AppOmni this week unveiled a technology preview of a digital assistant to its platform for protecting software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications that uses generative artificial intelligence (AI) to identify cybersecurity issues.

The AskOmni assistant provides access to a natural language chat interface for launching queries that reduces the level of expertise required to employ the SaaS security posture management (SSPM) platform developed by the company.

Capabilities of the AskOmni assistant include risk assessments that surface remediation advice, notifications of excessive user access permissions to sensitive data and real-time threat intelligence.

AppOmni CTO Brian Soby said the goal is to provide cybersecurity teams with more context as they correlate potential threats to SaaS applications that now make up an ever-increasing percentage of the attack surface that needs to be defended. That requires an ability to identify, correlate and remediate issues faster at a time when cybercriminals are specifically targeting the data that resides in these platforms, he added.

SaaS applications are subject to the same shared responsibility requirements for cybersecurity as any other cloud service, noted Soby. Each provider of a SaaS application will secure the underlying platform, but ensuring that, for example, credentials are not stolen, or that insiders have access to data they shouldn’t is the responsibility of the organizations employing those applications, said Soby.

Addressing that requirement has become especially challenging as the number of SaaS applications organizations use has steadily increased since the COVID-19 pandemic began. With more employees now working remotely than ever, reliance on SaaS applications within enterprise IT environments has only increased, even as more employees begin to spend time once again in the office. Regardless of where employees are now working, organizations are not going to replace the SaaS applications they have adopted over the course of the last three years. It’s now the responsibility of cybersecurity teams to ensure the data residing in those applications doesn’t get compromised.

It’s not clear to what degree generative AI tools such as AskOmni will improve application security, but the overall level of toil required should steadily decline as they become more widely available. Cybersecurity teams should be able to determine the root cause of an issue without having to navigate overlapping and often conflicting alerts that, over time, increase the overall level of fatigue experienced.

At the same time, the number of incidents that cybersecurity teams will need to respond to should decline as it becomes simpler to proactively protect data before cybercriminals can exfiltrate it.

In the meantime, organizations may want to review the number of SaaS applications they are using. In the early days of the pandemic, many business leaders decided to adopt SaaS applications with little to no regard for any potential cybersecurity concerns. In addition to increasing the overall size of the attack surface that needs to be defended, usage of SaaS applications that might have redundant capabilities also increases the total cost of IT.

Of course, SaaS applications are not going away any time soon. The issue now is finding a way to secure the least number of them possible, given all the potential threats against them.