SAAS Sprawl
SaaS sprawl is the uncontrolled accumulation of cloud applications across an organisation, typically bought outside central IT, producing redundant spend and unmanaged data.
What is SAAS Sprawl?
Definition
SaaS Sprawl is the uncontrolled accumulation of cloud applications across an organisation — subscriptions bought by individual teams, trials that quietly became production, and tools nobody has reviewed since the person who signed up for them left. The visible cost is mostly duplicated spend; the harder problem is that each application holds company data under terms and access controls nobody ever assessed. Bringing it back under control starts with discovery, because an inventory nobody maintains is precisely how sprawl accumulates in the first place.
Role in cybersecurity
SAAS Sprawl plays an important role in building organizational resilience against cyber threats. Implementing appropriate mechanisms in this area is required by regulations such as NIS2, DORA and ISO 27001.