SaaS Security solutions are different from other adjacent security product categories, including CASB, SWG/SASE, CNAPP, IAM/IGA, DSPM, and CSPM solutions. By providing a centralized view of the SaaS and AI applications in use and their security and identity related settings and activities, these solutions enable security teams to enforce consistent policies and ensure that sensitive data remains protected.
Why are SaaS Security solutions needed now? The explosive growth of SaaS and AI application use over the past 5 years - both sanctioned and unsanctioned - has shifted critical business data and processes into computing environments that exist outside the direct control, and even visibility, of corporate IT and security teams. In fact, in many cases IT and security teams are not even involved in the selection or administration of them. This makes securing them much more challenging! The scale and dynamism of the SaaS and AI systems drives much of the security management complexity.
Organizations need SaaS security systems to eliminate these visibility gaps, automate the discovery, prioritization, and correction of configuration drift (both general security and identity related), and ensure that their sprawling application ecosystems remain compliant with data privacy regulations.
Inclusion and Evaluation Criteria
The research will cover vendors ranging from pure-play SaaS security vendors to broader cloud security or SASE platform providers with the covered functionality. These vendors will be selected based on their ability to support a wide range of popular SaaS and AI applications, to comprehensively discover SaaS and AI application use, for their coverage of identity security posture, and their depth of integration via native application APIs. The included solutions should demonstrate the sophisticated automation, policy mapping, and identity normalization capabilities required to help security teams manage the complexity of their multi-application SaaS landscape.
It is expected that evaluated solutions will be able to cover most, but not necessarily all of the functional areas described here.
Primary Areas of Evaluation
- Application Discovery and Visibility (15% of product rating)
- Continuous Scanning and Posture Management (15% of product rating)
- Identity Security Posture Management (15% of product rating)
- OAuth Discovery and Risk Assessment (10% of product rating)
- Threat Detection (10% of product rating)
- Managed Remediation and Threat Response (10% of product rating)
- AI Agent Security (10% of product rating)
- Data Exposure Misconfigurations (5% of product rating)
- Compliance and Governance Reporting (5% of product rating)
- Cost Management (5% of product rating)
Exclusion Criteria
Solutions focused exclusively on identity provider security posture without some SaaS application native configuration or threat detection are out of scope. SaaS Management Platforms that primarily focus on cost management are also out of scope. Vendors without active paying customers will also be excluded from this Leadership Compass.
