attacks with minimal damage while a weak posture means exactly the opposite. SaaS security posture refers to the ability of SaaS applications to withstand attacks.

SaaS security posture management or SSPM is an approach to manage and optimize the security posture of SaaS applications like Microsoft 365. SSPM tools automatically and continuously monitor SaaS applications against pre-built policy profiles to detect and track security risks and thus safeguard the organization against data losses, malware, and other threats.

The best tools like SpinSPM leverage advanced technologies like artificial intelligence (AI) to intelligently identify high-risk apps. Through automated threat detection and in-depth risk assessments, they can detect issues that may compromise the security of your Microsoft 365 environment, and increase its susceptibility to cyberattacks. These issues may include:

• Configuration errors that could expose sensitive data to cybersecurity threats like malware
• Excessive, inactive, or unnecessary user accounts and permissions, as will as high-risk users, that increase the risk of data leaks and credential theft
• Compliance risks that could invite regulatory fines or legal troubles, or damage the company’s reputation or customer relationships

SSPM solutions highlight these issues before they can be exploited by threat actors, thus providing a proactive means to safeguard your SaaS apps and data from compromise, leaks, and losses. Additionally, automations, built-in workflows, and actionable guidance facilitate fast incident response and remediations and provide uninterrupted protection from cyberattacks and data breaches.

Key Features of Effective SSPM Solutions

Effective SSPM solutions include several critical security features that make them valuable additions to any SaaS security program, particularly for Microsoft 365. These include:

Continuous Monitoring

SSPM solutions continuously monitor your Microsoft 365 environment and all the data, identities, configurations, and third-party apps residing within it. They routinely keep an eye on configurations, detect potentially risky settings, and even assess the risk against accepted best practices and industry benchmarks. And they do all of this with little or no human input, reducing the manual effort needed to maintain a strong SaaS security posture.

Automated Threat Detection

In addition to 24/7 monitoring, SSPM tools automatically detect security risks to provide comprehensive security coverage and proactive threat identification. Additionally, they can automatically implement privacy and security rules to reduce your organization’s susceptibility to the many security and compliance threats targeting Microsoft 365.

Centralized Dashboard

Single-pane-of-glass visibility is crucial to understand the security state of your Microsoft 365 tenant and to identify the gaps that increase the risk of attack. SSPM solutions display the security risks and security score for every application on a single dashboard. This user-friendly interface makes it easy to view higher-risk applications and determine what action is needed to minimize the risk.

Alerting

On detecting a configuration error, overly permissive user settings, a failed control, or a compliance risk, SSPM tools send automated alerts. These timely and relevant alerts enable security teams to quickly take appropriate action to mitigate identified risks and minimize data losses and non-compliance costs.

Remediation Guidance

In a fast-evolving threat landscape, resource- and time-constrained security teams often struggle to identify, assess, and remediate emerging threats. SSPM tools automatically analyze detected threats and provide useful remediation recommendations based on accepted best practices. AI-powered remediation guides enable teams to save time and effort, and make it easier to strengthen the Microsoft 365 environment’s security posture.

Automated Remediation Workflows

Advanced SSPM solutions can automatically and effectively respond to some threats in the Microsoft 365 environment. Built-in workflows reduce the mean time to detect (MTTD) and the mean time to response (MTTR), thus ensuring fast, effective, and timely response plus stronger protection for SaaS apps and data.

How to Choose the Right SSPM Solution for Your Organization

To ensure broad coverage, effective monitoring, and accelerated incident response, it’s important to select the right SSPM solution. This requires paying attention to all of these considerations:

Security needs

Your security needs and priorities should influence your choice of an SSPM tool. Make sure to first self-assess your specific security needs. Then compare the features of various solutions to determine how well they are likely to satisfy those needs.

Featureset

When evaluating various solutions, check if they offer automated monitoring, alerting, and remediations. Also check if security scores and detailed remediations are available for each identified risk to help you remediate problems with minimal effort..

Cost

The cost of different SSPM solutions will vary depending on factors like licensing fees, implementation costs, and ongoing maintenance expenses. By understanding these costs, you can evaluate the total cost of ownership (TCO) of each platform and choose a solution accordingly.

Integrations and Scalability

Your SSPM solution must integrate with mission critical SaaS applications to identify the risks inherent in all of them. It should also be able to monitor new applications and highlight their security issues without requiring substantial tweaks or additional investments. Compliance capabilities

Select a solution that will automatically monitor your Microsoft 365 tenant against relevant industry regulations and standards – CIS, ISO 27001, SOC 2, NIS2, and so on. It should automatically assess applications, identify the risks of compliance violations, and execute automated response workflows to improve compliance and reduce non-compliance costs.

Customer support and resources

Access to a team of solution experts and a knowledge base of resources can be helpful if you have any questions or need quick assistance in certain situations. This is why it’s important to check the SSPM provider’s support capabilities and ensure they can provide adequate assistance when needed. 

