Say Yaas to the SaaS: Give Buyers the Experience They Want

While many security tools follow a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) business model, few provide a truly SaaS-based user experience. While this seems like a bold statement, security SaaS-alike solutions grew from different end-user needs when compared against traditional business-to-business (B2B) SaaS products. Despite growing in parallel and appearing similar, the divergent history of these two technologies has created many of the current problems that security teams face when trying to integrate tools. 

Today, security is a business concern as much as an IT issue. To remain competitive in an increasingly crowded market, security vendors should reassess how they build their products by understanding business buyers’ needs and providing solutions that respond to them. 

By understanding how B2B SaaS integrations improve end-user workflows, security vendors can bridge the gap between protecting systems and providing insights. 

How Did B2B SaaS and Cloud-Based Security Solutions Evolve Differently?

Business SaaS and cloud-based security solutions evolved in parallel, yet they initially responded to different customer needs. While business SaaS technologies can trace their beginnings to the 1999 release of Salesforce’s customer relationship management (CRM) solution, cloud-first security tools evolved as a direct response to the business solutions. Essentially, from the very beginning, cloud-based security tools existed as reactive measures, with Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) surfacing in the early 2000s and Gartner coining the phrase Cloud Access Security Broker (CASB) in 2012. 

Simultaneously, as SaaS technologies matured, business-focused Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) evolved with them, becoming increasingly integral to business operations throughout the 1990s and into the 2000s.

As business SaaS and cloud-based security tools evolved, their different buyer personas impacted their development trajectories. 

How Do Business SaaS Integrations Differ from Security Tool Integrations?

Business SaaS solutions often offer a more seamless integration experience than cloud-based security tools because the technologies evolved in response to different buyer needs. 

Integration Focus

From the beginning, these two categories of technologies integrated with other tools for different reasons:

• Business SaaS: Flexible, open integrations embedded into business processes and cross-functional workflows to enhance productivity.
• Security solutions: Security telemetry collection, event correlation, and threat intelligence sharing to improve risk visibility and mitigation. 

User Experience and Workflows

Similarly, the two technologies had different end-users with divergent priorities:

• Business SaaS: Intuitive interfaces that prioritizes user experiences for streamlined end-to-end business workflows. 
• Security solutions: Specialized user experiences that prioritize control, compliance, and auditability over workflow flexibility, often creating data and tool silos. 

Extensibility and Customization

With a focus on different end-users, the technologies took different approaches to integration:

• Business SaaS: Extensible design to support customizations, third-party integrations, and modular architectures. 
• Security solutions: Rigid design constrained by predefined security controls and policies, often using proprietary data schemas. 

Deployment and Agility

The different objectives changed the deployment models that have led to current integration challenges:

• Business SaaS: Rapid deployment and frequent updates responding to dynamic market and user needs. 
• Security solutions: Stable and compliance deployments with formal change management process to maintain security posture. 

Automation Goals

For both technologies, automation has become a critical selling point yet the end-user needs historically led to different outcomes:

• Business SaaS: Targeting business efficiency and workflow optimization. 
• Security solutions: Focused on incident response, continuous monitoring, and security policy enforcement.

Data Handling and Privacy

Finally, the technologies transmit and generate extremely different types of data which impacts how they integrate within an organization’s IT environment:

• Business SaaS: Border business data with varying privacy and security needs depending on function. 
• Security solutions: Highly sensitive security data, often in proprietary formats, that require data isolation, auditing, and compliance adherence. 

Why Do Security Buyers Want a B2B SaaS Experience from Their Vendors?

Increasingly, the security function is a business function that extends beyond the boundaries of the IT department. With cross-functional stakeholders, security teams need their continuous monitoring activities to provide business insights. However, siloed tools and data prevent them from achieving these objectives. 

