This post started as a bit of a joke but I am incredibly passionate and serious about the subject matter; the topic is software-as-a-service (SaaS) and cybersecurity and specifically how our company, Armor, is striving to "put the SaaS in security." About a year ago, we were batting around ideas for a new tagline for Armor. The first thing you need to know about this exercise is that our Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) has a strong passion for corporate marketing guidelines enforced by our Creative Department. She firmly believes in the power of a unified brand and powerful, singular messaging. The second thing you need to know about the exercise is that our CEO has a good sense of humor and likes to push our CMO's buttons sometimes. During the brainstorming session our CEO came up with the phrase "put the SaaS in security" - he liked it because it expressed the software-as-a-service nature of solution delivery AND because it expressed a cheeky and sassy attitude toward an industry that was often rooted in legacy technology and business models. While our CMO refused to let it become the official tagline of Armor, the tagline stuck as a rallying cry among the leadership team to continue to innovate to deliver the best SaaS security platform on the market. In this post, I am going to take a look at 3 reasons Armor puts the SaaS in security with its Armor Anywhere solution.

The first reason Armor puts the SaaS in Security is because it believes in the power of the SaaS business model not just as a delivery mechanism for its software solution but as a transformative operational model for Enterprise companies and service providers looking to build out security programs in today's modern era. The second reason is because we in the principles of simplicity, actionable analytics, and security and compliance outcomes at Armor, which helps us focus on building a sassy product each and every day. And lastly, Armor is sassy because we are highly particular with what we do and focus on doing it well, while allowing our invaluable and amazing partner ecosystem to do the rest. The rest of today's post will explore each of these reasons in detail.

The cybersecurity industry has, as a whole, been relatively stuck in a legacy mindset of enterprise software delivery and has had trouble making the leap to today's cloud and SaaS-driven world. Cybersecurity vendors delivered hardware or virtual-based appliances that were complex to configure and install in order to take advantage of their services. These security devices were offered on capital expenditure, year or multi-year contracts to CISOs and IT security teams and they were how businesses learned to understand risk, i.e. I have a walled garden that I need to protect. Corporate infrastructure primarily being on premise or in private data centers also helped contribute to this mode of delivery.

Fast forward to today and the world of IT is increasingly complex. Businesses often host their infrastructure in multiple cloud environments (public cloud, on prem, private cloud, etc.) and deliver their applications using a combination of IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS. Also, the public cloud democratized the ability for any business unit within the company to become an owner of their own IT, therefore responsibility for securing that IT has shifted out of traditional buying and ownership centers within an organization. Couple these trends with the fact that the cybersecurity vendor landscape has exploded over the years with 5000 point answers to point problems that have popped up as businesses tackle different use cases from user and identity access management to network security to workload protection, etc. and organizations' security leaders are left with an incredibly complex and Sisyphean task of maintaining a confident risk posture for a company.

Armor believes that the cybersecurity industry needs to evolve with the times and develop platform solutions delivered via software-as-a-service to help enterprises and service providers to stay safe and secure no matter the complexity of their IT modern day IT environment. The SaaS model itself helps solve some of the challenges the industry has been facing today. Instead of capital expenditures that require fiscal planning cycles that cannot keep pace with the change of digital transformation, the SaaS model offers the ability for businesses to consume services on a pay-only-for-what-you-consume model or at least monthly recurring payment models. This allows for security to be budgeted as an operational expenditure rather than a capital one and allows for more flexibility in keeping pace with the change of digital transformation. Secondly, SaaS delivers everything as software, which is advantageous when it comes to security because it allows more instantaneous deployments taking implementation time from weeks to hours. Also software-based approaches to security are more in line with the way infrastructure is deployed in today's cloud world. Just like infrastructure is deployed as code, security can be deployed as code as well ensuring that infrastructure is protected as far left as possible in the CI/CD pipeline and that it can be deployed by the same individuals who are building and deploying the software that runs your business, your developers and cloud engineers. SaaS democratizes access to security in the same way it did for infrastructure services within the public cloud providers. This is critical because the cybersecurity industry faces tremendous talent shortages and we need to empower as many individuals within an enterprise as possible to help companies to take on critical security and compliance tasks within a business.

