In a bid to protect the growing software as a service (SaaS) sector, online security provider Valence Security aims to offer solutions that can connect to apps within an organization’s digital environment. In doing so, these solutions can analyze each individual group’s configurations to identify risks specific to data sharing.
The company recently completed a Series A funding round wherein it raised around $25 million for such initiatives.
Valence’s proposed solution for enterprise-level SaaS will establish a management framework to handle SaaS applications widely used in the workplace which, in turn, brought in risks or threats that are beyond the capability of the usual approaches toward network security.
Yoni Shohet, Valance’s CEO and co-founder stated that malcontents had turned their sights on exploiting vulnerabilities within the SaaS mesh in recent years. These include unsecured supply chains, oversharing of data outside organizations, unmanaged or unsecured user identities, misconfiguration, and unsecured access to third-party applications, among others.
Shohet added that Valence aims to address these threats by giving organizational security improved oversight and monitoring capabilities on apps deployed within their environment. In turn, this enabled teams to define and enforce security policies about configuration and, more importantly, access privileges to prevent attackers from gaining entry into the SaaS landscape.
A Necessary Measure
SaaS security has gained importance over the past couple of years, especially with the boom in working remotely because of the ongoing pandemic.
As a result of this shift to working from home, the average corporation deploys at least 364 apps for its operations.
Individual applications pose unique security risks ranging from vulnerabilities within their working framework to misconfigurations, leading threat actors to exploit such weaknesses. More often than not, these threats tend to fly under the radar of conventional online security protocols and pose a serious issue among mostly untrained digital security teams.
An Edge Against the Competition
Right now, Valence Security is just one player within a market currently valued at $8.3 billion worldwide and has the potential to get $21.2 billion before the end of the decade.
But Shohet quickly states that his company’s advantage against the competition lies in its visibility over the business context. He explained that other SaaS security measures tend to fall short when it comes to providing the necessary visibility and context required by information security teams to be able to respond effectively to threats within the SaaS mesh.
