They often treat duplicates as a finance issue and ignore the identity impact. Each overlapping app creates its own access records, offboarding steps, and audit evidence, which fragments control and complicates governance. Rationalisation should be recorded as an identity governance decision, not only a cost-cutting exercise.
Why This Matters for Security Teams
Duplicate SaaS tools are often approved as a budget clean-up exercise, but the real risk sits in identity sprawl. Each overlapping app can introduce a separate OAuth grant, service account, admin role, audit trail, and offboarding path. That multiplies the number of places where access persists after a team change, a vendor exit, or a merger. NHI Management Group’s research shows that only 5.7% of organisations have full visibility into service accounts, which is a warning sign for any environment with overlapping SaaS estates.
The issue is not just redundancy. Duplicate tools create fragmented evidence for access reviews, inconsistent policy enforcement, and blind spots in incident response. When teams compare licences, they usually miss the hidden identity cost of parallel apps. The pattern is visible in breaches such as the Salesloft OAuth token breach and the BeyondTrust API key breach, where access paths, not just software cost, became the control failure.
Security teams that treat rationalisation as procurement work alone usually discover the identity consequences only after access review failures, token cleanup delays, or an audit request exposes inconsistent ownership.
How It Works in Practice
The practical mistake is assuming two tools that do the same job have the same risk profile. They do not. Even if one app is kept and the other retired, both may have left behind active identities, delegated access, integrations, and evidence in downstream systems. The right approach is to inventory duplicate SaaS tools by identity impact, not just functionality, and map every connected identity object: human admins, SCIM links, OAuth grants, API keys, webhook secrets, and privileged roles.
Current guidance suggests tying application rationalisation to identity governance workflows. That means each duplicate should be scored for who owns it, what secrets it uses, which business process depends on it, and how deprovisioning will be verified. The NIST Cybersecurity Framework 2.0 is useful here because it frames asset governance, access control, and recovery as part of operational resilience rather than isolated tasks.
Practitioners should also treat SaaS consolidation as a control test. If a duplicate app can be removed without a clear record of what identities were revoked, the organisation probably lacks reliable ownership data. NHI Management Group’s Ultimate Guide to NHIs is explicit that offboarding and revocation failures are a recurring control gap, especially where credentials live outside a managed secrets process.
- Record each duplicate app as an identity-bearing system, not just a licence line item.
- Assign a named owner for every SaaS tenant, integration, and service account.
- Require evidence that OAuth grants, tokens, and API keys were revoked during retirement.
- Verify downstream dependencies before decommissioning to avoid orphaned automation.
These controls tend to break down when duplicate tools are embedded in low-code automation and team-owned workspaces because no single group can see the full access graph.
Common Variations and Edge Cases
Tighter rationalisation often increases migration overhead, requiring organisations to balance reduced spend against access continuity and operational risk. That tradeoff is especially visible when duplicate tools support different regions, regulated data sets, or acquired business units. In those cases, the “duplicate” may actually be a temporary control boundary, and forcing rapid consolidation can create shadow workarounds.
There is no universal standard for this yet, but best practice is evolving toward identity-first rationalisation. In practice, that means keeping a duplicate tool only when it materially improves segregation of duties, resilience, or compliance evidence. Otherwise, the safer option is to remove it and close the associated identity paths completely. This is where investigations such as the Snowflake breach and the Dropbox Sign breach matter: overlapping access channels can turn a tooling overlap into a broader trust problem.
Security teams should also watch for “temporary” duplicates that become permanent because no one owns retirement. When the environment includes M&A activity, outsourced operations, or fast-moving SaaS procurement, the real edge case is not technical complexity but governance ambiguity.
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 AI RMF set the governance and control requirements practitioners need to meet.
| Framework | Control / Reference | Relevance |
|---|---|---|
| OWASP Non-Human Identity Top 10 | NHI-02 | Duplicate SaaS tools create unmanaged identities and grants. |
| NIST CSF 2.0 | PR.AC-1 | Duplicate apps expand access paths and weaken control evidence. |
| NIST AI RMF | Identity governance decisions need accountable, risk-based oversight. |
Use AIRMF governance to assign ownership, review risk, and document consolidation decisions.
Related resources from NHI Mgmt Group
Deepen Your Knowledge
Reviewed and updated by the NHIMG editorial team on June 11, 2026.
NHI Mgmt Group — the #1 independent authority on Non-Human Identity, IAM, and Agentic AI security. nhimg.org
