What is SaaS Configuration Drift? System Consistency Explained

Today’s companies use tens and sometimes hundreds of cloud-based software applications for everyday work processes. While the software as a service model brings significant agility, it brings its own operational problem called configuration drift. 

As a result of time and routine operations, various tweaks, manual changes, shadow IT practices, and other factors slowly drive systems away from their initial security baselines. Continuous monitoring of all processes needs to be maintained to understand what is SaaS configuration drift.

Basics of the Problem: What Makes Configuration Drift Possible

Configuration drift is a situation where software settings are slowly moving away from the initial baseline over time. Main causes of configuration drift may include:

• Manual Adjustments: Administrators who tweak access controls or notifications to resolve problems and forget to restore everything to the previous state.
• Shadow IT: Departments that are introducing new connections to the system or corporate applications without using IT services by means of purchasing software via a company credit card.
• Vendor Platform Update: Cloud service providers who change some aspects of their system or features automatically without informing the customers about it.

Also Read: IT Services Every Growing Business Needs for Long-Term Growth

Risks Associated With Unmanaged Settings Changes

The risks of not controlling the modifications made to security settings can have a great influence on the enterprise’s positioning as well as operations of the company:

• Security Breaches: The leak of sensitive files, unintentional privilege grants, and link distribution can lead to serious breaches.
• Noncompliance: The lack of control over the setting modification violates the existing framework, making companies susceptible to audit failures and fines.
• Disruptions: Different settings in related cloud applications may result in API disruptions and unexpected workflow problems.

To address all of these issues, a new approach is needed in infrastructure management.

How to Detect and Manage Drift Effectively

In order to stay in control of the dynamic SaaS stacks, organizations need to move from regular manual reviews to constant automated posture management:

Use Automated Tools: Adopt tools that would alert about any deviation from the standard baseline in terms of any admin settings, user privileges, or security rules.

Make Evaluations Contextual: Adopt context-aware tools that would be able to show how the identity and permissions of the application are connected to evaluate risks correctly.

Simplify the Process of Remediating: Develop automated or semi-automated workflows that would either roll back any risky setting change automatically or notify admins about any non-standard changes.

Conclusion

Manual management of modern SaaS software is not feasible. Any uncontrolled changes to settings are slowly damaging the consistency of the system and making sensitive information vulnerable to security attacks.