Principles of SaaS Security

The Cloud Security Alliance recommends the following principles:-

1. Access management: The security personnel must understand access permissions. They should also work on role-based access control, system access control, and workflow management.

2. VM management: To secure your infrastructure, continuously update your VMs. CISOs should be aware of the security threats & patches and ask SaaS vendors to implement them.

3. Network control: CISOs should look at network access control lists (NACL) for granular network security details. They should create a Virtual Private Network (VPN) layer that acts as a firewall.

4. Perimeter network control: CISOs should prioritize firewall rules that filter out dangerous traffic from data centers. They should also use intrusion detection and prevention systems (IDS/IPS).

5. Data protection: CISOs should encrypt sensitive data for SaaS security. Moreover, they can separate duties at the client and server-side and conduct regular SaaS security audits.

6. Incident management: As a CISO, you should create an incident management system that captures, tracks, and monitors specific incidents. It will notify about security attacks in advance.

7. Reliability: SaaS apps should have high-level CDN, which minimizes downtime. Moreover, the system should have self-healing capabilities, and there should be a concrete disaster recovery plan so that Mean Time to Recovery (MTTR) is faster than ever.