Master your SaaS Security Compliance (A Quick Checklist for CTOs)

Cyberattacks are rampant events—recent statistics say they happen once every 39 seconds. Organizations struggle to strengthen their security and compliance efforts. This places immense responsibility on technology leaders like CTOs to implement measures that ensure robust and continuous protection.

Navigating through the intricate landscape of cyber security demands a strategic approach that sustains business resilience. As a CTO, you likely work with complex cloud environments that require you to take a sustainable approach to security and compliance. To keep up without breaking the bank, you need strategic solutions. That’s why we built our SaaS security checklist with today’s landscape in mind.

What is SaaS security?

SaaS security refers to a list of practices that aid in securing data privacy and integrity across all cloud-hosted software and applications. It involves implementing security measures such as risk assessments, access control, frequent audits, and incident response to protect your applications from a variety of cyber threats.

SaaS security checklist for CTO:

While choosing the SaaS security measures, The Chief Technology Officer should oversee various security challenges such as complex cloud requirements, various features to choose from, and budgetary constraints. 

Here is a checklist to help you mitigate all the security vulnerabilities when choosing a SaaS security program.

1. Incorporate security training

Developing a security-first culture enables your employees to understand the organization’s current security posture. Educate and train your employees on various cybersecurity tools, processes, and technologies that pertain to the organization’s policies so it gives them the know-how and skills to handle potential issues and achieve better security outcomes.

2. Implement access control

Mandate access control measures, such as two-factor authentication, password protection, display locks, email, and end-point protection for all employees. It acts as an additional layer of security when a password is compromised and prevents unauthorized access since the secondary security factor will be sent as a text to your mail or phone. 

Since phones are used as a secondary factor, it is recommended to secure your phones with passcodes or biometrics. Also, incorporating a quarterly password change policy can refresh passwords and can help protect your organization’s data.

3. Enhance network protection 

Implement network protection measures to protect the integrity of your sensitive data. This involves enforcing strict security practices like encryption, firewalls, and secure file transfer protocols. Regularly review data management procedures by conducting periodic audits and intrusion detection systems to identify security risks in the external networks and establish comprehensive backup and recovery plans.

4. Establish internal security policies

Policies are essentially guardrails to ensure protection and security. They define protocol regarding all aspects of security and procedure. Implementing internal security policies allows organizations to identify and manage risks, essentially defining their risk appetite and preparing for various insider threats and levels of risk. A standardized policy helps organizations maintain confidentiality, integrity, and availability of their data and systems and demonstrates your commitment to information security to clients and stakeholders. 

5. Conduct regular penetration testing

Penetration tests simulate real-world attacks to find vulnerabilities that could be exploited to breach systems and data. Hence, it is crucial to perform regular pen tests from both application and network security perspectives.

Performing penetration tests regularly helps you identify your security gaps and vulnerabilities by evaluating your network security controls and configurations, enabling you to act on them before malicious actors and hackers exploit them. 

6. Conduct regular risk assessments

Risk assessment is an essential security measure that strengthens your security posture. This gives the company comprehensive data to identify various risk areas, including risk from third parties. Then, prioritize each risk based on their criticality and focus on mitigating high-severity risks first.

Effective risk assessments provide actionable insights to help you make strategic security decisions. And spotlight the most potential risks so you can strengthen defenses in the right places. 

7. Establish incident response procedures

Establish procedures to identify, manage, and mitigate security incidents efficiently. Start by defining clear roles. Outline the chain of command to avoid confusion when threats strike.

Strong collaboration and communication are also vital. Empower teams to work seamlessly across silos during response efforts. Keep stakeholders in the loop through centralized notifications. Implementing robust procedures will enable you to respond rapidly to the incident and can help you contain breaches decisively. 

8. Compliance management

Adhering to relevant regulatory standards and common compliance frameworks like SOC2, ISO 27001, HIPAA, and GDPR is critical to SaaS security.

There are two compliance requirements regarding SaaS security- voluntary and regulatory. One is enforced and mandatory, and the other is voluntary. Most companies, especially in SaaS, need a combination of both. And so achieving this manually can be a long, error-prone, resource-intensive process.

