SaaS security best practices for teams who hate posture theater

Securing SaaS tools is a complex challenge, made more complicated by the rapid adoption of cloud applications and the evolving threat landscape. In 2025, SaaS security best practices mean reducing the blast radius, minimizing standing access, eliminating oversharing, and shortening detection→decision→fix cycles. The key principle is to prioritize where sensitive data lives, not by which vendor you pay most – focusing on the core business.

In this context, it’s essential to understand that shared infrastructure means a shared blast radius, and vendor bugs or misconfigurations can introduce cross-tenant risks. Identity attacks are another significant concern, with phishing, weak MFA coverage, and session hijacking being common entry points for attackers. OAuth sprawl and collaboration by default also pose significant risks, leading to oversharing and potential data leaks.

Although SaaS Security Posture Management (SSPM) tools offer strong posture snapshots and policy libraries, most of them struggle with real time, day-to-day usage exposure, such as tracking who shared what or who exported data yesterday. This guide will focus on the practices first; the trade-offs of SSPM tools will be discussed later.

Key takeaways

• Map crown jewels by data bucket; protect adjacency: Focus on securing the most sensitive data first, by understanding where it lives and prioritizing accordingly. This means classifying data across simple buckets like customer, employee/HR, and business/financial data.
• Enforce SSO/MFA and zero-leftovers offboarding: Implement practices like onboarding on rails, offboarding with zero leftovers, and regular access reviews to reduce security risks associated with identity attacks and access management.
• Find & kill public or domain-wide links:  Scan for public or widely shared links in shared storage, review active users and permissions, and identify files shared outside your domain or with external collaborators to prevent data leaks.
• Use AI to rank fixes and close the loop fast: Use AI-native tools to ask plain-English questions across multiple platforms, receive ranked actions, and streamline security processes, ultimately shortening detection→decision→fix cycles.

The main SaaS security challenges

SaaS security is complex, and many tools add operational drag. Multi-tenancy creates cross-tenant blast radius: a neighbor’s bug can become your breach. Since you can’t patch the vendor, all that is left is to limit exposure.

Identity attacks and access management

Access from anywhere sounds great until you realize it also means identity attacks are just a phishing email away. Weak MFA coverage and session hijacking are the easy front doors for attackers. 

OAuth sprawl and integration risks

The “Sign in with…” approvals that make life easier for users also mint broad scopes and create app-to-app chains that move data in ways you didn’t intend. Service accounts and personal access tokens (PATs) can live on forever unless you actively hunt them down.

Collaboration risks

Collaboration by default is great for productivity, but it also leads to oversharing. Public links, domain-wide shares, and “temporary” guest accounts can all expose sensitive data. The answers exist, but across three consoles and four CSVs.

Fragmented security controls

Controls, logs, and fixes are split by product and tier, leaving you without a single view of what’s actually exposed. And when auditors come knocking, they want time-stamped proof across multiple SaaS suites – not after a week of exports and manual reconciliations.

Five SaaS security practices you should never compromise on

Identifying your crown jewels in SaaS security

When it comes to SaaS security, not all data is created equal. Your “crown jewels” – the sensitive information that would cause real damage if exposed – deserve special attention. Think customer records, financial data, intellectual property, and employee PII..

Prioritizing data over vendor logos

To secure your crown jewels, you need to classify what sits where, across simple buckets like customer, employee/HR, and business/financial data. This lens makes priorities obvious. For instance:

• Email and docs with shared drives are your company brain – links and sharing defaults can leak fast if you don’t watch them.
• Code repositories concentrate tokens, configs, and pipeline secrets that, if mishandled, can snowball into broader exposure and erode GitHub security posture and access.
• CRM systems store customer data and exports – a trust and compliance landmine if mishandled.
• HR platforms hold the richest PII set and your “who’s actually employed” source of truth for access decisions.

Mapping the blast radius

Identifying your crown jewels is just the first step. You also need to understand how they connect to risk; in other words, map your blast radius. That means tracing how data moves through your core apps, integrations, and third-party services, then applying a SaaS security checklist to make weak paths obvious.

1. List systems with customer, employee/HR, and business data.
2. List integrations and third-party apps with export or read-all scopes.
3. Mark who can create public or domain-wide links and external invites.
4. Circle the shortest paths from crown jewels to the outside world, and fix those first.

With crown jewels identified and blast radius mapped, align with SaaS security best practices: start with identity and access, then address file oversharing and OAuth sprawl.

