Shadow IT Discovery Agent
Detects unsanctioned SaaS applications and cloud services in use across the organization by analyzing network, expense, and identity signals.
Employees routinely sign up for SaaS tools using corporate email or expense cards without IT approval, creating a sprawling shadow IT footprint that security teams cannot see, let alone secure
These unsanctioned applications often process sensitive company data without going through vendor security review, leaving the organization exposed to data breaches, compliance violations, and unmanaged data residency risk
Traditional discovery relies on employees self-reporting tool usage, which captures only a fraction of actual adoption
Finance sees the expense line items, IT sees fragments of network traffic, and identity teams see OAuth grants, but none of these signals get correlated into a single picture, so shadow IT keeps growing invisibly until an incident or audit forces a reckoning
The agent correlates signals from network egress logs, expense report line items, and OAuth application grants against identity provider records to identify SaaS applications in active use that were never provisioned through IT's sanctioned catalog. It profiles each discovered application for data sensitivity risk based on the scopes it requested and the users accessing it, then routes findings to the appropriate owner for a decision to sanction, restrict, or block. The agent tracks the disposition of every discovered tool over time, building a living inventory that closes the gap between reported and actual technology usage.
Multi-Signal Discovery
- Analyze network egress logs for known SaaS domain patterns
- Scan expense reports for software and subscription line items
- Pull OAuth application grants from the identity provider
- Deduplicate signals into a single discovered application list
Risk Profiling
- Assess data sensitivity of requested OAuth scopes
- Identify which users and departments are active on each tool
- Check the vendor against known security and compliance databases
- Flag applications overlapping with sanctioned tool functionality
Ownership Routing and Disposition
- Identify the likely departmental owner of each discovered tool
- Route findings for a sanction, restrict, or block decision
- Coordinate with security on vendor risk review when needed
- Document the rationale for each disposition decision
Continuous Inventory Maintenance
- Update the living SaaS inventory as new tools appear
- Track sanctioned tools for policy and license compliance
- Alert on newly discovered high-risk applications immediately
- Report shadow IT trends to security leadership