SaaS apps are the newest and greatest thing in the software industry. They make it possible to work remotely, promote teamwork, and provide an affordable substitute for buying the program altogether. However, threat actors can also take advantage of the very characteristics that make SaaS products so popular, such as collaboration and remote access.
Forrester Consulting has completed a Total Economic ImpactTM (TEI) analysis on behalf of Adaptive Shield. The study shows the significant return on investment attained by a $10 billion a year multimedia corporation. The qualitative security ROI improvements were enormous, even if the quantitative ROI is still strong at 201%.
This post will look at the study’s conclusions about the effects of Adaptive Shield’s SaaS Security Posture Management (SSPM) platform on this multinational company.
The Principal SaaS Difficulties for the Company
During Forrester Consulting interviews, the firm under investigation identified multiple critical difficulties they faced with their SaaS stack in the run-up to 2022.
- The company admitted that they lacked the expertise to handle the applications. They were ignorant of the risks or necessary mitigations since they didn’t comprehend many of the special configurations or how they affected security or compliance.
- SaaS use inside the company had increased in the departments of IT, HR, sales, and marketing. They saw that valuable data and sensitive assets were dispersing across SaaS applications and that the security team was no longer able to keep an eye on everything. Furthermore, they needed to promote cooperation between the security teams, who are in charge of protecting the apps, and the app owners, who are in charge of controlling them.
- Their Merger & Acquisition (M&A) activities also resulted in additional complexity that they had to deal with. With each M&A, the number of applications they had to oversee increased, and many of those applications belonged to tenants who were spread out geographically and were difficult to merge with the app’s current tenants.
The company started searching for a way to lessen the SaaS misconfigurations they were having to deal with on a large scale. They required a platform that would assist them in maintaining regulatory compliance in their SaaS stack, interface with numerous business applications, and lessen communication problems between security teams and app owners.
They were pleased with Adaptive Shield’s platform, which not only showed the greatest range of applications it could serve, but it also identified configuration problems at the proof of concept stage. Adaptive Shield was chosen and put into use in 2022 to safeguard the company’s stack.
Advantages of Security: Adaptive Shield Is Introduced to the Company
The security team was able to “gain complete control and increased visibility of the security posture of all business-critical applications” thanks to Adaptive Shield, according to Forrester Consulting.
Enhanced Security Position of SaaS
Six security incidents resulting from incorrect setups and a low-security posture were previously handled by the security team. But starting with the POC, the organization noticed changes in posture. They had a 30% improvement in posture and “realized substantial improvement in its security posture score through visibility, remediation guidance, and ongoing monitoring”.
Enhanced Cooperation
Additionally, Forrester Consulting discovered indications of enhanced cooperation between app owners and security teams. They pointed out that although company owners hold “the key to the kingdom,” they are crucial participants in application security, but they lack the security know-how required to protect their environment. The implementation of Adaptive Shield facilitated communication and cooperation between security teams and app owners.
Numerous Additional Security Advantages
The Forrester Consulting team was able to quantify certain security benefits, but they were unable to assign a monetary value to all of Adaptive Shield’s offerings. Forrester Consulting, for instance, discovered that security teams could concentrate on security management instead of interviewing app owners about their configurations thanks to the automated processes in the Adaptive Shield platform. Additionally, it assisted the company in overcoming obstacles brought forth by SaaS security’s democratization. It assisted the company in maintaining ongoing compliance, preventing any disruptions to business operations, and staying ahead of any trends related to SaaS security.
The Reasons Economic Benefits Showed a 201% ROI
The organization that was interviewed saw a return on investment that was quantified by the Total Economic ImpactTM research. Forrester Consulting initially determined the value of an enhanced SaaS security posture to put these findings into numerical form. They estimated the number of breaches over three years, taking into account the number of breaches that had occurred before the deployment of Adaptive Shield. They factored in wage information, affected business and security users, and decreased productivity. They estimated that an enhanced SaaS security posture will cost $1.49 million in the next three years.
The operational efficiency attained by the Adaptive Shield’s SSPM platform was then examined by Forrester Consulting. They took into account hourly pay, the number of applications under observation, and the price of safeguarding SaaS apps both with and without an automated solution. They calculated that their savings over three years would be $397K.
After that, Forrester Consulting focused on compliance. Based on how long it takes businesses to check their applications and make sure they comply with various standards, they computed efficiency gains. Their present value over three years was $260,000.
enhanced cooperation between security teams and business app owners. Although more ROI areas were mentioned in the study, they could not be quantified.
The advantages over three years came to $2.18 million (at current value). At current value, the entire cost of licensing and deployment for those three years amounted to $723,866. In less than six months, payback was achieved, and over three years, the ROI was 201%.
An Advancement in SaaS Security
Organizations are storing more and more valuable data on the cloud these days. Sensitive data, such as personally identifiable information (PII), intellectual property, and private third-party information, is present in modern SaaS systems.
It is vital to protect this data, and using a SaaS Security Posture Management (SSPM) platform is the only practical option to do so.
Businesses are aware of how important it is to safeguard their SaaS stack. They also have to defend the expense of introducing more security measures. Organizations may now present a convincing argument for SSPM implementation by showcasing a substantial and quantifiable return on investment.