The second reason is because we in the principles of simplicity, actionable analytics, and security and compliance outcomes at Armor, which helps us focus on building a sassy product each and every day. This is a little acronym I created to help me focus product development efforts at Armor. SaaS (Simplicity, Actionable Analytics, Security and then if we want to add the 'y' that's on the end of sassy I add a C for compliance because it's close enough and critical to the outcomes Armor is able to provide for its customers). Security is not a technology problem (or the 5000 point solutions to point problems would mean we never saw breaches); it is an operations problem due to the inability for companies to build sustainable processes for analyzing risk with their technology and scale those operations with the talent crunch the industry faces today. Therefore, solutions in the space need to focus on helping companies simplify operational delivery of security operations programs. We have already discussed some of the ways SaaS helps with this by simplifying the deployment, installation, and configuration of security technology within an environment. However, technology can also help automate a lot of the repetitive task of a team allowing a business to focus on the security risks that matter and solve the operational problems of alert fatigue, tool fatigue, level one security triaging and security detection, false positive reduction, etc. Lastly, SaaS platforms can simplify the process of building an effective security program for a business by giving them a framework that focuses on outcomes and picks the best technology to help them get there. This modular framework allows a business to solve the right challenges at the right time for their business without worrying about locking into a particular vendor ecosystem and solution vertical only to have it be outpaced by the pace of digital transformation. The extensibility of SaaS platforms help future-proof a business against security challenges they face as their digital environment changes.

Beyond simplicity, our SaaS-y mantra helps us build products that focus on actionable analytics that help businesses focus on the outcomes they need rather than how they necessarily get to that outcome. Armor's platform relies on best of breed technology that our partners have developed to give enterprises the confidence that they are receiving the latest and greatest detection technology, while focusing on how all of that technology comes together with people and processes into an effective program for managing security and/or compliance risk. Too often vendor solutions in the space today are great at alerting you to all the possible risk within your environment but they leave you helpless in what to do next. That is why Armor puts a focus on the word actionable. If you can not turn your data into insight and understanding then you cannot effectively manage risk. And lastly, companies are fatigued with vendor solutions today. They simply have time to focus on particular security and compliance outcomes that are important to their businesses. This is where SaaS platforms can have tremendous value as they guide businesses on how to best achieve those outcomes. Because let's face it: very few businesses are security experts; they are building businesses that change the world and need to focus on that mission and rely on experts that know how to put the pieces together for an security effective program to do their job on their behalf.

The last reason Armor puts the SaaS in security is a small but powerful one. Just like a person with a sassy attitude, we are sassy cheeky because we have the right to be. We are extremely good at what we do. Our compliance and security experts are the best in the world and we've been able to translate that expertise into software to protect the world's largest enterprises. But we have built that attitude because we have been obsessively focused on building a software platform that help enterprises build security and compliance programs that can scale to meet the complex operational challenges of today's modern IT environments. Nothing else matters to us and hence why we've gotten a bunch of sassy counterparts together to build the best partner ecosystem on the planet that allows Armor to be sassy about what we do while pointing enterprises in the direction of other sassy companies that can help solve problems in spaces we don't focus on. Whether it's our technology partners such as Qualys, TrendMicro, VMware, ChaosSearch, etc., or our MSP partners such as Rackspace Technology, 2nd Watch, Quantum Security, Pulsant, etc., we are able to offer a wide array of complementary solutions that deliver security as part of broader digital transformation and cloud projects. Instead of trying to keep making "fetch" happen, Armor maintains a focus on its sassy delivery of security and empowers its partner community to help with the rest.

Thank you for reading this lengthy post about a subject I'm incredibly sassy and passionate about - SaaS in cybersecurity and how Armor puts the SaaS in security every day as we build and deliver solutions to market. I am incredibly grateful and humble to be a part of the journey Armor is on and hope that we maintain the sassy attitude I have grown to love. Leave your comments below! I would love to hear from you on the ways SaaS has transformed the way your company approaches security and compliance for your critical assets. And as always, if you enjoyed the post and want to show your appreciation with a cup of coffee you can do so with the button below.