Former Employee Accounts in Your SaaS Stack

When an employee leaves your company, you probably feel sure that their access has been revoked, accounts disabled, devices collected, and credentials removed. But in today’s SaaS-driven world, that confidence might be misplaced.

38% of admins admit they can’t even discover all applications in use.

2025 SME IT Trends Report: Simplifying IT in the Fast Lane of Change

SaaS apps are often adopted outside of IT’s control—what’s commonly known as shadow IT. Whether it’s through self-service sign-ups, team purchases, or one-off tool use, it can lead to a big problem: former employees might still have access to critical apps even after they’ve been offboarded from your directory or single sign-on (SSO) provider. Unless your provider also handles SaaS management, this can leave your business exposed.

These lingering accounts aren’t just operational loose ends, they increase the attack surface, create opportunities for data exfiltration, and complicate compliance in regulated industries.

This post explores why former employee accounts in SaaS tools are often overlooked and how to identify them with JumpCloud.

The False Sense of Closure in Offboarding

When an employee leaves a company, IT usually runs through the standard checklist: shut down the corporate email, revoke VPN access, remove them from the identity provider, and collect any hardware. On the surface, the offboarding process seems done and dusted. But in today’s SaaS-heavy world, it’s not always that simple. 

The truth is, employees use a variety of SaaS tools. They need everything, from project management platforms to generative AI tools. And many of these apps fall outside IT’s centralized control. While the main systems might be locked down, plenty of SaaS accounts could still be active and tied to the former employee’s credentials.

These accounts don’t always get flagged, especially when:

• They were created outside the official app provisioning process.
• They use non-federated credentials (e.g., email and password).
• They were accessed via personal devices or unmanaged browsers.

Why Former Employee Accounts Persist in SaaS

SaaS applications are built for convenience and accessibility. That’s part of their value, but it also introduces risks when it comes to employee offboarding.

Unlike centralized infrastructure or on-prem systems, SaaS tools often operate independently of your identity provider. While some support SSO, many do not. And even when SSO is in place, it’s not always enforced or universally adopted.

Here’s why former employees slip through:

• Individual passwords: Many SaaS tools let users manage their own passwords. If IT isn’t keeping track of every login method, ex-employees might still have active credentials. 
• Unlinked accounts: Some accounts use company email addresses but aren’t connected to the organization’s identity system. So, removing directory access doesn’t automatically disable these accounts. 
• Shadow IT: Employees sometimes sign up for tools on their own without IT approval, known as shadow IT. Without a centralized SaaS management system, these accounts can easily slip through the cracks during offboarding. 
• Active sessions: Even when access is revoked, browser sessions can stay active, especially in tools that don’t require frequent reauthentication. 
• Hidden admin privileges: In some SaaS platforms, user accounts can have admin rights without being tied to any role group or SSO policy, making them harder for IT to track or disable.

These realities combine to create a growing blind spot. It’s not that IT teams aren’t diligent. It’s that the SaaS ecosystem doesn’t always align with centralized security models.

The Risk Isn’t Just Hypothetical

Unmonitored former employee accounts aren’t just untidy. They are vulnerable.

And in the context of SaaS, where data is always connected and accessible, even a single forgotten account can become a vector for exposure.

Nearly 90% of IT admins are alarmed by shadow IT, and estimate most employees use one to five unauthorized applications.

2025 SME IT Trends Report: Simplifying IT in the Fast Lane of Change

Let’s go over some real-world scenarios:

• Customer data at risk: A former sales rep could still access CRM systems, exposing sensitive customer info, sales pipelines, or private conversations. 
• Leaked IP and projects: A former developer might still have access to code repositories, product plans, or shared documents. 
• Lingering admin rights: If an ex-employee had admin privileges in tools like marketing platforms or finance software, they might still be able to change settings, invite others, or delete data. 
• Password reuse issues: If the employee reused passwords across different services, those credentials could be exposed in unrelated breaches and used to access their still-active SaaS accounts. 
• Compliance headaches: Companies in regulated industries risk audit issues, data violations, or fines if sensitive information remains accessible long after an employee leaves.

How JumpCloud SaaS Security Insights Help

When it comes to managing SaaS security, visibility is everything, especially in offboarding scenarios. 

The challenge isn’t just disabling known accounts; it’s knowing what’s still active in the first place. That’s where the SaaS security insights capability of JumpCloud SaaS Management adds critical value.

JumpCloud discovers SaaS usage across your organization using multiple data sources, including browser activity via JumpCloud browser extension and native connectors (e.g., Google Workspace, Entra ID, Atlassian, and others).

The discovery process allows JumpCloud to map SaaS activity back to individual users, creating a user-centric view of app usage. When someone leaves the organization, this view doesn’t disappear. It becomes a lens for post-offboarding risk.

With SaaS security insights, IT teams can identify:

• Accounts still active for offboarded users
• Which applications those accounts are tied to
• Whether access was direct, federated, or shared
• Potential high-risk access (critical OAuth permissions)

These insights give you the clarity to take the right steps, like working with app owners to deactivate accounts, revoking credentials, or adding audit checks to your offboarding process. 

The result? Better awareness, smarter priorities, and confidence in your SaaS offboarding setup—without relying on guesswork or tedious manual audits.

What You Can Do Next 

Once former employee accounts are detected across SaaS tools, the next step is knowing what to do with that insight. Visibility creates a clear starting point for operational follow-up and strengthens your offboarding process overall.

Here’s how you can act on SaaS security insights effectively:

• Check and clean up access for former employees: Look for any SaaS accounts still tied to people who’ve left your team. Start with your most critical tools, like finance, customer data, or source code. 
• Collaborate with app owners or team admins: Many SaaS tools are managed by individual departments. Work with the right stakeholders to deactivate, transfer, or archive unused accounts. With JumpCloud SaaS management, you can easily assign owners to tools and spot shadow accounts that don’t have any owners. 
• Update offboarding processes to include SaaS checks: Most offboarding plans focus on email and core systems. Add a step to check SaaS access, ideally as part of your overall employee lifecycle process. 
• Set up regular audits: Regularly reviewing for inactive or orphaned accounts helps you catch lingering access and lower long-term risks. 
• Encourage teams to use centralized provisioning and SSO: The fewer direct-login accounts employees create, the fewer gaps there will be when they leave. Promote approved tools and enforce SSO whenever you can.

Visibility First, Control Next

Traditional offboarding often focuses on handling identity and device access, but it tends to overlook SaaS tools—especially when users create accounts with their own credentials or work outside approved processes. JumpCloud goes beyond standard offboarding by filling that gap, giving you better visibility into:

• Which SaaS tools are in use across your organization
• Who is using them—including accounts tied to former employees
• Where unmanaged, shadow, or lingering access might pose a risk

By combining user-centric SaaS discovery with security insights that you can export, JumpCloud empowers IT to go beyond the basics and take control of your SaaS ecosystem.

Start your free trial and see how JumpCloud SaaS Management helps surface and manage SaaS security risks others miss.