SaaS GRC Assessment
SaaS GRC Assessment, in the context of cybersecurity, is the systematic process of evaluating an organization's use of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications against its Governance, Risk, and Compliance (GRC) policies, mandates, and external regulatory obligations. This assessment is crucial because the increasing reliance on third-party SaaS vendors effectively shifts part of an organization's security and compliance responsibility to an external entity.
Focus of the Assessment
The assessment typically focuses on three interconnected areas:
Governance: Evaluating the policies, procedures, and organizational structures in place to oversee the secure adoption and management of SaaS applications. This includes ensuring there are controls for vendor selection, access management, and data ownership.
Risk Management: Identifying, analyzing, and mitigating the risks introduced by SaaS use. Common hazards include data exposure from misconfigurations, vendor lock-in, data sovereignty issues, and the impact of a potential breach at the vendor's side.
Compliance: Checking that the SaaS application's operation and the organization's use of it adhere to relevant external regulations (like GDPR, HIPAA, or PCI DSS) and internal corporate mandates.
External and Continuous View
A comprehensive SaaS GRC Assessment often requires an external, outside-in perspective. This is particularly important for identifying "Shadow IT"—unsanctioned SaaS applications used by employees—which poses a significant, unmanaged risk.
Ideally, the assessment should be continuous, meaning it doesn't just happen once a year. Since SaaS configurations, vendor security postures, and organizational GRC requirements evolve rapidly, constant monitoring ensures that compliance and risk gaps are identified and addressed immediately, preventing them from escalating into major security incidents or regulatory violations.
ThreatNG directly assists with External SaaS GRC Assessment by continuously evaluating an organization's Governance, Risk, and Compliance posture from the perspective of an unauthenticated external attacker, with a heavy focus on its exposure through third-party services and cloud environments.
How ThreatNG Aids SaaS GRC Assessment
External Discovery
ThreatNG performs purely external unauthenticated discovery to identify exposed assets, critical vulnerabilities, and digital risks. The key discovery mechanism for SaaS and cloud environments is SaaSqwatch (SaaS Discovery and Identification) within the Cloud and SaaS Exposure module. This discovers both Sanctioned Cloud Services and Unsanctioned Cloud Services associated with the organization.
Investigation Modules
The External GRC Assessment is a dedicated capability that identifies exposed assets and digital risks, and then maps these findings directly to relevant GRC frameworks.
Detailed Examples of GRC Mapping: This capability enables organizations to uncover external security and compliance gaps for the following frameworks: PCI DSS, HIPAA, GDPR, NIST CSF, and POPIA.
Key Contributing Modules (SaaS & Risk Focus):
Cloud and SaaS Exposure (SaaSqwatch): Identifies the specific services like Salesforce, Okta, Zoom, or Workday, and notes risks like Open Exposed Cloud Buckets. An open bucket could constitute a data leakage risk, directly violating GDPR or HIPAA mandates.
Data Leak Susceptibility: This rating is derived from uncovering external risks across Cloud Exposure, Compromised Credentials, and Externally Identifiable SaaS applications. These findings are critical GRC failures.
ESG Exposure: The GRC posture is further informed by the discovery and reporting of publicly disclosed ESG violations concerning Competition, Consumer, Employment, Environment, Financial, Government Contracting, Healthcare, and Safety-related offenses.
External Assessment and Security Ratings
The discovered risks are quantified and assessed, giving GRC teams a precise prioritization mechanism.
External GRC Assessment: This capability evaluates an organization's GRC posture.
Detailed Examples of SaaS-Related Risk Assessments:
Cyber Risk Exposure Rating: Assesses findings like Cloud Exposure (exposed open cloud buckets) and Domain Name Record Analysis (missing DMARC and SPF records). Missing email security records often indicate non-compliance with phishing-related controls, a GRC concern.
Supply Chain & Third-Party Exposure Rating: This A-F rating is based on findings across Cloud Exposure, Domain Name Record Analysis (Vendor Enumeration), SaaS Identification, and the Technology Stack. This directly quantifies the risk introduced by third-party SaaS vendors.
Continuous Monitoring and Reporting
ThreatNG provides continuous monitoring of all security ratings and external attack surfaces. This is essential for SaaS GRC, as service configurations can change daily, creating new compliance gaps.
Reporting Examples: The platform delivers External GRC Assessment Mappings reports specifically for PCI DSS, HIPAA, GDPR, NIST CSF, and POPIA. This allows the GRC team to see precisely how external risks translate into non-compliance with the specified regulations.
Cooperation with Complementary Solutions
ThreatNG's ability to map external risks to GRC frameworks, combined with its Legal-Grade Attribution, significantly enhances the function of complementary GRC and compliance solutions.
Example of ThreatNG Helping:
ThreatNG helps by detecting an exposed Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud bucket that contains files potentially in violation of GDPR due to exposed user data. The External GRC Assessment provides the direct mapping to the GDPR compliance gap, enabling the organization to proactively address this external compliance issue and strengthen its GRC standing.
Example of ThreatNG and Complementary Solutions Cooperation:
ThreatNG's SaaSqwatch discovers an organization is using an unsanctioned HR service (Greenhouse) that is externally identifiable. The External GRC Assessment immediately flags this shadow IT as a potential non-compliance issue under NIST CSF's asset management controls.
A complementary GRC or Risk Management Solution could use this finding, alongside ThreatNG’s definitive evidence, to automatically trigger an immediate internal audit or risk acceptance workflow. This use of ThreatNG's Legal-Grade Attribution accelerates the GRC process, focusing internal teams on exposed, high-certainty compliance failures that require immediate policy or contract review.
