Zscaler alternatives expose the identity governance gaps in cloud access

At a glance

What this is: This is a vendor comparison of Zscaler alternatives that spotlights cloud security, SaaS visibility, and access-control limitations.

Why it matters: It matters because IAM, NHI, and security teams need to judge whether cloud access controls actually govern identities, integrations, and privilege at scale.

By the numbers:

• Zluri says it uses nine SaaS discovery methods to achieve a 100% discovery rate for SaaS applications within an organisation.
• 60 days.

👉 Read Zluri's comparison of Zscaler alternatives for cloud security teams

Context

Zscaler alternatives matter when cloud security controls become harder to configure, slower to operationalise, or less aligned with how an organisation actually discovers and governs SaaS access. In identity terms, the issue is not simply traffic inspection or CASB feature depth, but whether the control plane can keep pace with the identities, apps, and connections that now sit behind it.

For IAM and NHI programmes, this is a governance question as much as a tooling question. Once SaaS discovery, third-party connections, and access policies are spread across multiple systems, teams need evidence that their control model still sees the full identity surface rather than just the most visible users and apps.

Key questions

Q: What breaks when cloud access tools cannot see all delegated identities?

A: When cloud access tooling cannot see the full set of delegated identities, teams lose the ability to connect access decisions to real business ownership. That means OAuth apps, API connections, and service accounts can remain active without review, and policy enforcement becomes partial rather than reliable. The result is hidden privilege, not just weak reporting.

Q: Why do SaaS integrations create governance risk for IAM teams?

A: SaaS integrations create governance risk because they often behave like persistent identities with access scope that is easy to grant and hard to unwind. If the lifecycle is not tracked, access survives after the original use case ends. That is how delegated access becomes a standing control problem instead of a temporary convenience.

Q: How do security teams know whether cloud access policy is actually working?

A: They should test whether policy decisions are traceable from discovery to approval to revocation. If a team can see apps but cannot prove who owns the integration, what data it can touch, and how it is removed, then the policy is only partially working. Effective governance produces evidence, not just alerts.

Q: Who should own OAuth app and service account cleanup?

A: Ownership should sit with the application or business system that depends on the connection, with identity and security teams enforcing the lifecycle rules. If ownership is diffuse, cleanup rarely happens on time. The practical answer is to assign named accountability for every connected app and every non-human identity.

Technical breakdown

CASB visibility versus identity governance coverage

A CASB can inspect cloud activity, classify data, and enforce policy, but that does not automatically mean it governs the full identity surface. Visibility into apps is only one layer. Identity governance requires knowing which human users, service accounts, tokens, and integrations can reach which data, under what conditions, and with what ongoing review. If discovery is incomplete, policy decisions are made against partial truth, which creates a false sense of control. In practice, the architectural gap appears when a security stack can see traffic but not the entitlement relationships that create risk.

Practical implication: teams should test whether their control stack can enumerate identities and entitlements, not just observe traffic.

Integration complexity and control drift

The article’s emphasis on complex setup and integration reflects a common failure mode in cloud security programmes. When access, logging, and policy enforcement are stitched together across many systems, control drift appears quickly: one platform sees the app, another sees the user, and a third holds the approval record. That split makes it harder to prove who approved access, whether policy was enforced consistently, and whether the identity lifecycle was closed cleanly. In NHI environments, the same problem often shows up in OAuth apps, API keys, and service accounts that remain connected long after the original business need has changed.

Practical implication: map the full control path from discovery to approval to revocation before adding another security layer.

Risk scoring for cloud apps and delegated access

Risk scoring is useful only if it reflects real entitlement depth. A cloud app that can read data is not equivalent to one that can edit or delete it, and the difference matters more when the app is connected through delegated identity such as OAuth. Good governance separates exposure from privilege by looking at scope, sensitivity, and lifecycle. That is especially important for NHI governance, where service integrations often behave like persistent identities even when teams treat them as mere applications. Without that distinction, the organisation can understate the blast radius of a connected app.

Practical implication: classify delegated access by scope and data action, then review the highest-risk integrations first.

NHI Mgmt Group analysis

Cloud access tooling does not equal identity governance. The article is framed around CASB and Zscaler alternatives, but the underlying issue is whether security controls actually govern identities and delegated access across SaaS estates. Visibility, policy enforcement, and compliance reporting are useful only when they are tied to a complete entitlement model. Practitioners should treat cloud access tooling as an input to governance, not a substitute for it.

