Security Guidance
5 minutes

SaaS Security Soars at Fal.Con 2022

At the end of September, the Obsidian team attended this year’s CrowdStrike Fal.Con cybersecurity conference in Las Vegas as part of the New Innovator’s Pavillion showcase. It was a great opportunity to network with other cybersecurity professionals in person, deliver our pitches at the Obsidian booth, and provide some unique insights around SaaS security. Across every conversation we had, there was a shared recognition of the immediate importance for visibility and security coverage for SaaS applications—even among organizations who hadn’t yet fully adopted them. We wanted to reflect on some of those interesting conversations and share some SaaS security takeaways from what was undoubtedly a full and engaging week.

SaaS adoption continues to rise

Of the many cybersecurity professionals who we spoke to at Fal.Con and who visited the Obsidian booth, each seemed to be at a different stage of adopting and securing SaaS applications on an organizational level. 

There were, of course, modern cloud-first companies who were basically entirely dependent on SaaS already and who recognized the immediate need to secure their SaaS environments. On the other hand, there were plenty of teams who had just begun their adoption of cloud applications with a limited rollout of just a few core services—an identity provider, a productivity suite like Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace, and maybe a select few others, for example. Many of these businesses were in industries with incredibly strict standards around data privacy which limited their flexibility to immediately transition away from existing infrastructure. Nevertheless, folks from these companies expressed that they expected their SaaS adoption to continue growing significantly in the near future.

Regardless of each business’s unique position in their cloud journey, there was absolutely a common thread in almost every single conversation: a fundamental need for security team visibility into SaaS environments to protect these critical applications.

Visibility is a fundamental requirement for cybersecurity

Security professionals from organizations that had already fully embraced SaaS applications expressed to us that, despite their full adoption of cloud services, their ability to monitor and protect these applications was very much lacking. Other people just beginning their SaaS journey were still eager to get their SaaS security approach in place proactively—especially when there were strict compliance expectations and data privacy commitments on the line.

While each person who joined us at the Obsidian booth was interested in SaaS security posture management (SSPM) for their own reasons, there was a shared excitement across all of these individuals about the prospect of having actual, complete visibility into their SaaS applications. Many reaffirmed that, as business owners continue deploying applications across their organizations, security teams are frequently left out of the loop. One security analyst we spoke to put it candidly when he said, “Honestly, we have no idea what’s going on in our applications.”

SaaS security has never been more relevant

Most people are already well aware that an unprecedented amount of sensitive business data is entrusted to cloud applications into which security teams have limited or no visibility into. Across every vector that attackers target, gaining access to SaaS applications seems to be an increasingly common end goal. Security leaders at Fal.Con recognized this urgency, and many came to our booth eager to learn more about how Obsidian would help address their team’s needs.

In fact, whether prompted by an internal event, a recent incident in the news, or just an evaluation of team needs, nearly every cybersecurity professional we spoke with was interested in the topic of SaaS security. Several different groups approached our booth mentioning that SaaS security posture management (SSPM) was on their shortlist for this upcoming year’s priorities, and that it’s an area their organization currently lacks sufficient protection.

Integrating Obsidian and CrowdStrike for seamless last mile security

Of course, because we were at Fal.Con, many inquired about the Obsidian integration with CrowdStrike and wanted to learn about how we identified the movement of threats from endpoints to applications. Connecting the CrowdStrike Falcon platform to Obsidian enables seamless data correlation and threat detections across endpoints and SaaS applications. 

On a practical level, this integration helps security teams answer questions like:

  • A user’s device was infected by malware. Were any of their SaaS accounts compromised? Are any of these accounts privileged?
  • I’m examining a user’s SaaS accounts during an investigation. What devices are they using?
  • A user is logging into their SaaS applications from an unusual location. Where are their sanctioned devices, and are the geolocations consistent?

More detail on the CrowdStrike and Obsidian integration is available in our latest brief.

All in all, this year’s Fal.Con was a massive success and another great part of our valuable partnership with CrowdStrike. A huge thank you to everyone who stopped by the booth to chat, learn, or just catch up. It was a memorable event for our team and many others—and we can’t wait for the next one.