> "Another downside," our source added, "is that some clients block Trello which can be really disappointing after you've just built a big board together."
Why is Trello being blocked?
Why is Trello being blocked?
Never work in a heavily regulated industry if this type of thing bothers you, because it exists at every level of those companies.
Then you have to keep on them forever, and stay apprised of features people would like you to use but aren't FedRAMP appropriate yet or do not have appropriate controls. I think you would be surprised how many SaaS providers really don't meet the muster under scrutiny, or your engineering teams are trying to use features that just haven't been brought into compliance yet. For example, the number of times I have had to use https://aws.amazon.com/compliance/services-in-scope/ (click the FedRAMP tab) as a hammer is extremely high. Then you get on the phone with AWS and you find out that only a certain subset of the service that meets their FedRAMP do not provide adequate controls for your usage of the service. There's a lot of defer to vendor and defer to user games being played by both sides and you have to go line by line and figure out who is responsible for what. More often than not the service's people that are catering to the customer are not appropriately educated too, so there's layers of escalations by a security team just to get someone who can answer security questions accurately.
So no, a security person can only see from most organizations that you tried to attest to some of these random certifications, but that doesn't mean I have an accurate map of how I'm supposed to meet my compliance goals with your stuff.
(This is not aimed at any one provider in particular, just my personal feelings on where this 'internal roadblock' argument falls apart).
(And as I understand it, Trello Enterprise doesn't even get you SSO without paying additionally for Atlassian Access? The website seems to be inconsistent on this point.)
We have teams that would definitely like to use Trello, but $4200/month as the minimum tier was too much.
Trello Enterprise (optionally) would secure your content (i.e. attachment restrictions, power-up restrictions, token restrictions, audit logs, team management).
"Exclusive Enterprise Features: [..] SAML SSO via Atlassian Access"
Similarly, on the pricing page: https://trello.com/pricing - it lists "SAML SSO via Atlassian Access" only on the Enterprise column.
It becomes overhead for the teams involved in maintaining security and compliance. The cost of that overhead is likely several orders of magnitude higher than Trello’s relatively simple monthly fee.
If the whole company goes in on Trello, that’s one thing, but jumping through the hoops to get and maintain approval for a small number of people just isn’t worth it. That’s why the behemoth, everything-to-everyone tools dominate at heavily regulated companies.
Unfortunately Trello did not satisfy management because it didn’t easily give them metrics that serve little to no purpose other than changing the team’s incentives from encouraging a great product to meeting metric targets.
"together" meaning with the client... How did you do that if it was never approved in the first place? Or maybe they just realized they never should have done it?
It was a pretty confusing and vague quote, at least to me.
Users will sign up for Dropbox accounts, share the credentials with others in the company, disable MFA and them load it full of confidential data. Users will do things like using personal email addresses for apps that become critical to business processes, then quit without transferring the account.
Additionally as a European company, we are bound by the GDPR to know where confidential data is being stored and processed, to have assessed any third parties and put them in our data processing agreements.
Consequently we end up in this situation of having to be the bad guys, blocking otherwise useful sites with proxies/CASBs to save users from doing dangerous things.
Web app developers could do a lot to help security departments but I suspect they intentionally don't because they perceive that it would harm adoption.
It doesn't help that SaaS companies tend to put the things required for security (OIDC, mandatory 2FA, organisation support, sharing restrictions) on the expensive enterprise plans, which mean that IT need to go back to the user and say if they want to use it, they need budgetary approval for the $15k/month version. This either kills it (and makes them sneakily sign up for the personal one) or means it won't get approved until their departments next quarterly budget meeting.
While I understand that SaaS companies want to find unique areas they can use to upsell enterprise customers, I feel pretty strongly about basic security features being used as that leverage. Especially as there are many SMEs like us that work in a regulatorily complex environment but don't necessarily have the budget for the top tier just to get that security (UK finance, so we have GDPR/ePD/PECR as well as PCI-DSS, MIFID II, POCA, and a bunch of other FCA regulations to comply with).
Ultimately this means we end up saying no to users more than we say yes, which as you say, frustrates them and pushes them into shadow IT. Then we need to deploy proxies/CASB to catch users trying to use shadow IT and blocking sites.
However, when you're talking about something like external hosting and transferring data outside of your organisation, I think there is a line that has to be drawn, partly just as a responsible corporate citizen and partly because of the potential liability when laws and regulations such as those you mentioned attempt to mandate that sort of responsible behaviour.
In an obviously sensitive field like finance, healthcare or law, bypassing the rules and setting up shadow IT really should be a serious disciplinary matter, possibly even a firing offence. It is, after all, potentially causing the company to break the law, not to mention creating severe security and privacy risks, and the damage that can be done by a small group or even a single individual can be catastrophic.
Unless I become the bad guy, it feels like they are trying to inventory every possible way to leak our GDPR data. And this is how you get micromanaged or fired.
Relatively simple things that SaaS companies could do to make our lives easier include:
* Ability to "claim" email domains to corporate ownership - that is, if any user tries to register with one of our email domains, they are automatically added to the corporate account with appropriate sharing and security controls (to be fair to Trello, I believe they do this - as do Apple, Google, Microsoft and a few others)
* Making OIDC/SAML/SSO a standard option rather than something you have to pay for the super-duper $15k+/month enterprise plan that you can only get after weeks of conversations with sales (if anyone from Twilio happens to read this...)
* Ensuring there is "organisation" support - with security/billing admins that can manage the account, set mandatory 2FA.
* Even just something in the sign up flows where it asks if they're setting up a business account, and if so, asks for their security/IT contact and pops them an email. Most users aren't being intentionally malicious, just they aren't aware we'd like to know (despite repeated communication that they tend to ignore!).
Long term, I think we need better industry-wide solutions to Shadow IT that don't involve invasive proxies. I haven't fully thought through what that would look like, but something like a Do-Not-Track header, but to disable users setting up accounts. Or TXT records on DNS hosts which would cause any attempt to set up an account with that email to automatically fire off to an admin user for approval, etc... See how Google forces mandatory safe-search for schools: https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/186669?hl=en
Imagine a hospital or law firm putting sensitive data in Trello boards, for example. Or details about a new product.