Shadow IT Discovery and Risk Assessment
Employees adopt SaaS tools outside procurement constantly — a team trials a project management app, someone expenses a subscription to get a task done faster, a department standardizes on a tool nobody told IT about — and each one represents an unknown quantity of company data sitting with a vendor that's never been security-reviewed. Discovering this shadow IT footprint by hand means periodically asking around or waiting for it to surface during an incident, by which point data has often already been flowing to an unvetted vendor for months.
STARTING PRICE
From €299
Standard tier · Multi-step workflow with AI extraction/decisioning and 2-3 integrations.
Get a quote →Saves roughly 4-6 hrs/week of manual shadow IT tracking and vendor cross-referencing.
How the automation works
We pull data from network traffic logs, CASB visibility tools, and expense records to build a continuously updated inventory of SaaS applications actually in use, cross-reference it against your approved-vendor list, and score each unsanctioned application's risk based on the data it likely touches and what's known about the vendor's own security posture. The output is a risk-ranked shadow IT register that goes to security for review, not an automatic block list — because cutting off access to a tool a team has come to depend on can break real workflows, the decision to sanction, restrict, or retire access to a discovered app stays a human call, made with the risk context in hand rather than in the dark.
Process flow
- 01
Continuous data collection trigger
Network traffic logs, CASB visibility data, and expense records are pulled on a recurring basis to detect SaaS usage.
- 02
Identify unsanctioned applications ai
Detected applications are cross-referenced against the approved-vendor list to identify tools in active use that haven't been through security review.
- 03
Risk-score each discovered app ai
Each unsanctioned app is scored based on likely data sensitivity involved, number of users, and available information on the vendor's own security posture.
- 04
Route to security for review output
Discovered apps and their risk scores route to security as a register for review — nothing is blocked automatically based on the discovery alone.
- 05
Track sanction/restrict/retire decision output
Security's decision on each app — sanction with a formal review, restrict usage, or work toward retiring it — is tracked to closure, keeping the human decision as the actual gate on any action.
- 06
Report shadow IT exposure trends output
Trends in shadow IT volume, risk concentration by department, and remediation progress are reported over time.
Inputs
- Network traffic and DNS logs
- CASB visibility data
- Expense report data
- Approved vendor/application list
Outputs
- Shadow IT application inventory
- Risk-scored register by application
- Security review and decision tracking
- Shadow IT exposure trend reporting
Works with
Prefer a fully custom build instead of an off-the-shelf integration? We scope both options during your free consultation — most jobs like this one work fine on standard connectors, but higher-volume or non-standard systems sometimes need bespoke API work, reflected in the complex tier.
Where this goes wrong if you get it wrong
- Expense-based discovery misses any app paid for personally and expensed as a generic line item, or one that's free and never shows up in financial records at all, so relying on expense data alone leaves a real blind spot that network and CASB visibility need to cover.
- A discovered app isn't automatically a risk — some are legitimately approved but simply untracked in the formal vendor list, and treating every discovery as a violation rather than checking for this first generates unnecessary friction with teams who did nothing wrong.
- Risk scoring without genuine vendor security posture context defaults to guessing based on app category alone, which misjudges risk in both directions — a well-secured niche tool can score worse than a poorly-secured mainstream one if the scoring has no real vendor data behind it.
- Blocking a discovered app without review risks breaking a workflow a team has built real dependencies around, sometimes including customer-facing processes — the review step exists specifically to weigh that operational cost against the security risk before anyone loses access.
Frequently asked questions
Does this automatically block unsanctioned apps?
No — discovered apps and their risk scores go to security as a register for review; the decision to sanction, restrict, or retire access to any app is made by a human, since cutting access without review can break real workflows.
What data sources feed the discovery?
Network traffic and DNS logs, CASB visibility data where available, and expense records — each source catches different blind spots, and using all three together produces broader coverage than any one alone.
How is risk scored for a discovered app?
By the likely sensitivity of data it touches, how many users are actively using it, and whatever is available about the vendor's own security posture, not by app category alone.
Does this replace formal vendor security review?
No, it surfaces apps that should go through your existing vendor security review process — see vendor security questionnaire completion for that review step itself.