TL;DR: Six common SaaS management mistakes, from spreadsheet tracking and legacy SAM reliance to manual provisioning, weaken visibility, compliance, and access control in environments averaging 1,250 SaaS applications, according to Zluri. The real risk is not spend inefficiency but unmanaged identity and governance drift across apps and users.
At a glance
What this is: This is a SaaS governance analysis showing how common management shortcuts leave visibility, access control, procurement, and offboarding exposed.
Why it matters: It matters because IAM and IGA teams cannot govern what they cannot inventory, and SaaS sprawl now sits directly on the identity surface.
Context
SaaS management is the discipline of discovering, organising, and governing cloud applications, their users, and their access over time. In practice, the article argues that common shortcuts leave organisations with incomplete visibility, poor control, weak licence discipline, and offboarding gaps that spill into identity governance.
The governance problem is not limited to spend. When SaaS apps are acquired outside formal review or provisioned and removed manually, identity data becomes stale quickly and access decisions are made against an inaccurate application map. That is why this topic sits squarely in SaaS governance, IAM, IGA, and offboarding control.
For identity teams, the central issue is that SaaS estates now behave like a moving identity surface rather than a static software inventory. The article is typical of the problem space: a broad, everyday operational risk pattern rather than an isolated edge case.
Key questions
Q: What breaks when SaaS access reviews rely on spreadsheets?
A: Spreadsheets freeze access data in time, so reviewers work from stale exports while roles, teams, and app usage keep changing. That creates entitlement drift and weak evidence for auditors. A better model is recurring review automation with current usage, department, and risk context, plus direct remediation from the review step.
Q: Why do manual SaaS provisioning and deprovisioning increase governance risk?
A: Manual provisioning and deprovisioning create gaps between the recorded identity state and the real one. Over-provisioning at join time and incomplete removals at leaver time leave unnecessary access behind, especially when teams depend on tickets or memory instead of automated lifecycle controls.
Q: How should organisations control SaaS spend without losing governance over access?
A: They should treat SaaS spend as part of identity and lifecycle governance, not just procurement. The practical model is to maintain a complete application inventory, assign ownership for every tool, review usage before renewal, and remove dormant access before it becomes recurring spend. That keeps budget control tied to accountable access decisions.
Q: Why do SaaS expenses become an IAM issue instead of just a procurement issue?
A: Because SaaS costs follow active services, and active services usually carry user access, data exposure, and lifecycle obligations. When procurement, IT, and identity teams work from different records, services can renew even when usage has dropped or ownership is unclear. IAM teams need spend visibility so lifecycle decisions stay aligned with access governance.
Technical breakdown
Why spreadsheet-based SaaS tracking breaks at scale
Spreadsheets depend on manual updates, informal ownership, and timely human coordination. In a SaaS estate that changes continuously, those assumptions fail quickly because applications rotate in and out, user access changes, and records drift from reality. Once the spreadsheet becomes the source of truth, the organisation is already operating with stale identity and application data. That undermines access reviews, licence reconciliation, and any governance process that depends on accurate inventory.
Practical implication: move SaaS inventory into governed discovery and lifecycle workflows instead of treating a spreadsheet as an authoritative control surface.
Why traditional SAM and CASB tools leave identity blind spots
Traditional software asset management was built to count installations and licence metrics, not to govern who can access cloud applications and under what conditions. CASB tools can observe activity inside services, but limited visibility is not the same as access control. Neither approach fully answers the IAM question of which user identities are entitled to which SaaS applications, or whether access still matches business need after role changes and offboarding.
Practical implication: separate software metering from access governance and make entitlement visibility a first-class requirement.
How manual provisioning and deprovisioning create lingering access
Manual provisioning and deprovisioning turn joiner-mover-leaver processes into error-prone human tasks. That increases the chance of over-provisioning at join time, missed removals at leaver time, and orphaned access in applications that IT no longer tracks. The result is not just excess licence spend. It is a persistent governance gap where former users, shadow apps, and undocumented access paths can outlive the business need that created them.
Practical implication: automate joiner-mover-leaver handling for SaaS access and tie deprovisioning to application inventory, not to memory or ticket discipline.
Breaches seen in the wild
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NHI Mgmt Group analysis
SaaS governance fails first as an inventory problem, then as an identity problem. The article shows that when organisations rely on spreadsheets, they stop governing SaaS as a living access surface and start managing it as a static list. That breaks visibility, recertification, and ownership assignment at the same time. For IAM and IGA teams, the operational conclusion is simple: discovery quality determines governance quality.
Traditional SAM and CASB assumptions do not map cleanly to SaaS identity control. SAM is built around installations and licence counts, while CASB is often strongest on in-service activity visibility. SaaS governance needs both inventory and entitlement accuracy, which means neither category alone closes the access-control gap. The practitioner takeaway is to stop treating metering tools as substitutes for identity governance.
Manual provisioning creates entitlement drift that outlives the provisioning event. Every manual joiner or leaver action introduces a window where the recorded state can diverge from the actual state. That divergence is not just an administrative nuisance. It is the mechanism by which unmanaged access, stale accounts, and shadow IT persist across the SaaS estate. The governance response is to treat SaaS access as a lifecycle control, not a helpdesk task.