Related reading: Choosing the right SSPM solution for your organization

Leading SSPM Solutions for Microsoft Office 365

This section describes three popular solutions for holistic SaaS security posture management and threat protection.

SentinelOne

SentinelOne is an autonomous SSPM platform that offers comprehensive real-time visibility and AI-driven threat detection for SaaS ecosystems. It continuously monitors SaaS applications, and automatically identifies system vulnerabilities to help organizations stay secure. Additionally, it incorporates threat investigation capabilities, CI/CD workflow integrations, and AI-generated threat intelligence to minimize exploit opportunities, prevent data breaches, and accelerate incident response. SentinelOne can also automatically remediate compliance issues and policy violations associated with SaaS services.

Cynet

Cynet is an automated, user-friendly SSPM platform. It incorporates advanced automations, incident response workflows, and user behavior analytics (UBA) to protect SaaS environments from many threats like viruses, malware, and ransomware. Like other SSPM solutions, Cynet provides visibility into the SaaS security posture and actionable insights to fix identified security weaknesses. It can also investigate and auto-remediate identified threats to quickly minimize the risk of exploitation.

SpinSPM

SpinSPM is an award-winning SSPM solution from cybersecurity specialist vendor Spin.AI. Part of the SpinOne all-in-one SaaS security platform (5-star customer rating on G2), SpinSPM provides SaaS inventory, visibility, risk assessments, access management, and automated incident response for Microsoft 365 in a single user-friendly offering.

SpinSPM provides 24/7 threat monitoring and considers over 15 risk factors to clearly highlight security issues within your SaaS applications, such as misconfigurations, risky users, security drifts, Shadow IT, and compliance breaches. It also provides immediate notifications and advanced reports of all detected incidents to help you further minimize security risks, improve compliance, and protect SaaS assets and data.

A Closer Look at SpinSPM for Microsoft 365

SpinSPM is a world-class SSPM offering from Spin.AI – a company that’s on a mission to help organizations strengthen their security and compliance posture, simplify security operations, and reduce security costs.

Trusted by 1,500+ organizations worldwide, SpinSPM for Microsoft 365 is designed to protect mission-critical Microsoft 365 apps against ransomware attacks, insider threats, data losses, data leaks, and non-compliance risks. It offers comprehensive protection across all attack surfaces in Microsoft 365 and safeguards the organization from the dangers of Shadow IT, insider threats, misconfigurations, and unauthorized access to sensitive SaaS data.

SpinSPM includes all these advanced features to provide robust and reliable SSPM for your Microsoft 365 environment:

• Advanced threat detection: AI and machine learning algorithms quickly detect anomalies and potential security threats, reducing risk assessment time and speeding up threat response.
• User behavior analytics: User activities are monitored and automatically assessed to identify risky behaviors or compromised accounts that increase the risk of attacks and breaches.
• Automated remediation: Actionable insights and remediation steps speed up incident resolution and minimize the potential for damage.
• Configurable, granular security policies: You can configure your own org-specific policies to automate access management and blocklist/allowlist applications.
• Integration with third-party apps: Permissions and accesses for apps are continuously monitored and automatically managed to reduce third-party risks.

These and many other features of SpinSPM will ensure that you get full visibility into your Microsoft 365 environment. Leverage this visibility to identify security risks and take advantage of automated incident response capabilities to prevent exploitation and minimize damage.

What Makes SpinSPM a Superior SSPM Solution to its Competitors

As we have seen in previous sections, many SSPM solutions are available that can automatically monitor and evaluate your Microsoft 365 environment and alert you to its security and compliance risks.

So what differentiates SpinSPM from other SSPM solutions?

For one, it can perform granular risk assessments on all your Microsoft 365 apps in just a few minutes. At the end of the assessment, it assigns a score from 0 to 100 to each assessed app. This tangible output, along with actionable, AI-powered recommendations and step-by-step guidance will help you to correctly identify the riskiest applications and remediate them on priority.

Next, SpinSPM can discover Shadow IT and protect critical SaaS data from its risks. By inventorying and assessing all your third-party applications and browser extensions using a database of 400,000 apps/extensions, SpinSPM will help you to better control over your SaaS environment and prioritize the blocklisting of high-risk unknown/unapproved apps.

Another advantage of SpinSPM is that it offers full control over all access management and incident response cases. You can easily customize your responses for any use case and configure your own policies to automate the access management process.

In addition to the above unique capabilities, SpinSPM offers a user-friendly interface, centralized dashboard, robust customer support, and a highly engaged user community. All of this translates into a powerful, enterprise-ready SSPM solution that can effectively protect your Microsoft 365 environment, reduce security costs, and improve compliance – with minimal manual workloads.Want to see SpinSPM in action?

Click here to request a free demo.