Use access certification and ownership-based review to decide whether a licence is truly unnecessary. Combine that with automated deprovisioning for clearly inactive accounts and a quick access request path for legitimate exceptions. The goal is to remove standing waste while preserving a controlled way to restore access when business needs change.
Why This Matters for Security Teams
SaaS licence waste is rarely just a procurement issue. It is usually an identity and access problem: entitlements stay active after people change roles, projects end, or workflows become automated. That creates direct spend waste and also broadens the number of accounts that can still reach business data. Current guidance from the OWASP Non-Human Identity Top 10 and NHIMG research points to the same pattern seen in service-account sprawl: only 5.7% of organisations have full visibility into their service accounts, and poor visibility makes it hard to tell whether access is truly dormant or merely infrequent.
The right response is not a blunt purge. Teams need ownership-based reviews, proof of recent use, and a low-friction restore path so legitimate users are not blocked when business conditions change. The NHI lifecycle guidance in Ultimate Guide to NHIs is useful here because the same discipline that governs offboarding of machine identities applies to human SaaS seats: know who owns the access, know why it exists, and remove it when the justification disappears. In practice, many security teams discover licence waste only after finance questions renewal costs or an access review exposes accounts that have not been used for months.
How It Works in Practice
The practical model is to combine certification, inactivity signals, and business ownership into one decision flow. Start with a live inventory of SaaS licences, map each seat to a named owner or manager, then classify accounts by usage, business criticality, and exception status. Access reviews should not ask only whether someone logged in recently; they should ask whether the access is still needed for an active job function, project, or approved operational duty. That is the same governance logic used for NHI offboarding, where the absence of a current owner is itself a risk signal.
A workable process usually includes four steps:
- Flag clearly inactive accounts for automated deprovisioning after a defined grace period.
- Send ownership-based review tasks to the manager or app owner, not just the end user.
- Use a just-in-time reactivation or access request path for legitimate exceptions.
- Record the business reason, approver, and expiry date so the licence does not silently return to standing waste.
That approach aligns with Ultimate Guide to NHIs — Key Challenges and Risks and with the control emphasis in OWASP Non-Human Identity Top 10, which both stress visibility, ownership, and controlled credential lifecycle management. Where possible, integrate these checks with HR, ITSM, and SaaS admin tooling so the review is continuous rather than annual. These controls tend to break down when ownership data is stale, because no one can confidently decide whether an account is unused or simply unreviewed.
Common Variations and Edge Cases
Tighter licence controls often increase administrative overhead, requiring organisations to balance cost reduction against operational continuity. That tradeoff is especially visible in shared accounts, seasonal roles, and executive assistants who support multiple principals. Current guidance suggests treating these cases as exceptions with explicit expiry and compensating controls rather than as permanent standing access, but there is no universal standard for this yet.
Some environments also need more than inactivity checks. A user may log in rarely but still need access for audits, incident response, or month-end work. In those cases, licence reclamation should be paired with a rapid restore path and a documented owner who can reapprove access without opening a broad standing exception. NHIMG breach analysis, including the 52 NHI Breaches Analysis, shows why this discipline matters: stale access and poor offboarding are common ingredients in broader identity compromise. For teams looking for a broader control lens, the OWASP guidance is a useful complement to this operational model.
The best result is not zero licences at any cost. It is a portfolio where every active seat has a named owner, a current reason to exist, and an easy way to come back only when the business genuinely needs it.
Standards & Framework Alignment
This section maps relevant standards and security frameworks to the operational risks and controls described in this guidance.
OWASP Non-Human Identity Top 10 address the attack and risk surface, while NIST CSF 2.0 and NIST Zero Trust (SP 800-207) set the governance and control requirements practitioners need to meet.
| Framework | Control / Reference | Relevance |
|---|---|---|
| OWASP Non-Human Identity Top 10 | NHI-03 | Licence reclamation depends on access review, ownership and lifecycle control. |
| NIST CSF 2.0 | PR.AC-4 | Least-privilege access governance supports reducing dormant SaaS entitlement waste. |
| NIST Zero Trust (SP 800-207) | PR.AC | Zero trust access decisions should be continuously revalidated, not left standing. |
Review each SaaS seat by owner, usage and expiry, then remove or renew access with documented justification.
