A modern threat detection (TD) solution for SaaS security must provide near real-time insights, transparency, and seamless integration into the systems you already have. If you’re evaluating SaaS security tools, these differentiators will help you cut through the noise.
The risk of delayed threat detection
Threat actors thrive on speed. Most SaaS attacks are smash-and-grab operations, aimed at stealing valuable data quickly before detection. Delays in identifying these threats can leave your organization vulnerable to significant damage.
Unfortunately, many security solutions rely on delayed event logs, sometimes taking up to 24 hours to surface potential threats. Given the speed of modern attacks, this delay creates an opportunity for attackers to exfiltrate data before detection.
Near real-time threat detection is the gold standard
Your security solution should actively ingest and process all available audit data the moment it becomes available. But it’s not just about collecting logs—it’s about what happens under the hood of the detection engine.
A streaming-based architecture ensures events are processed in real time, eliminating delays caused by scheduled queries. This immediate processing is critical for identifying and responding to threats before they escalate. However, logs don’t always arrive in perfect order. To maintain an accurate and continuous view of activity, a robust system must reconstruct event sequences, correcting and reordering out-of-order logs as they come in. While this helps ensure clarity, prolonged log delays—such as batch interruptions lasting hours—present a different challenge, where response actions are stalled until the missing data is received and properly integrated.
Beyond just ordering events correctly, security systems must also keep pace with fluctuating SaaS event volumes. Dynamic scaling allows the system to adjust its processing capacity in real time, preventing bottlenecks and ensuring consistent performance even under heavy loads.
What sets a robust security solution apart?
- Immediate event processing: A streaming-based engine ensures events are analyzed as they happen, reducing detection delays.
- Intelligent log management: The system must handle out-of-order logs by reconstructing event sequences while also adapting to prolonged log delays to maintain an accurate security view.
- Scalable architecture: Dynamically adjusts to handle high ingestion volumes without performance degradation..
** Pro tip: Check the log availability and timing for each SaaS application in your environment. Many providers offer documentation on their log schedules. AppOmni’s OpenSource Event Maturity Matrix can help you assess whether your platform processes logs as efficiently as possible.**
Transparency: The missing link in threat detection
Many SaaS security solutions lack transparency in detection logic, making it difficult for security teams to understand the context behind alerts and fine-tune detection rules for their environments.
Why transparency matters
- Context for investigation: Transparent detection rules ensure security teams can trace alerts back to their source, making it easier to assess whether an event is truly malicious.
- Customizable detections: Without insight into detection logic, teams are forced to work with out-of-the-box rules that may not align with their risk profile. Full transparency allows teams to tailor threat detection to their needs.
- Better detection engineering: Security teams need control over how threats are identified. Transparent rules allow them to refine detection logic over time, reducing false positives and increasing detection efficacy.
Solutions that act as a “black box,” simply forwarding alerts without clear reasoning or rule logic, hinder investigation efforts and limit security teams’ ability to adapt to evolving threats. A truly effective SaaS security platform not only provides full rule transparency but also offers guidance on triage, investigation, and remediation—ensuring teams know what to do next.
Security teams don’t have time to be experts in every SaaS platform, and even with visibility into detection logic, it might as well be a black box if they lack the necessary context for the platform the alert is for. Without this, organizations may find themselves drowning in alerts but lacking the ability to proactively detect and neutralize advanced attacks.
Seamless integration: Working where your teams work
Security teams need threat detection solutions that integrate effortlessly into their existing workflows while providing key capabilities for investigation and triage.
Why seamless integration matters
- Works where your teams work: Security operations teams rely on a variety of tools, including SIEMs and SOAR platforms. Threat detection should seamlessly integrate with these systems rather than force analysts to pivot between multiple dashboards.
- Provides actionable insights: Raw, normalized logs should be forwarded directly into security platforms to ensure full visibility and investigation capabilities.
- Improves response times: Security teams need immediate access to threat data in the tools they use daily to speed up triage and remediation efforts.
A SaaS security solution should not require teams to manually pull logs or rely on proprietary dashboards. Instead, it should ingest, normalize, and be able to forward these normalized logs, ensuring that all relevant data is available in the SIEMs and analytics tools where your security analysts operate.
Reduce the noise with posture management
3 in 4 network intrusions in 2024 were due to misconfigurations or identity-related issues, according to Google. While triaging and responding to threats is critical, many alerts and threats can be prevented with strong posture management. A robust posture management strategy reduces alert fatigue and frees up resources for higher-priority threats.
At AppOmni, we’ve observed that organizations—including 5 of the Fortune 10—can reduce threat alerts by up to 48% by having a strong posture.
What to look for in deep posture management
- Automation to ensure consistent enforcement of security policies
- Breadth of coverage across SaaS applications, not just a handful of tools
- Ease of use so security teams can implement and maintain posture controls without unnecessary complexity
Key takeaways: What you should demand from your SaaS threat detection solution
- Near real-time threat detection: Delays are a security risk you can’t afford.
- Transparency in detection logic: Full visibility into how alerts are generated enables security teams to investigate efficiently and customize detection rules.
- Seamless integration: Threat detection should work where your teams work, passing raw normalized logs into SIEMs for full visibility and faster investigation.
- Deep posture management: Reducing alert fatigue by addressing misconfigurations and enforcing secure baselines, freeing your team to focus on real threats.
The bottom line
If your SaaS security provider isn’t delivering expert-driven, real-time threat detection with full transparency, you might be operating with false confidence. In today’s environment, near real-time response, transparent detections, and proactive posture management are non-negotiable. Asking the hard questions now can prevent SaaS breaches before they happen.
Want to see what a truly expert-driven SaaS threat detection engine looks like?
Contact us today for a deeper dive into AppOmni’s approach to SaaS security.