SaaS Integrations: The Security Solution Secret Sauce for Success

As organizations adopt new technologies, threat actors evolve their attack methodologies. In response to these changes, security teams are integrating additional cybersecurity tools to enhance their monitoring capabilities. While this cycle enables security vendors to generate revenue, it means that security teams struggle with data silos, which ultimately create security blind spots or lead to alert fatigue. 

Security vendors market their solutions under the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) subscription model, yet they often fail to provide the same level of integration capability as business SaaS tools. As security teams consolidate their technology stacks, SaaS integrations become increasingly important. Today’s security operations centers (SOCs) need their security tool ecosystem to function like the business SaaS environment. However, for security vendors, building SaaS integrations often diverts developers from work on the core product. 

As buyers increasingly want SaaS integrations for their security tools, vendors need to respond quickly or risk deal loss and customer churn. 

What are the Benefits of SaaS integration for Security Buyers?

Effective security integrations are more than a technical convenience. They enable security teams to gain visibility into risk and automate response activities. 

Reduced Costs

When security vendors provide SaaS integrations, customers eliminate the costs of building and maintaining the application programming interface (API). Developers can focus on internally built applications without having the security team request additional work. OVer time, this lowers operational overhead and the security tool’s total cost of ownership (TCO).

Improved Visibility

Integrating security tools enables SOCs to gain a unified view of all activities occurring across their environment. By leveraging SaaS integrations for their security solutions, customers can enrich telemetry with context, creating a comprehensive view of the effectiveness of their security controls.

Increased Efficiency

SaaS integrations enable customers to connect various security tools. By aggregating and correlating data, they can implement automations to remediate or respond to security issues. By automating these manual processes, the security team can focus on strategic activities like threat hunting. 

What Are the Benefits of SaaS integration for Security Vendors?

On the flip side of the integration coin, security vendors gain various benefits from providing out-of-the-box APIs. 

Faster Time to Value

Built-in SaaS integrations accelerate deployment and adoption, enabling customers to realize their return on investment (ROI) faster. Vendors reduce sales cycles and improve the customer experience, ultimately building a repuation within a crowded market. 

Improved Customer Retention and Expansion

Delivering a SaaS security solution means using a subscription model. By providing out-of-the-box integrations, the vendor integrates the solution into the customer’s daily workflows quickly. Ultimately, the security solution becomes embedded in security operations and improves the customer experience, increasing renewal rates, reducing churn, and providing opportunities for upselling. 

Competitive Differentiation

Providing a library of prebuilt integrations signals that the vendors designed the solution for interoperability and ease of use. Security buyers increasingly expect vendors to integrate into their current security ecosystem so having a variety of out-of-the-box options can make the product stand out from other tools covering the same threat. 

What SaaS Integration Challenges Do Security Vendors Face?

While native SaaS integrations for security tools improve revenue and the customer experience, vendors often face unique challenges as they try to build them. 

Inadequate API documentation

Writing and maintaining API documentation is time-consuming and often leaves it incomplete and inconsistent. Inadequate API documentation leads to customer confusion, onboarding dealtes, and additional support tickets. Security vendors often face a trade-off between delivering customer-requested integrations and improving the core product. 

Difficult to diagnose and troubleshoot broken integrations

Application integrations can fail for various reasons, including:

• Changes to a dependent service. 
• Credentials expiring. 
• Updates to data schemas. 

Unlike static business SaaS app’s data, security applications and their data are dynamic, often updating in response to new threats. Security vendors struggle to identify where integration failures occurred, leaving customers with data and service disruptions. Missing security data may can lead to alert trigger failures or customer compliance issues, negatively impacting the vendor’s customer loyalty and brand reputation.  

Never-ending demand for integrations

Many vendors face constant customer pressure to develop new integrations, especially when adopting new technologies to address evolving threats. Security vendors struggle to keep pace with these requests because new ones often require custom integrations that divert developer and engineering teams from core product work. 

