How HR teams can improve their SaaS security and compliance

The role of HR in ensuring SaaS security compliance in your company

From C-level executives to your newest recruit, security is everybody’s business, and, as the gatekeeper of your company, HR has a critical role in ensuring your data security. As your company becomes larger, you add more SaaS tools to your SaaS stack.

Without the right security measures for your team, each user of an app becomes a potential security risk.

In this article, we’ll be sharing exactly how HR teams can collaborate with IT to ensure the security of your SaaS environment, as well as org-wide compliance with security regulations and rules.

Key points in SaaS security and compliance

The security of your company’s SaaS environment depends on

• The security practices of your SaaS vendor.
• The security practices of your workforce.

According to a 2022 forecast by Gartner, 95% of cloud security failures will be the users’ (your employees’) fault. This means that after carrying out security audits on your SaaS vendors, there is still work to do on the human side of the SaaS security scale.

That is where HR comes in. Below are a few best practices you can adopt to improve your SaaS security today:

1. Create a SaaS governance policy for your organization

Shadow IT is the first culprit in SaaS security. The second is insecure and unauthorized access to your SaaS stack and data. HR should collaborate with IT to develop a clear policy the govern SaaS adoption: How are requests for new tools handled, individually or through team leads? Who is responsible for vetting security of new tools? Who is responsible for training employees on security protocol? Connecting HR and IT to develop firm policies and guidelines for employees is an important first step in SaaS security.

2. Enforce company-wide SaaS workflow adoption

It is one thing to create a policy, it is another thing for your employees to accept it and work with it. HR teams should work with IT to maintain visibility into if and how the above guidelines are adopted. Using workflows to track SaaS adoption, changes, and high-risk usage will make it easy to identify if and when security breaches occur and faster to remedy them.

3. Start from employee onboarding

SaaS security and compliance should begin when you bring in new hires.

HR must get new recruits updated on the security practices of your organization (and signed off on complying with them). These best practices should enforce your SaaS governance policy, and educate new hires on how to handle company data, access company tools outside of the workplace, and share sensitive information without putting the business at risk.

4. Continue through employee offboarding

HR must ensure exiting employees are properly and promptly removed from the company’s SaaS environment. Insider attacks are common security threats, and it takes just a single mistake or an angry employee to cause your company a lot of security trouble.

5. Educating new and existing employees on security developments

One of the jobs of HR is organizing training programs for employees. Collaborating with other stakeholders, HR can organize mandatory SaaS security training sessions for your employees across the organization. The purpose of this is to keep your staff up to date on SaaS usage and security best practices.

6. Build an environment that encourages employee co-operation in promoting security and compliance

Your employees should be free and safe to report security threats to HR. This can be actual or impending security threats on the conduct of other employees to HR.

Automate and streamline your security compliance processes with Vendr

The job of HR starts when (or even before) an employee’s first day in your company, and continues even after the employee is out of the company. We discovered most of the processes involved in carrying out these duties can be automated. We built Vendr to help your company work in a secure SaaS environment without wasting hours of your human resource manpower.

Vendr helps you see the security status of all your vendors in one place- letting you assess security risk at a glance. Blissfully lets you set up a streamlined and automated employee on and offboarding process to ensure compliance. And see who is accessing your SaaS tools, how, and from where to stay ready for your next security audit.