How Security Teams Can Discover Every Shadow SaaS and GenAI App Employees Use
Employees often forget to alert IT to every SaaS application they use. But even popular security tools can miss apps in your environment.
Shadow SaaS and GenAI Discovery
As enterprises embrace SaaS and GenAI applications, security and IT teams struggle to maintain visibility into every tool in use. Employees often adopt new applications without IT approval, creating shadow SaaS, a security and compliance risk that traditional monitoring solutions may fail to detect. Shadow AI goes a layer deeper, hiding GenAI tools and introducing unique security risks around data loss and insider threats.
Even security tools designed for SaaS and GenAI discovery often miss key applications, leaving organizations exposed to potential data leakage, compliance violations, and security threats.
To truly understand your SaaS and GenAI risk landscape, IT and security teams must adopt solutions that monitor SaaS and AI usage where they occur: the browser.
Why Shadow SaaS and GenAI Tools Escape Detection
1. Employees Adopt Apps Without IT Oversight
- Workers can sign up for SaaS and GenAI tools using their personal email addresses and connect these apps to sensitive corporate systems.
- IT and security teams often remain unaware of these applications unless they are reported or discovered with a specific tool.
2. Unapproved Apps Increase Security and Compliance Risks
- Sensitive company data may be shared, processed, or stored in unsanctioned applications.
- Shadow SaaS and GenAI applications may lack proper access controls, increasing the risk of unauthorized exposure or insider threat.
- Passing data to unsecured applications does not comply with common industry regulations or best practices, creating legal liabilities.
3. Traditional Discovery Methods Miss Applications
- Email-based discovery tools detect SaaS usage by scanning incoming corporate emails for telltale keywords, but they often miss active users who sign up with personal accounts or don’t receive any related emails.
- Network-based discovery is ineffective for workers using personal devices or VPNs.
- Whitelists are ineffective against unauthorized SaaS or GenAI tenants, which can operate in parallel environments with no centralized oversight.
Browser-Based SaaS Monitoring: Full Visibility into Shadow IT and GenAI Usage
How It Works:
The Obsidian Security Browser Extension offers rapid time to value by removing the complexity of deploying an agent or custom browser. The extension is privacy-focused, only monitoring for corporate applications; it only collects limited information, avoiding sensitive data like browsing history.
Obsidian provides deep, real-time visibility into SaaS and GenAI usage directly from the browser, including:
- Application inventory
- Associated users
- Login frequency
- Authentication method (e.g., password vs. Social/OIDC)
Unique advantages:
- Visibility into login activity and authentication methods reveals gaps in policy enforcement, such as instances where Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) was assumed to be the only login method, but password-based access was never actually disabled
- By monitoring logins, you can identify accounts being shared among employees, including those violating company policy
- Block access to specific applications that violate company policy or pose a risk to the business (ex., ChatGPT, Grammarly, Zapier, etc.)
- It avoids technical and organizational adoption challenges like user preferences, network tunneling, latency issues, and application problems caused by SSL/TLS certificate pinning.
"During the Cyberhaven incident, Obsidian helped us uncover five other extensions that were using Generative AI. With no controls or visibility into what data was being read from our systems, this quickly became a top priority for the team. Using Obsidian, we were able to prioritize and block access to these unauthorized AI instances, ensuring safety of our data." - Leading Financial Services Company
Conclusion
As SaaS and GenAI adoption accelerates, traditional discovery methods—like email scanning—fall short on their own, as they often miss applications accessed directly through the browser. In-browser monitoring provides superior visibility into app usage, balancing security and privacy where most Shadow IT and AI tools actually operate—the web browser.
Get started for free to begin inventorying every SaaS and GenAI application in your environment.
