What is Nudge Security and How Does it Work?

Dec 11, 2024The Hacker NewsSaaS Security / Endpoint Security

In today’s highly distributed workplace, every employee has the ability to act as their own CIO, adopting new cloud and SaaS technologies whenever and wherever they need. While this has been a critical boon to productivity and innovation in the digital enterprise, it has upended traditional approaches to IT security and governance.

Nudge Security is the world’s first and only solution to bring together all facets of SaaS management in one solution:

• Discovery: Gain visibility into your full SaaS footprint including GenAI apps, free tools, duplicate tenants, unapproved apps, and more, all on Day One.
• Security: Secure new accounts as they are created, uncover and revoke risky OAuth grants, and continuously harden your SaaS security posture.
• Spend Management: Discover up to 2 years of historical SaaS spend and identify unused paid accounts, redundant apps, and shadow spend.
• Third Party Risk Management: View security profiles for all SaaS providers and get alerted when breaches impact SaaS vendors you use or those in your software supply chain.
• Identity Governance: Orchestrate and automate daily security and administration tasks so you can scale identity governance without overwhelming your team.

How Nudge Security works

Nudge Security discovers all SaaS accounts ever created by anyone in your organization within minutes of starting a free trial, and only requires a single point of integration: read-only API access to your Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace email provider. No endpoint agents, network proxies, browser plugins, app integrations, or other complicated deployment steps required.

The patented approach to SaaS discovery takes advantage of a consistent design pattern: every SaaS provider uses email to drive user engagement, making it the perfect event log to capture new account sign-ups and other security-relevant activities. By searching and analyzing machine-generated email messages (e.g., no-reply@box.com), Nudge Security builds and updates your inventory of SaaS accounts, users, spend, and resources, without you ever having to tell it which apps to look for.

Inventory of SaaS apps

Implement SaaS security best practices

Nudge Security can alert you immediately when new accounts or apps are introduced by your workforce so you’ll always be the first to know. You’ll see who has access to what along with valuable context on how access was granted, whether through SSO, an OAuth grant, or username and password. You’ll also see which apps and accounts are (and aren’t) enrolled in MFA or SSO so you can easily track progress against your identity security efforts and kick off automated workflows to help users enable MFA for their accounts and enroll apps in SSO.

Additionally, you’ll see a full inventory of all OAuth grants and scopes to understand where app-to-app integrations could allow data to be shared beyond what is permissible under your data governance policy. OAuth risk scores help you quickly identify overly permissive scopes so you can nudge app users for more context, or revoke the grant with two clicks.

View of OAuth grants flagged for review

Nudge Security also runs security posture checks on your critical IdP infrastructure (Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace), alerting you of:

• Misconfiguration risks such as unrestricted groups, email forwarding rules, and missing SSO.
• Identity risks such as suspicious email rules, inactive privileged accounts, and delegated inbox access.
• Integration risks such as unused OAuth grants with privileged access, active integrations associated with inactive users, and unapproved grants with risky scopes.

Curb wasted SaaS spend

Nudge Security is the only SaaS management platform that discovers up to two years of historical SaaS spend within minutes of starting a free trial. As described above, our patented method of SaaS discovery finds and analyzes invoices from the last two years to extract spend data such as billing frequency, amount, renewal date, billing owner, cost center, and most recent transaction, powering the platform’s cost optimization insights.

The SaaS spend management dashboard surfaces inactive and abandoned accounts associated with paid apps so you can reclaim costly licenses and redistribute them, or right-size your contract. There’s even an automated playbook to help you orchestrate account removals by enlisting app owners across the business in the clean up so you can scale SaaS governance efforts without drowning in manual tasks.

Additionally, for each app used in your organization, you’ll see a Venn diagram illustrating user overlap across similar apps, and you can click into the diagram to see the list of overlapping users across each combination of apps. The bigger the circle, the more accounts exist for that application. With this info, you can better understand which tools are heavily used and likely essential to productivity, and which would be candidates to be phased out.

Improve third party risk management

Nudge Security provides vendor security profiles for each of your SaaS providers, including breach history, compliance attestations, data locality, and more. With this data, you can conduct vendor security assessments more quickly and prepare for IT compliance audits more easily. And, only Nudge Security shows you the SaaS supply chain of your SaaS vendors, so when breaches of high profile apps occur you can quickly determine if you are in the blast radius of a third- or fourth-party supply chain attack. You’ll even be alerted if a SaaS provider you use is breached, or if a SaaS tool used under the hood by one of your providers is breached.

Scalable identity governance

The last thing you need is another security product that creates overhead for your team. Our built-in playbooks automate workflows for common identity governance tasks, like conducting user access reviews, IT offboarding, removing inactive accounts, and more so you can minimize time spent on tedious manual tasks while scaling your identity governance efforts.

Playbooks automate common SaaS administration tasks

Get started with Nudge Security.

To discover your organization’s SaaS footprint and modernize your approach to SaaS security and governance, start your 14-day free trial today.

Your SaaS management dashboard in Nudge Security