Two-thirds (66%) of organizations believe their enterprise SaaS application would cause the greatest amount of disruption to their business above all others in the event an outage, according to a new study by AppOmni.
The survey of over 200 IT professionals also found that 66% have less time to effectively manage and secure SaaS applications, with 93% stating they have recently received additional responsibilities in light of the shift to remote working during COVID-19.
The move to work from home has substantially increased cloud adoption and other remote work technologies. This has led to organizations growing their use of SaaS applications to help enable this transition. However, managing and securing these applications effectively is proving difficult, according to the report, which found that 68% of IT professionals rely solely on manual efforts to detect data exposures.
In addition, more than half (52%) of respondents said the biggest challenge with existing cloud security solutions is their reactive nature, only alerting them to a problem once an incident has already been detected.
Brendan O’Connor, CEO at AppOmni, commented: “Due to COVID-19, IT teams are struggling to keep up with massive changes to day-to-day operations and the accelerated rate of cloud adoption associated with a remote and virtual workforces. This highlights the need for companies to work to better secure their current SaaS applications given that 90% of the respondents we surveyed noted that their usage of SaaS applications has increased in adoption since the beginning of the pandemic.”
He added: “These days, more organizations are investing in preventative solutions and gaining visibility into their cloud attack surface than ever before. Even post COVID-19, businesses will need to offer remote work opportunities to stay competitive. Now is the time to implement a hybrid working strategy that includes mission-critical SaaS applications. Companies that wait until it’s too late are going to find themselves behind the curve, making them easy targets for attackers.”