Shadow IT Risk Mitigation

Protect your critical SaaS data from the risk of Shadow IT with SpinSPM

Shadow IT Tackling SaaS Security Risks with SpinOne

Shadow IT Use Case

In our remote-friendly world, employees are understandably comfortable downloading and utilizing apps that help them do their jobs. The problem? These third-party applications and browser extensions can have dangerous access to your sensitive, mission-critical SaaS data – posing severe threats of data leaks, breaches, and ransomware attacks.

Shadow IT refers to the fact that these cracks in your armor are not easily detected by your organization’s SecOps teams – and they can’t control what they can’t see. How do you detect and mitigate this looming risk?

Impact of Shadow IT

Reduce the Risk of Shadow IT

Visibility and Control Over Your SaaS Environment

To tackle Shadow IT, you need to be able to see and inventory all cloud services, mobile apps, SaaS apps, and browser extensions that have access to your SaaS environment — and understand who has access to your critical SaaS data. You require an industry-leading SaaS Security Posture Management (SSPM) solution.

See why we are integrated with Google for Chrome extension risk assessment.

Automated, Continuous Risk Assessment

Eliminate time-wasting busywork for your SecOps team with automated risk assessment (taking your risk assessment time from months manually to seconds automatically.) Detect when new third-party apps or extensions are installed, uninstalled, or even updated – then automatically review or block potential risks with continuous reassessment.

Try our App Risk Assessment here

SpinOne SaaS Security Posture Management (SpinSPM)

Combat Shadow IT with full visibility and fast, automated incident response for unsanctioned apps and browser extensions from SpinSPM, a solution within the SpinOne platform. Slash your risk assessment time from weeks manually to seconds automatically.

Download SpinSPM Brief

Why Businesses Choose SpinSPM

We needed a security solution to ensure that our university’s user base could maximize the functionality of the G Suite without compromising the institution’s sensitive information. We needed a service to screen third-party applications and let us know which ones were safe.

Roland Chan

Chief Information Security Officer

Many forms of ransomware are Trojans, not viruses, which is why conventional anti-virus tools are unable to detect ransomware attacks. At Gurnick, we are committed to taking proactive measures that ensure all our students and staff are fully protected. This is why we selected Spin Technology as the solution for our organization.

Val Pashchenko

Information Technology Manager

The ability to view what file and which user shared data outside of our company is huge. SpinOne’s PII data detection has the added benefit of being able to reach out to workers to be careful of sharing sensitive data

Jake Kilian

Technology Support Manager

It’s fast to install and easy to use. SpinOne gives me confidence in our Microsoft 365 deployment with its complete protection of user mailboxes and 2×7 ransomware monitoring.

Ted Do

IT Manager

Great product, user-friendly portal, easy setup and fills a void that Google neglected to protect your data.

Louis Burdulis

Executive Vice President

Great service. The system works flawlessly. In the event of any problems, they have a friendly and competent support team. It’s good to be protected by this service, but I still hope to never really need them.

Georg Israel

General Manager

SpinOne is the greatest Google backup client I have been able to find on the internet. Getting it up and running was a breeze. Everything is well designed, intuitive, and – best of all – their product works flawlessly. I have recommended it to all of my friends and coworkers.

Michael Svedeman

Senior Manager, Project Development

Purchasing from Spin and setting up the service was convenient, as they were very responsive and clearly communicated the value of SpinOne. Afterward, when we use the platform, the product’s simplicity put it over the top.

Geet Jacobs

Director, Digital Ops

I’ve looked at a lot of the backup solutions for Google and this is by far the best I’ve found. I really like the security tools, especially the ransomware protection for peace of mind. The flexibility in choosing what and what not to back up is very nice. The interface is clean and easy to use, and restores are a snap. We are very happy with the product.

Joshua Goss

Senior Director of IT

SpinOne has been a game changer from day one. We were drawn to SpinAI’s platform because it was so easy to set up and manage. With SpinOne, we have full transparency into what’s happening in the environment and can enforce policies that are stronger than ever before.

Stephan Matter

Technical Operations Manager

Related Resources

SpinSPM Brief

Shadow IT Whitepaper

Case Study

Your SaaS Security starts with SpinOne

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Frequently Asked Questions

Why is Shadow IT a concern in a remote-friendly work environment?

Shadow IT is the phenomenon where employees use third-party apps, extensions and devices to complete work-related tasks without corporate IT approval. While this scenario might seem like a quick way to increase productivity especially in remote work environments, it’s a serious cybersecurity challenge that can lead to many security, compliance, productivity, and cost concerns.

How can organizations detect and mitigate the risks associated with Shadow IT?

Start by implementing:

Automated Shadow IT discovery to analyze every single application or browser extension that has access to your business-sensitive data.
Automated AI-driven risk assessment to save your SecOps teams significant amounts of time, avoiding human mistakes and increasing the accuracy of risk detection.
Ongoing AI-based risk assessment performed every time an app changes access permissions or updates to a new version to make sure no new vulnerabilities have occurred.

What are the main causes of security breaches related to Shadow IT?

One of the main causes of security breaches related to shadow IT involves OAuth abuse. OAuth is a modern authorization technology that powers today’s cloud SaaS environments. The OAuth (Open-Authorization) protocol was created by a team at Google to secure user authentication. OAuth lets users grant third-party applications access to their accounts without sharing sensitive data, like logins and passwords.

Many third-party apps that business users in your organization may install request permission to access user information and data, and sign-in on the user’s behalf in other cloud apps. When users install these apps, they frequently click accept without carefully reviewing the details in the prompt, including granting the app permissions. Accepting permissions from third-party apps poses a security risk to your business.OAuth can make it easy for users to share information with cloud SaaS applications to access data stored in other online services. But OAuth does have its risks — if a malicious application gets its hands on an OAuth token, it can use that token to pretend to be the user and gain access to their account or steal their data.

If an application is malicious, potentially even containing ransomware, the malicious application has permission to encrypt all the user’s data and any data the user can access. OAuth tokens even bypass two-factor authentication in cloud SaaS environments and must be manually removed if compromised.

How does SpinSPM help organizations manage Shadow IT risks?

Misconfiguration management Visibility and inventory of all third-party apps and browser extensions connected to the SaaS environment Automated assessment of the risk of all apps and extensions connected to the SaaS environment and continuous re-assessment Access management to allowlist or blocklist risky applications and extensions Configurable, granular security policies based on set criteria