From project management to scheduling meetings, there’s an app for that. You’ve got your all-time faves (probably open in another tab right now) and the ones you avoid like the plague.
What do they both have in common? Love ’em or not, SaaS apps have become integral to how we work every day. But with them comes a greater risk of data breaches and security issues.
Salesforce found that the average enterprise company has over 1,000 apps, with around 40% of those completely unmanaged. That’s 400 potential risks just chilling in your company’s digital landscape alongside all that unsecured data, contracts included.
It’s time for a new approach to data and app security. We teamed up with the pros at Ironclad to put the risk of unmanaged apps and AI into context—and we’re digging into how companies can take control of their data. Let’s get started.
Take control
SaaS apps are easily adopted and deployed, making for a widely distributed, individualized approach to management and security. Each app can be monitored and adjusted individually, but those apps add up. And individually controlling 1,000 total apps is asking a lot of your IT team.
When you have hundreds of vendors providing solutions for your company, it’s next to impossible to perform meaningful due diligence. Even with the best intentions, things are bound to slip through the cracks. With so many solutions to worry about, leaders often focus on securing their most sensitive apps and reacting to past incidents instead of creating proactive solutions.
So, what’s the most urgent consideration for IT teams and leaders looking to switch their mindsets about data? The need for a new security model.
Instead of attempting to monitor and manage each app individually, companies can create a centralized point of control and surveillance. No more juggling individual settings and policies: With a centralized system, IT gets better visibility into your company’s library of tools and how to secure them.
On your radar
Without a centralized view of your company’s apps, the risk of a data or security breach goes up. And with the rise of AI, that risk only increases.
Cloud apps run on company data, exposing it to potential loss and misuse. Introducing AI apps into the mix poses new challenges.
Let’s use legal as an example: Ironclad’s State of AI in Legal report found that 84% of in-house legal teams use AI for work. That doesn’t sound too bad on the surface, right? In reality, AI needs access to huge amounts of data to be effective, compounding the problem of keeping that data secure. With little regulation over AI in the US, companies carry the burden of simultaneously trying to maintain data privacy compliance.
Keeping with the legal theme, let’s talk about the risks in contracts and why they should be on IT’s radar. There’s a wealth of business insights in every contract, including:
- your company’s obligations + deliverables
- what vendors your company uses
- processing time + how long it takes to complete deals
The list goes on and on. And while those insights are useful to your team and vendors, there’s a lot of risk there, too. Contracts hold some of your company’s most sensitive data. Without a central solution, that data is spread across several teams, places, and contracting solutions.
Secure the foundation
To secure company data, you have to change the way you think about security. Good security is no longer a nice-to-have; it’s the resource fueling your business. Which means you have to build a solid foundation of control across allll apps.
Here are a few building blocks (or data nonnegotiables) to get you started:
- Everything (seriously, everything) should be encrypted, and you should hold the keys—not individual vendors, but your in-house team.
- You should have access to and control over audit logs.
- The same goes for app data. It should be easy to work with and accessible for data scientists and nonengineers alike.
- All data should be in a standardized format that supports analysis and integration with data from other sources.
Ready to get more control over your contracts? Ironclad is bringing contracts and security into the digital age. It centralizes the contracting process, giving you scalable security controls over all of your contracts. It powers billions of contracts every year, acting as the contract lifecycle management platform for innovative companies like Salesforce, L’Oréal, OpenAI, and more.
Ironclad helps companies collaborate and negotiate contracts, speeding up the process while maintaining compliance. Its secure platform is flexible, handling every type of contract workflow from sales and HR agreements to complex NDAs.
To stay secure, data security has to change. Learn how Ironclad can help.