Shadow SaaS Accounts as Security Blind Spots

While many IT teams focus on discovering shadow IT, the unauthorized apps used by employees, a key aspect often overlooked is shadow SaaS accounts. These are user accounts within SaaS tools that don’t match any known user or identity in your organization.

These untracked accounts can pose serious risks, bypassing security policies and remaining undetected in your system. As SaaS adoption increases, understanding and managing these accounts is crucial for maintaining both security and compliance.

In this post, we’ll explore why shadow SaaS accounts are a growing threat and how to identify and mitigate them.

What Is a Shadow SaaS Account?

A shadow SaaS account is any user account within a SaaS application that can’t be matched to a known identity within your organization. These are accounts that fall outside the visibility and governance of IT and security teams—not necessarily because of the tool itself, but because no one knows who the account belongs to.

Think of them as ghost users; real accounts with real access, but no clear owner, no proper identity tie-in, and often, no security oversight.

Common examples of shadow SaaS accounts:

• [email protected] created during a SaaS trial that was never cleaned up
• A personal Gmail account invited to collaborate in Figma or Google Drive
• Service accounts created for automation, with no linked user or team
• Former employee accounts still active in apps long after offboarding
• Generic team logins like [email protected] with shared access

Why Do Shadow SaaS Accounts Exist?

Shadow SaaS accounts often originate from:

• Users inviting personal emails for convenience
• Teams bypassing IT to set up apps quickly
• Lack of enforcement around identity governance in SaaS tools
• Incomplete offboarding process
• Vendors requiring account creation during setup or trials

They might seem harmless, but these accounts can have full access to sensitive data, admin privileges, or persistent OAuth permissions, all without being tied to anyone IT can verify or manage.

What Causes Shadow SaaS Accounts?

Shadow accounts don’t appear out of nowhere. 

They are often the byproduct of today’s fast-moving, decentralized work environments. As teams adopt more SaaS tools to move quickly and collaborate seamlessly, identity and access governance gets left behind. The most common drivers behind the rise of shadow accounts include the following:

1. Decentralized SaaS Adoption

Employees often sign up for new tools independently, whether it’s for design, marketing, analytics, or productivity. When those sign-ups happen outside of centralized IT provisioning, the accounts created may not align with your identity provider (like Entra ID or Google Workspace). This leads to:

• Personal email addresses used in business apps
• Accounts created using aliases or shared mailboxes
• Tools that exist in parallel to sanctioned platforms

2. User Invites and Personal Email Usage

Many platforms allow users to invite collaborators freely. An employee might invite their personal Gmail or Apple ID to test something across devices or to keep access if they leave. 

Over time, these personal emails become ghost accounts with ongoing access to your company data.

3. Untracked admin and service accounts

To get a SaaS app up and running, teams often create setup accounts like [email protected], or service accounts used by integrations or bots. The issue is they forget about them when onboarding begins, which means accounts with genuine permissions exist without any individual using them.

These accounts may:

• Not be tied to any real employee
• Bypass MFA or SSO
• Persist long after the initial setup
• Have access privileges

Without visibility, they quietly accumulate risk. It may be months or even years before someone realizes these accounts are active, with no current employee to ask about their use or existence. Many SaaS apps don’t contain native user action logging, so it would be nearly impossible to know if someone used these accounts maliciously.

4. Lack of Identity Enforcement by SaaS Providers

Not all SaaS apps integrate with enterprise identity providers. 

Even those that do may allow users to create accounts with unmanaged identities. Unless enforcement policies are in place, there is nothing stopping a user from adding any email they choose.

The result of all of these would be a growing collection of accounts that IT and security teams can’t see, manage, or control, but still have access to company resources.

The Risks of Unowned SaaS Accounts

At first glance, a few stray accounts in SaaS tools might not seem like a big deal. But shadow SaaS accounts are more than just clutter. They are unmonitored access points that quietly increase your organization’s attack surface.

No Clear Ownership Means No Accountability

If an account doesn’t match a known user, no one’s watching it. That means:

• No one’s ensuring it follows security best practices
• No one knows if it’s still needed
• No one gets alerted if it’s compromised

Accounts without owners are accounts without responsibility, and that’s a problem.

Bypass of Identity Controls

Shadow accounts usually live outside your identity provider or identity and access management platform unless it is a unified platform that also covers SaaS management. That means:

• No enforcement of SSO or MFA
• No password policies
• No visibility into login activity

They operate in a blind spot that your identity and access management (IAM) and security tools might not cover.

Lingering Access to Sensitive Data

Even if a tool isn’t critical, the data inside it might be. Shadow accounts can retain access to internal documents, customer information, financial data, and shared cloud storage or repositories. Since these accounts aren’t tracked, that access may persist long after it should have been revoked.

Privilege Creep and Overexposure

Many shadow SaaS accounts, especially service or setup accounts, are created with high privileges. Over time, these accounts:

• Accumulate access across multiple apps
• Are used in scripts or automations that no one monitors
• Become too risky to remove, leading to “zombie” accounts

All of these creates an environment ripe for internal misuse or external manipulation.

Compliance and Audit Failures

Shadow accounts are a direct threat to your compliance posture, especially in frameworks that require strict access governance and auditability. 

If you operate under standards like SOC 2, ISO 27001, HIPAA, or GDPR, shadow accounts can result in:

• Access control failures
• Audit gaps
• Violation of least privilege principles
• Data residency or privacy issues

How JumpCloud Helps Uncover Shadow SaaS Accounts

Before you can manage shadow accounts, you need to see them. That is where JumpCloud comes in. 

JumpCloud SaaS Management empowers IT teams to go beyond surface-level app discovery. It helps uncover shadow accounts, from where you can take your preferred course of action to improve your security and compliance posture.

WIth JumpCloud you can take advantage of:

• Multiple discovery methods: JumpCloud detects SaaS usage from multiple sources to build a complete picture of your SaaS footprint, including the JumpCloud browser extension to native connectors like Google Workspace, Microsoft Entra ID, and more.
• Centralized visibility: When accounts are discovered via connectors and don’t match any known identity in your organization, they are flagged as shadow accounts. These typically include personal emails, external collaborators, or service accounts with no identifiable owner.
• SaaS security insights: IT admins can generate reports of SaaS security insights, including shadow accounts, shared accounts, former employee accounts, OAuth permissions, and app-to-app connections.
• Permissions controls: See the risk scores of OAuth permissions and revoke them if necessary, leaving no security gap behind.
• Direct ownership assignment: If you have detected the owner of an account and want to keep it, you can assign a user to it. This way, the account shows up under the matching user profile, making it easier to track.

The goal is to turn invisible accounts into visible, manageable identities.

Ready to make sense of your organization’s SaaS footprint? Try JumpCloud for free today to see it for yourself.