Procurement without governance creates unmanaged identity surface area. When employees buy apps outside IT review, the organisation acquires data exposure, access sprawl, and compliance obligations it may never have inventoried. That is why SaaS procurement belongs in identity governance, not only in finance or vendor management. The practical implication is that approval and intake controls must precede deployment, not follow it.
Identity governance for SaaS is now a cross-functional control plane. The article implicitly connects procurement, access, compliance, and offboarding into one operational problem. That is the right framing for modern SaaS environments because the risk emerges when those functions are siloed. Practitioners should treat SaaS governance as a lifecycle discipline that spans discovery, entitlement, and removal.
From our research library:
- The average enterprise SaaS platform connects to 42 or more third-party applications through OAuth tokens, API keys, webhooks and automation platforms.
What this signals
SaaS governance now sits in the same control family as identity lifecycle management. Once procurement, provisioning, and offboarding are handled separately, the organisation loses the ability to explain who has access to which cloud app and why. The programme implication is that SaaS must be governed as part of the identity surface, not as a side inventory.
SaaS management mistakes are really lifecycle mistakes. The most durable fix is not a better spreadsheet or a different asset count. It is a model that ties application discovery, entitlement decisions, and deprovisioning into one governance path so stale access cannot survive organisational change.
For practitioners
- Implement governed SaaS discovery Build an authoritative inventory of cloud applications, owners, and access paths so governance starts from current data rather than manual tracking.
- Separate software metering from access governance Use SAM for licence accounting and dedicated IAM or IGA controls for entitlement review, approval, and access removal.
- Automate joiner-mover-leaver workflows for SaaS Connect provisioning and deprovisioning to identity lifecycle events so new hires, movers, and leavers are reflected across SaaS apps without manual delay.
- Create procurement gates for new SaaS adoption Require security, privacy, and ownership review before employees can adopt tools that introduce new data processing or access obligations.
- Prioritise offboarding verification for abandoned apps Confirm that departing users lose access across every SaaS application, including apps acquired outside IT channels or later abandoned by the business.
Key takeaways
- SaaS management shortcuts create visibility and governance gaps that directly weaken identity control.
- The article shows that manual tracking, legacy tool reliance, and unmanaged procurement all distort the SaaS estate.
- Practitioners should govern SaaS through discovery, entitlement review, and lifecycle automation rather than through ad hoc administration.
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 addresses the attack surface, NIST CSF 2.0 and CIS Controls v8 set the technical controls, and ISO/IEC 27001:2022 defines the regulatory obligations.
| Framework | Control / Reference | Relevance |
|---|---|---|
| OWASP Non-Human Identity Top 10 | NHI-01 — Improper Offboarding | Manual deprovisioning and abandoned access are central risks in the article. |
| NHI-05 — Overprivileged NHI | Manual provisioning and poor visibility can leave users and app access broader than needed. | |
| Recommendation — Tie SaaS offboarding to identity lifecycle events and verify removal across every application. Review SaaS entitlements for excess access and remove privileges that exceed business need. | ||
| NIST CSF 2.0 | PR.AA-05 — Access Permissions, Entitlements and Authorizations | The article focuses on who can access SaaS apps and whether that access is controlled. |
| Recommendation — Apply entitlement governance to SaaS applications and recertify access against current role need. | ||
| CIS Controls v8 | CIS-5 — Account Management | The article highlights account creation, removal, and governance weaknesses across SaaS. |
| Recommendation — Automate account lifecycle management so SaaS users are created, changed, and removed consistently. | ||
| ISO/IEC 27001:2022 | A.5.15 — Access control | SaaS governance in the article is fundamentally about controlled access to cloud applications. |
| Recommendation — Define and enforce access control rules for SaaS applications and review them on a lifecycle basis. | ||
Key terms
- SaaS Lifecycle Governance: SaaS lifecycle governance is the set of controls that manage applications from onboarding through access assignment, renewal, and decommissioning. It matters because the security value of SaaS management depends on whether the organisation can prove ownership, revoke access, and retire unused tools on demand.
- Identity Drift: Identity drift is the gap between the access path originally approved and the behavior that exists later. For browser extensions, drift can appear through updates, remote configuration, publisher changes, or permission expansion, turning a trusted integration into a materially different risk.
- Joiner Mover Leaver: Joiner Mover Leaver is the identity lifecycle process for creating, changing, and removing access as people enter, change roles, or leave an organization. It governs provisioning, modification, and deprovisioning across systems, ensuring access matches current job needs and reducing orphaned accounts, privilege creep, and residual access risk.
- SaaS Sharing Entitlement: A SaaS sharing entitlement is any permission that allows data to be accessed outside the original owner or team, including links, folder access, email distribution, and connected app permissions. In governance terms, it is an access object that needs lifecycle control, not a one-time convenience setting.
Deepen your knowledge
NHI governance, agentic AI identity, and machine identity lifecycle are core topics in our NHI Foundation Level course, the industry's only accredited NHI security programme. If you are building or maturing an IAM programme, it is worth exploring.
Published by the NHIMG editorial team on June 11, 2026.
Updated on October 8, 2026.
NHI Mgmt Group, the independent authority on Non-Human Identity, IAM, and Agentic AI security. nhimg.org