To maintain revenue and differentiate themselves in a crowded market, security vendors need to respond to security buyers who demand the B2B SaaS experience that brings smooth integration, scalability, and usability. Today’s security buyers increasingly demand:

• Centralized, scalable security management compatible with their cloud-first environments. 
• Seamless integrations with other security tools and core business SaaS platforms. 
• Clear, actionable insights from the telemetry generated from their collection of security tools and business applications. 
• Real-time workflows that streamline incident response processes. 
• Cross-team collaboration capabilities so security, IT, and business units can work together. 

Creating True Security SaaS Solutions with a Unified API

Integrations are the new table stakes for cybersecurity vendors. Whether using integrations to bring in new customers or to create stickiness with existing customers, security vendors must provide the same seamless integrations as the business SaaS platforms. A Unified API provides a cost-effective way to give customers the best of both worlds, continued updates to core product capabilities and integrations across the complex security ecosystem. 

One API, Many Connections: Seamless Integration for Extensibility, Deployment, and Agility

A Unified API creates a general software category to provide a single, standardized endpoint, making it easier to integrate across diverse tools. In cybersecurity, this looks like creating an API based on various security controls:

    Alerting and event management

    Incident response communications

    Vulnerability management 

    Data storage

    Identity and access management

    Network security 

    Asset management

    Endpoint security 

    Cloud security

    Email security

With seamless, native integrations, customers can more easily deploy the solution and incorporate it into their current environment. Streamlined integration capabilities enable agility, ensuring that a security solution can integrate across multiple vendors, reducing the time and resources required for delivering a broad, integrated security ecosystem. 

Ultimately, the Unified API enables security vendors to generate net new customer relationships while creating stickiness with existing customers. 

Data Normalization: Customization, Workflows, and Automation

Unlike business SaaS applications, security solutions often use a variety of data formats, including:

    Syslog

    JSON

    XML

    Vendor specific formats, like Palo Alto, Cisco, Microsoft Windows Event logs

Even more challenging, each of these has their own:

    Field names

    Structures

    Nesting

The Unified API then parses and normalizes the data against a vendor agnostic schema, like the Open Cybersecurity Schema Framework (OCSF). With the ability to integrate all data from across the security ecosystem, customers can create custom, high-fidelity alerts and leverage analytics to gain true security insights. 

Interoperability allows customers to build the security technology stack they need and want, rather than confining them to a specific vendor’s ecosystem. Ultimately, this builds the long-term customer relationships that generate annual recurring revenue. 

Further, by normalizing data, no security solution becomes a barrier to automation. Security vendors can live up to their promises around improving key security metrics through automation without conditions or limitations. 

Secure, Managed APIs: Data Handling and Protection

While APIs are expensive to build, they are even more expensive to maintain. While the initial cost to build a security API can cost an average of  $16,560 – $22,080, the maintenance adds another $32,400 – $43,200 until the organization retires it. Beyond that, attackers increasingly target APIs to gain unauthorized access to the sensitive data they maintain. 

A Unified API provider builds and maintains the integration. When the provider understands the dynamic natures of security APIs, they can ensure continued availability when updating schemas in response to new threats. This reduces the cost of management by ensuring that the API maintains connectivity even when the security solution:

    Adds new fields

    Changes field names

    Updates the entire log structure

Further, a Unified API built for security can manage the sensitive and dynamic information that a customer’s IT environment generates beyond traditional personally identifiable information (PII), like:

    IP addresses

    Hostnames

    User credentials

Synqly: The Connected Platform that Transforms Cloud-Native Tool into SaaS Solution

Synqly is the first unified API for cybersecurity, IT Ops, and Managed Service Providers. With simple, secure, and scalable product integrations, security vendors can transform their model from a cloud-native tool into a SaaS solution that connects to customer security ecosystems.

Security vendors need to provide native integrations to remain competitive. With Synqly, customers can provide any request integrations without sacrificing time, quality, or expensive resources. 

Built by security veterans for security vendors, Synqly follows security best practices so that security vendors can meet customer deployment requirements, improving the customer experience and enabling continued revenue.