How To Champion SaaS Security at Your Organization

Implementing a robust SaaS security program is one of the best ways of strengthening your company's overall security posture. But simply purchasing a security tool won't be enough – you must pay attention to certain critical organizational factors as well.

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This will require you to effectively make a case to technical teams and management about the advantages of a more sweeping embrace of SaaS-focused security.

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This brings challenges of its own, of course. But if you follow the six strategic steps outlined below, you will be able to maximize your efforts as a SaaS security champion, keeping your company and peers safe while advancing broader business objectives.

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STEP 1 –  ESTABLISH A CLEAR VISION AND PURPOSE

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Begin by crafting a crystal-clear vision that defines what you want to accomplish and how it impacts your organization. Your vision should clearly elucidate why establishing a proactive SaaS security program matters – to protect your data, ensure regulatory compliance, and navigate the ever-evolving SaaS landscape. The next few sections will provide more specific guidance on establishing your vision.

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Relevance Through Context

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Your security efforts should be connected directly to your organization's specific context. If you’re in a healthcare organization, for example, focus on how unauthorized note-taking and transcription tools could expose private health information. If you’re in a B2B SaaS company, on the other hand, demonstrate how a misconfigured CRM might publicly expose critical files and customer data.

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Align With Organization’s Mission

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Your security vision shouldn’t be bolted haphazardly onto your organization's core mission, it should be integrated into it on multiple levels. Wherever your company comes down on the tradeoffs between innovation and customer trust, weave your security narrative around these values. Remember, SaaS security directly supports these (and other) imperatives, and it’s important to make sure everyone understands why and how.

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Enrich with Stories and Numbers

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Strengthen your vision by incorporating compelling stories and concrete data. Consider this real-world example from the CISO of Belk:

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"When we talk about applications that we manage, we manage about 200. Well, you add all these SaaS applications that are on our network — that's more like a thousand now." This way, the size of the challenge of SaaS security becomes much more tangible.

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Looking at broader industry trends, the average enterprise now operates 490 SaaS applications, with over 53% qualifying as shadow SaaS apps. Without implementing proper SaaS security measures, organizations leave this massive attack surface undiscovered and vulnerable to threats.

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STEP 2 – ALIGN LEADERSHIP

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Implementing a SaaS security program presents unique challenges because organizations don't manage SaaS applications centrally. Different lines of business or departments own various SaaS applications, making cross-functional buy-in essential for success. Since organizational change typically begins at the top, start by building your case to peers at the C-suite and board level. Use these proven tactics to increase your chances of success.

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Tie Security Initiatives to Business Outcomes

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Frame SaaS security as a necessary first step that helps business leaders manage their outcomes more predictably by quantifying risks from SaaS applications. Effective SaaS security reduces data leakage risks, prevents compliance violations, and protects systems from compromise—all outcomes that directly benefit business leaders and their objectives.

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Bring Attention to Potential Cost-Savings

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Consolidating redundant SaaS licenses across departments can significantly reduce expenses and make room in the budget for other priorities. This financial incentive is often enough to convince budget owners to enthusiastically support SaaS security initiatives!

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“We discovered we had nine separate Smartsheet accounts spread out across different teams. By canceling eight of them, migrating users into one account, and taking advantage of tiered pricing discounts we were able to save $200K on Smartsheet licenses. That freed up budget we could then put toward security tools like Reco, and more importantly towards patient care.” 

– Mike D’Arezzo, Executive Director of Information Security and GRC, Wellstar Health Systems

Read the Full Case Study

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Lobby for Operational Support

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SaaS security touches every department—from marketing to HR, engineering to infrastructure, and finance to operations. For this reason, you must secure buy-in from cross-functional leaders at the operational level. Involve these stakeholders early so they can join your efforts to champion SaaS application security in their own departments. Without active commitment from leadership, SaaS security initiatives will quickly falter, especially when implementation requires changes to employee evaluation metrics (see Step 5).

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Form a SaaS Security Committee

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Organizations that successfully implement SaaS security initiatives establish dedicated committees for this purpose. Ideally, such committees should include regular meetings of representatives from IT, security, compliance, and various other business lines. The committee should be responsible for setting policies, reviewing risk assessments, prioritizing remediation efforts, standardizing processes for onboarding and sunsetting SaaS tools, and communicating security-enhancing initiatives across the organization.

