Top 4 Best Practices for Securing Every App in Your Ecosystem
How IT and security teams can bring disconnected apps, the ones without SSO, SAML, or SCIM, under the same protection as the rest of their stack.
Disconnected applications create serious security gaps. Because they sit outside your identity provider, with no APIs or support for SAML, SCIM, or OIDC, they lack the visibility and centralized management your other apps have, which exposes your ecosystem to risk. Securing them comes down to four best practices.
1. Audit your applications
You can't secure what you can't see, and disconnected apps are the ones IT and security teams monitor least. Map your full application landscape, then rank apps by operational criticality and data sensitivity and flag the ones that lack secure authentication, so you can prioritize.
2. Close access gaps
Many vendors charge an SSO tax, an extra fee to unlock single sign-on, which discourages teams from applying it everywhere. Consolidate authentication through your IdP and enable SSO on every compatible app, and for apps that lack APIs or don't support SAML or SCIM, use Cerby to extend SSO and lifecycle management so everything sits under one identity perimeter.
3. Streamline lifecycle management with automation
When provisioning and deprovisioning are manual, business users end up managing their own security and human error creeps in. Automate role-based access so permissions apply consistently, and make sure deprovisioning happens immediately and cleanly when someone's role changes or they leave.
4. Educate and iterate
Without ongoing review, employees overlook the risks in disconnected apps and gaps go unmonitored. Review your application security processes and access permissions regularly, keep employees informed about disconnected-app risks, and encourage reporting of potential threats.
Doing this consistently across a sprawling app ecosystem is the hard part. Cerby automates the heaviest steps, extending SSO and MFA, automating provisioning and deprovisioning, and giving IT visibility into every app including the disconnected ones, so these best practices hold without constant manual effort.
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