Tackling identity & access hygiene

Maintaining proper identity and access hygiene is crucial for SaaS security. This involves implementing practices that ensure access is granted and revoked appropriately, reducing the risk of unauthorized access to sensitive data.

Onboarding and offboarding processes

To start, onboarding on rails is essential. This means giving new hires a defined path into core apps like email, docs, code repos, and CRM, all with MFA/SSO enforced by default. This approach prevents ad-hoc invites that can lead to unmanaged permissions.

Equally important is offboarding with zero leftovers: former employees shouldn’t retain access to anything. This involves disabling accounts, revoking access, and removing them from core applications. Using HR as the source of truth for user provisioning and deprovisioning helps keep access consistent and makes audits straightforward.

Regular access reviews

Quarterly access reviews on your top apps are also vital. Roles drift over time, and “temporary” access can linger. Regular reviews help catch unnecessary access before it becomes a problem.

IAM quick wins

• Run a quick Google Workspace security review to pull every third-party OAuth app users have approved.
• Tag core “crown jewels” and classify them by data type; Reconfirm roles and risky capabilities on a quarterly basis.
• Give new hires a defined path into core apps with default roles and MFA/SSO enforced.
• Offboard former employees completely – disable accounts, revoke access, and remove unused seats.

Taming file oversharing in core productivity platforms

You’ve locked down identity and access – now it’s time to tackle file oversharing. The native tools in Google Workspace and Microsoft 365 provide some visibility, but they have limitations.

Limitations of native tools

In Google Workspace, public or domain-wide files show up in the File exposure report (Security Center on certain editions), while admin changes are tracked elsewhere – in Admin audit or Audit & investigation. Similarly, Microsoft 365 has externally shared items in SharePoint/OneDrive sharing, and admin/role changes in Entra ID (audit/PIM), but not in a single, unified view. This scattered information makes it challenging to get a clear picture of what’s exposed.

The reality of oversharing

The ease of collaboration in SaaS tools can lead to oversharing through public links, domain-wide shares, or “temporary” guest accounts. To combat this, you need a more streamlined approach.

File oversharing quick wins:

• Scan for public or widely shared links in shared storage (such as Drive, SharePoint or equivalent) monthly.
• Review active users and permissions across your top 5 apps quarterly.
• Identify files shared outside your domain or with external collaborators.
• Flag documents labeled confidential but shared widely.
• Revoke risky links and tighten sharing defaults.

Managing OAuth sprawl and app-to-app chains

OAuth sprawl and app-to-app chains can create complex security risks in your SaaS environment. When one SaaS application connects to another, often through OAuth approvals, it can lead to a web of connections that are difficult to track and manage. Understanding how to secure SaaS applications effectively is crucial in this context.

Understanding app-to-app chains

These connections can spread risk across multiple applications. For instance, a CRM system might connect to Google Workspace, which in turn connects to an HR platform. When evaluating these connections, it’s essential to focus on those with data extract or export scopes, as they pose the most significant risks.

OAuth sprawl quick wins:

• Inventory third-party apps connected to your core systems.
• If it can export or read-all crown-jewel data, it’s in high priority. Otherwise, park it.
• Review and limit standing access for service accounts and personal access tokens (PATs).
• List third-party OAuth grants with Drive /email /contacts read-all or export scopes not used in 30 days; revoke or re-scope.

Securing Code Repositories

Source Code Management (SCM) systems like GitHub and its key alternatives (e.g., GitLab and Bitbucket)are critical components of your SaaS and developer security posture, requiring best practices for maintaining clean and secure code repositories. A breach in these systems can expose sensitive code, credentials, and configuration files.

Repositories hosted on services like GitHub store source code, credentials, and release pipelines, making them a core SaaS security priority. Public repositories can be a significant risk if not properly managed. External collaborators with excessive permissions can also pose a threat. Furthermore, branches without proper protection rules can lead to unauthorized changes or deletions.

To enhance GitHub security, it’s essential to monitor repository permissions and access controls regularly. This includes listing public repositories and reviewing their visibility settings, as well as monitoring external collaborators and their permissions. Ensuring that branches have proper protection rules enabled is also crucial.

Additionally, prioritizing and addressing alerts from Dependabot or other dependency management systems, for vulnerable dependencies can help prevent potential security breaches.

Code repositories’ security quick wins

• Retain GitHub audit logs for at least 180 days.
• Lock down GitHub Environments for production and require reviewers on production deployments.
• List public repositories and external collaborators; remove public unless intentional and enforce MFA for all members and outside collaborators.
• Identify branches without protection rules on critical repositories and enable protection.
• Rank and remediate open Dependabot (or equivalent) alerts by severity across all organizations and prioritize fixes.
• Monitor repository permissions and access controls regularly.