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STEP 3 – CREATE YOUR IMPLEMENTATION STRATEGY

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After securing leadership alignment, you will then be faced with the task of developing a clear strategy to implement and maintain effective SaaS security. For its part, this process must begin with establishing a comprehensive baseline of your current environment before moving on to remediation and repair.

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Conduct a Baseline Assessment

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When you perform a baseline assessment with your SaaS security tool, you'll gain critical insights into the scope of your challenges and develop a clear understanding of the roadmap needed to achieve acceptable risk levels. During this foundational stage, partnering with the right security provider makes a significant difference in your success.

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Assign Phases to Remediation Efforts

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The initial findings from your SaaS security tool might overwhelm your team, making strategic prioritization of remediation efforts absolutely essential. Breaking your work into well-defined phases helps ensure you can realistically achieve your goals. Prioritize your remediation efforts by focusing first on applications that present the highest security and operational impact potential.

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Phase one should address your core applications—the SaaS platforms critical to your business's daily operations. These typically include essential systems such as Salesforce, Office 365, and Snowflake.

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Phase two can incorporate the highest-priority work items you identified during your baseline assessment. For example, an unprotected connection between your CRM and marketing platform that exposes thousands of records clearly outranks a lesser-used application with only a handful of user accounts.

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Beyond preventing team burnout, this phased approach delivers early wins that build momentum for your broader security initiative. One especially illuminating example of this strategy in action comes from Wellstar Health Systems, which improved its Microsoft posture score from 50 to 75 using the methodical approach just covered. According to one of their executives:

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“At first, seeing all the alerts felt overwhelming. But Reco’s Customer Success team was very helpful in showing us how to prioritize our findings in order to make the most impact with the least effort. For example, Reco provides a vendor risk score for every application – scoring on a scale of A through F. So you can sort by risk score and number of users, and prioritize from there. For example, an app rated F with 1000 users needs to be looked into first, whereas an app rated F with only one user could wait until later.”

– Mike D’Arezzo, Executive Director of Information Security and GRC, Wellstar Health Systems

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STEP 4 – EMPOWER APP OWNERS AND STAKEHOLDERS

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Collaborating effectively with the teams who own and administer each SaaS application forms the cornerstone of a successful SaaS security program. Actively engage these stakeholders and clearly demonstrate how security measures directly support their specific goals. What’s more, show them they have robust support throughout the process by helping them with the procedures outlined below.

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Implement Training

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When you integrate SaaS security education into your organization's routine security awareness training, you normalize security practices and transform them into fundamental requirements that will have a more meaningful impact on company culture. You should organize targeted workshops that train app owners on security best practices and provide customized templates and playbooks that simplify the process of configuring tools securely. This has the added benefit of lightening their cognitive load, which will help encourage the adoption and maintenance of a robust SaaS security posture.

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Assign and Incentivize App Owners

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Designate dedicated stakeholders within each department—marketing, finance, HR, and others—to serve as their department's primary point person for SaaS security initiatives. These individuals will actively communicate between the central security team and their departments, maintain secure configurations for department-specific applications, and relay new security policies to their colleagues.

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If you have the budget for it, it can also help to create compelling incentives like sponsored attendance at industry conferences, public recognition of their contributions during company events, and performance-based monetary rewards when security goals are achieved. These incentives help these key stakeholders remain motivated, engaged, and committed to advancing your organization's security profile.

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Provide Ongoing Support

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Your security team will have more success driving meaningful changes by actively partnering with app owners to interpret the (often complex) results of security audits and develop clear, phased improvement plans. Host regular monthly "office hours" specifically for app administrators to create a dedicated space where they can ask questions, troubleshoot challenging issues like Single Sign-On (SSO) implementation and Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) rollouts, and continuously strengthen their understanding of relevant best practices. With a consistent support structure, security goes from being a sporadic concern into an ongoing, top-of-mind priority across your organization.

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STEP 5 – MEASURE SUCCESS AND DRIVE ACCOUNTABILITY

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To ensure the success of your SaaS security initiative, you must establish clear metrics that define what success looks like. This can take many forms, but a great place to start is creating structured accountability systems and implementing feedback loops that enable continuous improvement when issues are uncovered.

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Define Metrics

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Clear, measurable metrics provide visible indicators of progress that all stakeholders can reference. In addition to driving accountability, this also allows your organization to recognize and celebrate wins, which is important for maintaining morale and building momentum. You could, for example, track the adoption rate of Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) across your company. Set 100% as your gold standard, since MFA serves as a foundational security measure that makes your SaaS accounts 99% less likely to be hacked.

