The Problems with Homegrown Threat Detection and Response for SaaS

As organizations adopt more SaaS and AI applications, security teams are wrestling with how to effectively monitor and secure their expanding SaaS environments. Many organizations believe they can build effective threat detection and response programs using their existing security tools, particularly Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) platforms.

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However, doing so may become prohibitively complex and ultimately fall short of providing adequate protection. The reality is that general-purpose security tools weren't designed for the unique challenges of SaaS security.

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Here are eight critical considerations that illustrate why building a homegrown threat detection and response solution for SaaS may be more problematic than it sounds.

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7 Considerations for DIY Threat Detection and Response Solutions

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1. Log Availability

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The foundation of any threat detection program is data, but not every SaaS application produces the logs needed for security monitoring. Many popular applications offer limited logging capabilities, particularly at lower subscription tiers. This fundamental gap means companies attempting DIY approaches are often limited to having visibility into only a subset of their SaaS ecosystem—creating blind spots in their security coverage.

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2. Integration Issues

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Even when logs are available, getting them into your SIEM can be a major challenge. Many SaaS applications lack native SIEM integrations, requiring custom development work to bridge the gap. These engineering cycles can be time-consuming, often distracting technical teams from their core responsibilities. For organizations with hundreds of SaaS applications, building and maintaining these custom integrations becomes a burden.

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3. Upgrade Requirements

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SaaS providers frequently gate advanced logging and security features behind premium pricing tiers. To get the data needed for effective security monitoring, companies often need to upgrade to more expensive enterprise licenses across numerous applications. These costs can quickly add up, turning what seemed like a cost-effective DIY approach into an expensive project.

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4. Lack of Standardization

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Each SaaS application produces logs in different formats with different schemas and event structures. There's no standardization across the industry, which means security teams must become experts in each application's unique logging approach. This lack of consistency makes it nearly impossible to develop unified detection rules or correlation logic that works consistently across your entire SaaS ecosystem.

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5. Log Volume Economics

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SaaS applications generate enormous volumes of logs. Since SIEM vendors typically charge by data volume, ingesting, storing, and analyzing all this data in a SIEM quickly becomes expensive. This forces security teams to make dangerous compromises:

• Sampling only a percentage of logs, creating visibility gaps
• Limiting retention periods, hindering forensic investigations
• Excluding certain applications from monitoring

The economics of SIEM simply don't scale for comprehensive SaaS monitoring, leading to partial visibility at best.

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6. Context Limitations

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Even with full log access, SIEMs lack the specialized context needed to effectively detect SaaS-specific threats. They don't understand application-specific behaviors, can't easily correlate activities across different SaaS platforms, and lack awareness of normal usage patterns for cloud services. This context deficit leads to a flood of false positives and low-quality alerts that overwhelm security teams without providing actionable insights.

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7. SaaS-Specific Detection Gaps

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Traditional security tools weren't designed to detect threats unique to SaaS environments, such as OAuth token theft, cross-application privilege escalation, or suspicious third-party app integrations. Building detection content for these specialized threat vectors requires manual effort. Security analysts must sort through millions of events, analyze the data to establish baselines, and identify what constitutes normal versus abnormal activity – then build the threat detection template. Creating a single threat detection can take days of specialized work, making it impossible to scale this approach across dozens or hundreds of applications.

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How Reco Helps with Threat Detection and Response for SaaS

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Rather than struggling with these challenges, organizations are turning to specialized platforms designed specifically for SaaS security. Reco's Dynamic SaaS Security platform addresses the limitations of DIY approaches with purpose-built capabilities:

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Pre-built Threat Detections

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Reco eliminates the need to build detections from scratch by providing over 400 pre-built threat detections designed specifically for SaaS environments. Mapped to the MITRE framework, these detections are constantly updated based on emerging attack techniques and changes to SaaS applications. Security teams can leverage these detections immediately, without the months of development time required for DIY approaches.

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Identity Threat Detection and Response (ITDR)

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Reco's platform is designed for the identity-centric nature of SaaS security. Reco correlates identities with their associated accounts across multiple applications and links them with other information such as:

• Activities
• IP addresses
• Devices
• Locations
• Data
• And more…

By connecting Reco to your SIEM, you can flag risks, misconfigurations, and suspicious activities in real time, and send context-rich alerts to your SOC team for immediate action.

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Rich Context and Guided Remediation

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Unlike generic security tools, Reco provides detailed context with each alert—explaining what's wrong, why it matters, and recommending specific remediation actions. This contextual information accelerates investigation and response times, allowing security teams to quickly understand and address threats without extensive manual research.

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Reduced Alert Noise

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Reco reduces alert fatigue by focusing security teams on the most meaningful threats. The platform correlates information across multiple dimensions to rank and surface only the alerts that matter in the context of your specific environment (i.e. if the data isn’t critical, the alert shouldn’t be either). This intelligent prioritization ensures critical threats don't get lost in a flood of low-value alerts.

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Case Study: BigID Accelerates Threat Detection & Response, with Reco

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BigID, a leader in data security, was trying to manually build a threat detection and response program for SaaS applications such as Google Workspace, MongoDB, and Salesforce. They ran into several challenges:

• Log management complexities: it was difficult to get logs from all their key apps flowing into their SIEM, requiring time-consuming engineering cycles.
• Expensive upgrades: in order to get some apps to produce logs they had to invest in licensing upgrades, which generated unexpected costs.
• Tedious, manual tasks: it took days to build one threat detection by hand. Since they needed hundreds, this process did not scale well.

To save time and reduce complexity, BigID deployed Reco. Here are some of the benefits they’ve seen:

• Eliminated months of manual work: BigID leverages Reco’s 400+ pre-built threat detections, eliminating months of work. Now security engineers can focus on responding to threats instead of parsing through data.
• Reduced time to remediation: BigID pushes Reco alerts to their SOC team through their SIEM. Security engineers get all the info they need to rapidly assess, triage, and remediate each event with contextualized alerts from Reco.
• Elevated insider threat posture: Reco flags suspicious insider behavior, like an employee sharing a file with a personal email, unusual permission changes, or excessive downloads. Reco maps all identity behavior in its knowledge graph, providing a bird-eye-view into behavior to aid investigations.

→ Read the Full Case Study

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Accelerate SaaS Threat Detection and Response, with Reco

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Building a homegrown threat detection and response solution for SaaS might initially seem like a straightforward extension of existing security practices. However, the unique challenges of SaaS security make this approach unsustainable for most organizations.

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Instead of investing in a never-ending DIY project, organizations are adopting specialized SaaS security platforms like Reco. These purpose-built solutions eliminate the complexity of SaaS security monitoring while providing more comprehensive protection than homegrown approaches could achieve.

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As your SaaS environment continues to grow and evolve, having a security solution that's designed specifically for these challenges isn't just more efficient—it's essential for effective risk management.. To learn more about Reco schedule a demo.

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