Delegated SaaS access creates identity debt when lifecycle ownership is unclear. OAuth-connected apps, integrations, and service accounts can outlive the business need that created them, which makes revocation and recertification difficult. That is not just a control gap, it is a lifecycle failure that turns ordinary app connections into persistent access paths. Practitioners should expect delegated access to behave like NHI unless it is explicitly governed that way.

Control complexity becomes operational risk when visibility is fragmented. The article’s repeated emphasis on setup effort and integration challenges signals a broader pattern: every additional console can widen the gap between policy intent and enforcement reality. In mature identity programmes, the question is not whether the stack has features, but whether teams can prove consistent decisioning across discovery, access, logging, and review. Practitioners should measure control coherence, not feature count.

Identity surface management is now a cross-domain problem. Cloud access, SaaS discovery, and compliance mapping sit at the intersection of human IAM, NHI governance, and platform security. The organisations most likely to stay ahead are the ones that stop treating these domains as separate buying decisions and instead govern them as one identity surface. Practitioners should align tooling choices to that shared operating model.

Top 10 NHI Issues: the recurring failure pattern here is visibility before governance, not governance before visibility. The article’s strongest lesson is that disconnected cloud controls can leave service identities, OAuth apps, and high-risk integrations under-managed even when the environment appears covered. Practitioners should evaluate whether their control model can prove coverage across identities, entitlements, and app-to-app connections.

From our research:

• 72% of organisations have experienced or suspect they have experienced a breach of non-human identities, according to The 2024 ESG Report: Managing Non-Human Identities.
• Enterprises that have experienced a compromised NHI averaged 2.7 separate incidents in the past 12 months, according to The 2024 ESG Report: Managing Non-Human Identities.
• For lifecycle control context, see NHI Lifecycle Management Guide for how provisioning, rotation, and offboarding map to delegated access governance.

What this signals

Delegated-access sprawl is becoming an identity governance problem, not just a cloud security problem. When teams connect more apps, more identity boundaries become implicit rather than enforced, and the governance burden shifts to lifecycle control. The practical signal is simple: if ownership, revocation, and recertification are not tied to each integration, visibility will not prevent drift.

Identity surface coverage needs to include machine-to-machine access, not only named users. A mature programme treats OAuth grants, API keys, and service accounts as governed identities with explicit owners and review cadence. For practitioner teams, that means aligning cloud access tooling with the OWASP Non-Human Identity Top 10 and the NIST Cybersecurity Framework 2.0.

Top 10 NHI Issues: the real operational risk is not a missing feature, but a broken chain between discovery and removal. If a connected app can be discovered but not retired cleanly, the organisation is carrying access debt that will surface during audits, mergers, or incident response.

For practitioners

• Audit delegated cloud access paths Inventory OAuth apps, API connections, and service accounts that can reach business data, then document the owner, purpose, and revocation path for each.
• Separate visibility from governance evidence Require proof of who approved access, what scope was granted, and when it was last reviewed before treating an application as controlled.
• Review high-risk app permissions first Prioritise integrations with write, delete, or admin-like actions over read-only connections, because action scope drives breach impact more than app count.
• Map SaaS discovery to lifecycle controls Tie discovery feeds to joiner, mover, and leaver processes so connected apps are recertified and removed when the business need ends.

Key takeaways

• Cloud access alternatives should be judged by how well they govern identities and delegated access, not by feature breadth alone.
• Fragmented discovery, approval, and revocation create hidden privilege paths across SaaS and NHI estates.
• Practitioners should connect visibility tools to lifecycle controls so connected apps can be owned, reviewed, and removed on time.

Key terms

• Delegated Access: Access granted to one system or app on behalf of another identity, often through OAuth, API tokens, or service credentials. It is powerful because it can operate continuously and invisibly unless the organisation ties it to ownership, scope, and lifecycle review.
• Identity Surface: The full set of identities that can reach systems, data, and actions across an environment. This includes humans, service accounts, tokens, certificates, and integrations. Governance fails when teams manage each category separately instead of treating them as one control surface.
• SaaS Discovery: The process of finding which software services exist in the environment and how they are used. Strong discovery should reveal app ownership, access relationships, and risk, not just app names. Without that depth, organisations see inventory but miss governance exposure.
• Lifecycle Control: The operational discipline that ensures access is granted, reviewed, rotated, and removed when no longer needed. In NHI and SaaS contexts, lifecycle control is what stops integrations and credentials from becoming permanent access paths after the original business need has passed.

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 responsible for identity security strategy or NHI governance in your organisation, it is worth exploring.

This post draws on content published by Zluri: IT Teams Top 10 Zscaler Alternatives & Competitors To Try in 2026. Read the original.