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Tie Metrics to KPIs/OKRs

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After establishing your metrics, align individual performance to these security goals through Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) or Objectives and Key Results (OKRs). When you evaluate department managers and SaaS application owners partially on security metrics—such as achieving MFA adoption goals—they will prioritize security because it directly impacts their performance assessments.

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Since security teams typically don't manage app owners directly, you'll need to work through the SaaS Security Committee discussed above to implement this approach. Collaborate with department leaders to incorporate security metrics into their teams' performance frameworks. Present compelling data showing how security improvements protect business operations, and draft sample OKRs that department leaders can adapt for their teams. This cross-functional alignment changes SaaS security from a responsibility on the plate of an isolated security team into a priority shared across departments.

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Implement Ongoing Accountability

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Schedule regular check-ins with everyone contributing to your SaaS security program to maintain accountability and provide a structured forum for addressing challenges. These meetings create consistent opportunities for participants to share insights from their day-to-day work in the trenches and celebrate successes. A consistent meeting cadence keeps SaaS security at the forefront of stakeholders' minds and prevents momentum from stalling.

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During these check-ins, review metric progress visually through dashboards, recognize teams exceeding their goals, and collaboratively problem-solve obstacles faced by underperforming areas. This continuous feedback loop transforms security from a one-time project into an ongoing organizational discipline that continuously improves your protection against evolving threats.

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STEP 6 – ADDRESS COMMON CHALLENGES AND SOLUTIONS

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As with most other things, successfully implementing SaaS security requires anticipating potential obstacles and preparing effective solutions in advance. With that in mind, the material below lays out some common challenges along with proven strategies to overcome them.

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Challenge: App owners resist updating their SaaS configurations or adopting new security processes because they believe they lack sufficient bandwidth.

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Solution: Demonstrate to each stakeholder how security enhancements deliver a positive return on investment by preventing costly data breaches and avoiding regulatory fines. Provide comprehensive training, ready-to-use templates, and direct hands-on support throughout the implementation process to reduce their burden and reinforce your commitment to their success.

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Challenge: Application owners struggling with competing priorities will often relegate security requirements to secondary status behind more immediately pressing business concerns.

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Solution: When you develop your security strategy, do so collaboratively, i.e., by incorporating their input and aligning security work with their existing project timelines. Phase security requirements to fit within their established sprint cycles or project roadmaps. In situations where significant adjustments must be made to application configurations to meet your security needs, plan these changes to fit into the team's existing development schedule.

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Challenge: Resource constraints lead to stretched teams and budgets, making it difficult to find the resources required to get real security overhauls over the finish line.

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Solution: Champion a phased implementation approach to prevent sudden cost spikes and distribute resource requirements over time. Simultaneously, build a compelling business case that highlights the potential financial impact a single security breach could inflict—often far exceeding the cost of sustained security measures. Leverage the incentive strategies outlined in Step 5 to motivate individuals to embrace the "SaaS Security Champion" role within their departments, creating additional security-specific capacity without adding headcount.

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Thoughtfully anticipating these challenges and proactively preparing these targeted solutions will help you overcome both technical and organizational hurdles that might otherwise derail your SaaS security initiative.

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CONCLUSION

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The growth in SaaS applications, data volumes, and associated organizational complexity has been relentless–and there’s no reason to think it’ll slow down any time soon. This state of affairs demands immediate action on SaaS security initiatives, but the good news is organizations that implement comprehensive SaaS security programs now will establish a decisive competitive advantage in the future. This makes SaaS security far more than a routine security exercise—it represents a new frontier in proactive security, as well as a strategic investment in your organization's ongoing resilience and success.

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At Reco, we partner with organizations to build successful SaaS security programs. Our dedicated customer success team works alongside you throughout your journey to accelerate adoption, address resistance, strategically prioritize remediation activities, and expertly navigate the complexities of managing large-scale organizational change.

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"The Customer Success team has been very supportive in helping us with process management and helping us get the most value out of the tool. That was an added benefit I did not expect out of the Reco platform."

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– Mike D’Arezzo, Executive Director of Information Security and GRC, Wellstar Health Systems

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Ready to strengthen your SaaS security program and protect the critical data your business relies on? Schedule a Reco demonstration today.

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