Maintaining data security and privacy

Security APIs often transmit sensitive security data, like external APIs or credentials. Maintaining the API means that security vendors need to continuously monitor security and privacy. 

Standardizing data 

Different security tools and platforms often use different schemas, data models, naming conventions, and event formats, including:

• Syslog
• JSON
• XML
• Vendor specific formats, like Palo Alto, Cisco, Microsoft Windows Event logs

If the vendor has to normalize the data for each integration, the process requires developers to understand the different data schemas and customize the API accordingly. 

Financial impact

At core, the aggregated challenges drive up the cost to build the integration. The initial cost to build the API can be anywhere from $16,560 – $22,080 while the continued maintenance can be another $32,400 – $43,200. When security vendors have to build each integration on their own, they often limit their out-of-the-box options to the most popular tools. 

Considerations When Choosing a SaaS Integration Platform

Instead of building integrations internally, many business-to-business SaaS companies use an integration platform. For security vendors, using a Unified API provider can scale their ability to provide native integrations. However, since security tools come with unique issues, vendors need to consider the provider’s business and security capabilities. 

Assess business needs

Security vendors should start by identifying their core integration needs. Some considerations include:

• Scalability and use cases: Connectors or integrations for the security tool categories that matter most. 
• Flexibility and adaptability: Features like adaptive data mapping and runtime configuration that make onboarding new tools easier. 
• Operational visibility and monitoring: Dashabords for monitoring integration health which enables prioritization and troubleshooting. 

Some examples of security categories to look for include:

• Security event management
• Ticketing and notification
• Vulnerability management
• Data Storage
• Identity management
• Endpoint security
• Network security
• Cloud security 
• Asset management
• Email security

Integration capabilities 

An integration platform should offer one connectors across many providers in the same category to reduce engineering effort and maintenance costs. Some considerations include:

• Standardization support: Data normalization across sources by supporting standard schemas like the Open Cybersecurity Schema Framework (OCSF).
• API and Software Development Kit (SDK) support: Well-documented APIs and SDKs in multipl language with example code and testing support. 
• Embeddable, configurable user interface (UI): UI components for selecting, configuring, and managing integrations that embed within the security solution to improve user experience and reduce development overhead. 

Ease of use

An integration platform should empower technical and non-technical users. Some considerations include:

• Easy setup: Efficient onboarding with minimal developer effort by providing authorization, credentials, UI, and schemas. 
• Operational tools: Dashboards or consoles for monitoring, logging that enable troubleshooting integration status and usage metrics. 
• Runtime flexibility: Integration configuration without redeploying code.

Security and compliance

Since the integrations handle sensitive and connect across multiple systems, an integration platform should have a security-first architecture. Some considerations include:

• Strong data protection: Encryption in transit and at rest, security token storage, credential handling, customer data isolation. 
• Role-based access controls (RBAC) for enabling least privilege: Ability to set edit/read access for people in the customer and vendor organizations. 
• Regulatory certifications: Vendor compliance via SOC-2 report and platform ability to support customer compliance needs. 

Cost considerations

The SaaS integration platform’s pricing model should cost less than internal development. Some considerations include:

• TCO: Licensing, onboarding, support, and maintenance to reduce integration, developer effort, and API updating costs while reducing custom work. 
• Flexible pricing: “Pay for what you use” model that allows scaling and choosing only necessary connectors without requiring a large up front investment. 
• AI capabilities: Providing AI assistants to reduce costs related to integration setup, data access, and automation. 

Synqly: A SaaS Integration Platform Built for Security Solutions

Synqly is the security integration solution that enables security vendors to reduce costs, accelerate their product’s time-to-value, and ensure secure, scalable growth. With Synqly, vendors can provide pre-built connectors across key security and IT categories with data normalized to industry standards and built-in monitoring for troubleshooting. 

Built by security practitioners, Synqly’s platform embeds security and compliance best practices, evidenced by our GDPR Data Privacy Agreement and SOC-2 Type 2 certification.  

Contact us today to see how Synqly can provide the SaaS integrations that lead to your security solution’s success.