When you look at current trends shaping modern work—the staying power of remote work, the rampant pursuit of AI-powered productivity hacks, the erosion of IT governance caused by vendors’ PLG (product-led growth) strategies—a SaaS security and governance market seems all but inevitable. After all, in today’s cloud-first and cloud-native organizations, traditional network security, SAM (software asset management) and ITSM (IT service management) solutions are rendered incomplete, if not obsolete.

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This is what led us to develop the world’s first and only SaaS security and governance solution built for modern work. With over 90% of all SaaS and AI apps today adopted outside of IT, we recognized the urgent need for a new approach to discovering, protecting, and governing all SaaS assets everywhere work happens.

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Recently, Nudge Security was recognized in the first-ever 2024 Gartner Magic Quadrant for SaaS Management Platforms report (subscription required). While we are proud to be included in this report just shy of our startup’s second birthday, we are even more encouraged by the recognition of this emerging market, which we believe gives credence to the critical need for SaaS security and governance solutions in modern enterprises.

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According to Gartner, “SaaS management platforms empower organizations to address the compounding challenges of SaaS application usage across the business that lead to overspend, elevated risk, lack of visibility and contract sprawl.”

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The report from Gartner also included strategic planning assumptions:

• “Through 2027, organizations that fail to centrally manage SaaS life cycles will remain five times more susceptible to a cyber incident or data loss due to incomplete visibility into SaaS usage and configuration.
• Through 2027, organizations that fail to attain centralized visibility and coordinate SaaS life cycles will overspend on SaaS by at least 25% due to unused entitlements and unnecessary, overlapping tools.
• Through 2027, over 50% of organizations will centralize SaaS application management using an SMP, an increase from less than 10% in 2024.”

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In the report, Nudge Security was given an honorable mention, which means we didn’t check all of the boxes defined by the research team. Namely, at the time of the research, we didn’t satisfy criteria related to SaaS cost optimization. However, on the heels of the report’s publication date, we launched new cost optimization features that we believe will help organizations to avoid wasted SaaS spend and close the gap noted in the research.

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Overall, our take is that current SMP solutions largely take shape from the perspective of IT and ITOps teams’ requirements. We developed our solution from a security-first perspective, and we believe strongly that a robust SMP can and should serve a broad set of stakeholders: IT and operations, security, GRC, finance, and even SaaS business owners and individual employees. We built our solution to act as a complete system of record for an organization’s SaaS estate, along with the context and capabilities required to satisfy their unique use cases.

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Undoubtedly, this market will evolve in the coming years. Any critical capabilities defined today are cast in wet cement, and we expect to see more organizations like our customers focus their requirements on SaaS security and governance rather than adopting redundant or partially overlapping SMP, SSPM, and other cloud and SaaS security solutions. We look forward to the evolution of this market and are excited to drive innovation in this space with our unique, patented approach to SaaS discovery.

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Gartner, Magic Quadrant for SaaS Management Platforms, By Tom Cipolla, Yolanda Harris, Jaswant Kalay, Dan Wilson, Ron Blair, Lina Al Dana, 22 July 2024.

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