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11/06/2026 10:32 pm
TL;DR: Cloud access tools still leave teams wrestling with setup complexity, integration friction, visibility gaps, and policy enforcement trade-offs across SaaS and cloud environments, according to Zluri’s comparison of Zscaler alternatives. The practical issue is not vendor choice alone, but how identity, access, and governance controls hold up once cloud sprawl and third-party integrations expand.
NHIMG editorial — based on content published by Zluri: IT Teams Top 10 Zscaler Alternatives & Competitors To Try in 2026
By the numbers:
- Zluri says it uses nine SaaS discovery methods to achieve a 100% discovery rate for SaaS applications within an organisation.
Questions worth separating out
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.
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.
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.
Practitioner guidance
- 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.
What's in the full article
Zluri's full article covers the product-specific comparison detail this post intentionally leaves for the source:
- Detailed feature-by-feature comparisons across the listed Zscaler alternatives for practitioners evaluating replacement options.
- Vendor-specific pros, cons, and customer rating context that helps teams shortlist tools at the buying stage.
- Product-level notes on SaaS discovery, compliance mapping, and integration behaviour that sit below the strategy layer covered here.
- The full ranking and narrative around each alternative, including the reasons Zluri groups the options the way it does.
👉 Read Zluri's comparison of Zscaler alternatives for cloud security teams →
Zscaler alternatives and the governance gap in cloud access control?
Explore further
12/06/2026 6:44 am
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.
A few things that frame the scale:
- 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.
A question worth separating out:
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.
👉 Read our full editorial: Zscaler alternatives expose the identity governance gaps in cloud access
