All SaaS Risk Is Identity Risk and Your Identity Management Software Is Probably Missing It

Every security leader we talk to lately is feeling the same thing:

You’ve got more visibility than ever, more alerts than you can triage, and still—somehow—you’re not ahead.

One day it’s a stale Slack token still active for a departed contractor. The next day, someone installs an AI assistant with full access to Google Drive. Then comes a browser extension that quietly exfiltrates customer records from Salesforce.

You don’t need more alerts. You need a better way to understand what all of these risks have in common.

Let’s call it what it is: an identity problem hiding in a SaaS wrapper—one that most identity management software isn’t built to see.

New to identity-first SaaS security?
Recommended: Getting Started with SaaS Security Guide. This practical resource walks through key concepts, risk patterns, the various solution options, and how to build a more effective SaaS security program. Download your copy now.

Stop Treating the Symptom

The industry loves to name symptoms like they’re root causes.

• “Misconfiguration.”

• “Shadow IT.”

• “Insider threat.”

• “OAuth misuse.”

Each gets its own category. Each has its own tool. But under the hood, what we’re really looking at is this:

Someone had access. That access wasn’t understood, governed, or revoked appropriately.

And because that “someone” could be a human, an integration, a service account, or an extension, the problem slips past traditional guardrails and past most identity management software that still focuses on logins, not behavior.

SaaS Risk Isn’t a Category; It’s a Consequence

When SaaS adoption exploded, most security teams responded by trying to wrap familiar controls around unfamiliar territory. They extended their CASBs, enforced MFA, and leaned more heavily on their identity providers and IAM platforms to keep things in check.

Useful steps, but it’s not enough. Those controls were built for visibility and enforcement, not what the identity did after login, or how it spread across apps, roles, and tokens. And that’s the gap.  

You can’t make smart risk decisions if:

• All identities look the same on paper

• You can’t tell a dormant service account from an active one

• A browser plugin siphoning CRM data doesn’t even show up as an identity

That’s where the whole model starts to break.

The Real Blast Radius of SaaS: Identity

Let’s look at what introduces risk in a modern SaaS estate:

• A shared password that unlocks 8 tools, none of which have SSO.

• A browser plugin that reads every email in your company’s inbox.

• A forgotten integration still syncing data to a partner you stopped working with last year.  

• A no-code workflow running with hardcoded admin credentials.  

• A temp hire with full export rights in Salesforce, because someone cloned the wrong role.

None of this unusual. It’s normal. And it’s not because SaaS is inherently risky. It’s because SaaS identity sprawl is growing faster than most teams can track across accounts, tokens, extensions, automations, and app-to-app integrations.

Want to see how these risks stack up across the industry?
Check out our 2025 SaaS Security Risks Report, a breakdown of emerging identity threats across real SaaS environments. Download the report.

Why Grip Starts (and Stays) With Identity

Grip isn’t traditional identity management software, nor did we build yet another tool to manage SaaS. We built a system that re-centers SaaS security around what matters most:

Who has access, what they can do with it, and how you control that over time.

Not just for sanctioned apps. Not just for SSO users. Not just for the clean, “cut and dry” cases. All of it, sanctioned apps or not.

Grip ingests SaaS usage at scale and reconstructs the full identity graph across users, service accounts, tokens, and extensions. Then we show you where access exists, where it’s risky, and where it’s outright broken. And unlike legacy tools, we don’t just tell you what’s wrong.

We help you fix it, with automations and workflows built in.

• Revoke risky OAuth tokens tied to dormant identities

• Flag browser extensions with excessive permissions

• Detect privilege creep across disconnected SaaS silos

• Uncover unauthorized integrations and trace it back to the identity that enabled it

No drama. No FUD. Just a clearer picture of the blast radius, before it explodes.

The Bottom Line

You don’t have a “SaaS problem.” You have an identity risk problem that manifests across your SaaS environment. Solving it requires a better mental model.

Start with identity. Understand how it moves, multiplies, and mutates in SaaS. Then take action with context, not just correlation. That’s what we built Grip to do. And it’s why our customers sleep a little easier.

Ready to see your SaaS environment through the lens of identity?

Next steps:

• Explore the fundamentals first: Download the free guide, Getting Started with SaaS Security

• Talk with our team of security experts about your SaaS environment. Book time now.

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