As you implement these security measures across your SaaS stack, you’ll likely find that manual efforts can be time-consuming and may not scale. This is where leveraging technology can help streamline your security processes and provide a more comprehensive view of your SaaS security posture.

Fitting AI in SaaS Security Best Practices

As organizations implement various SaaS security measures, leveraging AI can significantly enhance their security posture. Used well, AI in SaaS security lets teams ask plain-language questions across Workspace, Microsoft 365, GitHub, and Okta, then returns a prioritized fix list with owners and next steps. The goal is to reduce the time between detection, decision, and fix.

Enhancing Security with AI

AI is most valuable where risks span systems. It correlates admin roles, sharing states, auth policies, and OAuth scope grants across APIs, surfaces overlaps that create exposure, and ranks what to fix first by data sensitivity and blast radius.

It also adds context you can act on: who owns the risky asset, which systems are touched, what permission or link created the exposure, and the minimal change that removes it without breaking workflows.

Several use cases demonstrate the effectiveness of AI in SaaS security. It can identify dormant or surprise admins across platforms and open a one-click review queue. It might detect newly public or domain-wide files and overshared folders, and notify owners with the fix in context. It could also map MFA and SSO gaps, including exceptions and older accounts, with per-app enablement steps.

In addition, it can flag third-party OAuth grants with export or read-all scopes that have not been used in 30 days and recommend revoke or re-scope. It can list service accounts, bots, and deploy keys with write access and propose rotation or expiry. It can also generate time-stamped evidence packs for SOC 2 or ISO on request. 

If you are using Sola, install the Workspace, Microsoft 365, GitHub, and Okta apps from the gallery, run these queries, then remediate in place or nudge owners.

Quick Wins with AI

You can start with these AI-driven actions by using the following prompts to tame SaaS security risks:

Admin drift:

Public files’ exposure:

MFA and SSO gaps:

OAuth sprawl:

Non-human identities:

Compliance snapshots:

Where traditional SSPMs fit in – and where they don’t

SaaS Security Posture Management (SSPM) solutions have become a mainstream approach to managing SaaS security risks. These platforms connect to various SaaS applications via APIs, inventorying apps, benchmarking settings, and raising misconfiguration alerts. SSPMs add welcome structure to SaaS security, but they often come with limitations.

For lean teams, SSPMs can be overwhelming due to the volume of risk scores and alerts. A common friction is alert churn: as OAuth tokens rotate and configurations change, scores expire and you chase a moving baseline. SSPMs are strongest for policy libraries and benchmark checks across many apps, but they may still be a poor fit for smaller teams with limited capacity.

In such cases, alternative approaches like AI-native cybersecurity solutions can provide a more streamlined and effective way to manage SaaS security. These assistants can offer a unified view of SaaS security risks, simplify compliance reporting, and provide actionable insights without the overhead of full-blown SSPM deployments.

Summary: your next 30-days’ plan for SaaS security

Implementing SaaS security best practices requires a structured approach. Here’s a 30-day plan to get you started:

Days 0-7: Connect core systems, run baseline prompts

Begin by connecting your essential data sources to an AI platform like Sola. This includes Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, your Identity Provider (IDP), code repositories like GitHub or Bitbucket, and your CRM. Once connected, run baseline prompts to identify and fix your top 10 exposures.

Days 8-30: Enforce key security measures, automate tasks

During this period, focus on enforcing MFA/SSO across your connected systems, standardizing your onboarding and offboarding processes, and enabling targeted alerts for critical security events. Additionally, build workflows to automate repetitive tasks, reducing manual effort and improving response times.

Beyond day 30: Reviews and continuous improvement

After the initial 30 days, maintain your SaaS security posture through quarterly reviews of access controls, non-human identity cleanup, and mapping app-to-app chains for crown-jewel adjacency. This ongoing process ensures your security measures stay effective and up-to-date.

Reporting best practices for SaaS security 

A good reporting plan keeps everyone on the same page. Here’s how to tailor your SaaS security reports for different stakeholders:

• For auditors: timestamped admin inventories, sharing exceptions, and MFA coverage.
• For execs: a “What changed since last month?” report with a three-line summary and links to fixes.
• For owners: targeted nudges with context (file, team, last activity).

By tailoring your reports to each stakeholder’s needs, you can ensure that everyone has the information they need to manage SaaS security risks effectively.