What should organisations do when Apps Script is not in use?

Why This Matters for Security Teams

When Apps Script is not needed, leaving the project creation path open creates an avoidable shadow-control surface. The risk is not the script runtime itself, but the organisational tendency to allow lookalike project names, ad hoc exceptions, and long-lived automation to persist after the business use case has disappeared. That pattern undermines governance, makes review harder, and increases the chance that a legitimate-looking project hides unapproved automation. NHI Mgmt Group’s Ultimate Guide to NHIs notes that only 5.7% of organisations have full visibility into their service accounts, which is exactly the kind of visibility gap that makes these surfaces hard to police. The control objective is to reduce exposure before it becomes an exception-management problem, not after. Current guidance aligns with broader access governance in the NIST Cybersecurity Framework 2.0, which emphasises limiting unnecessary attack paths and maintaining control over identities that can act independently. In practice, many security teams discover script abuse only after a business unit has already embedded it into a workflow and nobody can confidently say who approved it.

How It Works in Practice

The safest pattern is to treat Apps Script as a controlled capability, not a default entitlement. If the organisation has no business need for it, block the project creation pattern at the policy layer, then confirm that no sanctioned automation depends on that surface. This is a lifecycle decision as much as an access decision: removing future creation rights without checking existing dependencies can break reporting, workflow automation, or lightweight integrations that were never formally documented.

Operationally, security teams should combine preventive policy with discovery:

• Deny sys-style project IDs and similar naming patterns that make projects easier to mimic or obscure.
• Monitor for exceptions so that any approved use is visible and time-bound.
• Review existing Apps Script usage before enforcement so dependency owners can be identified.
• Map any script execution to the identities, tokens, or API permissions it can reach, then remove anything unnecessary.

That approach is consistent with the NHI governance lessons highlighted in NHI Mgmt Group’s Ultimate Guide to NHIs, especially where hidden automation and weak offboarding create persistence risk. It also mirrors the containment mindset behind the Schneider Electric credentials breach, where identity exposure and abuse pathways mattered more than the tool category itself. The practical goal is to shrink the authorised surface so the remaining automation is intentional, reviewable, and easier to revoke. These controls tend to break down in large tenants with many delegated administrators because ownership of existing scripts becomes ambiguous and exceptions are hard to reconcile.

Common Variations and Edge Cases

Tighter project blocking often increases exception-handling overhead, requiring organisations to balance reduced exposure against operational friction. That tradeoff is especially visible in environments with citizen development, regional IT autonomy, or inherited Google Workspace estates where no central inventory exists. Current guidance suggests that if Apps Script is still used in a few sanctioned workflows, the policy should be narrower than an outright ban: allow only the minimum approved creation pattern, require explicit ownership, and review each exception on a schedule. There is no universal standard for this yet, but the direction of travel in NHI governance is clear: short-lived, visible, purpose-bound access beats broad, persistent capability. If project-name mimicry is part of the abuse path, blocking only the runtime is insufficient because the control gap sits earlier in the lifecycle. For teams formalising the response, the NIST Cybersecurity Framework 2.0 is useful for framing the decision as governance, detection, and response rather than a single technical hardening task.

Related resources from NHI Mgmt Group

• How can organisations reduce data loss when employees use AI apps and shadow SaaS in the browser?
• Why do malicious OAuth apps still work even when organisations use MFA?
• When should organisations use AI to help manage NHIs?
• How can organisations govern AI agents that use service accounts and tokens?