That’s where Sprinto comes in. With over 15 frameworks and automated compliance tasks such as evidence collection and control monitoring, create a seamless, error-free experience.

9. Perform internal and external audits

Conduct internal audits regularly to identify and remediate nonconformities before your certification audits. Internal audits highlight how organizations have communicated various processes and procedures to their employees and how well their people maintain their security culture.

Conduct periodic external audits by an independent third-party auditor to provide an unbiased assessment of your security and compliance controls and identify gaps that may need to be noticed during internal reviews.

The external auditor will inspect your security controls, policies, processes, and documentation through interviews, observations, and testing. You will receive a detailed audit report summarizing their findings, risk ratings, and remediation recommendations.

10. Assess your vendor management

Conduct thorough due diligence on third-party service providers, ask for proof of their security measures, such as penetration testing and vulnerability scans, and ensure they meet the necessary security standards. Regularly review and update vendor agreements to include specific security requirements and responsibilities. You can invest in software that uses monitoring tools to detect potential breaches at third parties for effective vendor management.

11. Create a real-time reporting system

A solid reporting system tracks compliance and flags control failures in real time. This helps organizations mitigate risks at the earliest opportunity.

Pairing it up with continuous monitoring measures creates greater awareness and visibility into your IT infrastructure and information security systems, enabling a proactive approach to threat detection and security risks. 

This helps tackle vulnerabilities, monitor security controls, and continually assess the risk landscape. It also assists the Security Operations Center in creating and implementing risk mitigation strategies when threats are detected. 

Read more: A complete guide to continuous monitoring

Experience the Sprinto advantage: Sprinto helps you centralize compliance data, generate comprehensive reports, and automate crucial tasks like evidence collection and compliance checks to achieve and maintain compliance in record time.

How can you manage your SaaS security checklist with Sprinto?

A compliance automation software like Sprinto brings smarter workflows and helps you manage key activities efficiently within your SaaS security checklist. A few examples of how it enables you to delve through the checklists are given below:

Sprinto provides complete visibility into your security and compliance posture by mapping all the desired security controls and helps you design comprehensive risk and compliance reports in an intuitive health dashboard.

With Sprinto you can assess all security controls and maintain awareness of all networks, systems, and servers across the organization and the vendor ecosystem and provide continuous security monitoring, strengthening your cybersecurity posture.

It also solves another important aspect of the SaaS security checklist—employee training. It has built-in training modules to ensure employees know and effectively implement all necessary policies.

Compliance automation tools like Sprinto can help you automate compliance-related tasks, create and manage documentation, policies, and protocols, address issues related to risk management, and ensure your policies and procedures meet all the necessary laws and regulations.

Conclusion

Effective SaaS security and compliance requires managing security controls, policies, audits, reports, and vendor risks. Doing this manually is inefficient and can be error-prone. This makes robust security and continuous compliance challenging to achieve.

CTOs can utilize Sprinto to take a proactive approach to security and compliance. Sprinto seamlessly connects with your existing cloud setup, allowing you to map common controls across security frameworks and streamline compliance activities with ease. 

Let’s show you how it’s done. Talk to our experts.

FAQs

Why is SaaS security important?

SaaS compliance is important because it ensures confidence among customers and stakeholders that regulations adhere to stakeholders and sensitive data is being handled securely. It also acts as a competitive advantage, opening doors for new markets and new funding rounds because of the rapport it helps build.  

What are the criteria to consider while choosing a SaaS security checklist?

The key elements to consider while implementing a SaaS compliance checklist include conducting risk assessments, developing incident response plans, performing regular security audits, and implementing compliance tools to streamline workflows.

How often should a SaaS security checklist be updated?

Regularly updating the SaaS security checklist is significant to implement all the evolving regulatory requirements. It is recommended to review and update the checklist quarterly and whenever significant changes in the regulatory landscape occur. 

Why do you need compliance software?

Compliance software helps to eliminate manual error, saves time spent on manually collecting evidence, offers enhanced visibility over potential risks, removes silos, consolidates multiple manual tools, and keeps track in real-time.