Last updated on
April 28, 2025

Shadow SaaS Discovery: Email Scanning vs. In-Browser Monitoring

Scott Young

How Security Teams Can Discover Every Shadow SaaS and GenAI App Employees Use

Employees often forget to alert IT to every SaaS application they use. But even popular security tools can miss apps in your environment.

Shadow SaaS and GenAI Discovery

As enterprises embrace SaaS and GenAI applications, security and IT teams struggle to maintain visibility into every tool in use. Employees often adopt new applications without IT approval, creating shadow SaaS, a security and compliance risk that traditional monitoring solutions may fail to detect. Shadow AI goes a layer deeper, hiding GenAI tools and introducing unique security risks around data loss and insider threats. 

Even security tools designed for SaaS and GenAI discovery often miss key applications, leaving organizations exposed to potential data leakage, compliance violations, and security threats.

To truly understand your SaaS and GenAI risk landscape, IT and security teams must adopt solutions that monitor SaaS and AI usage where they occur: the browser.

Why Shadow SaaS and GenAI Tools Escape Detection

1. Employees Adopt Apps Without IT Oversight

2. Unapproved Apps Increase Security and Compliance Risks

3. Traditional Discovery Methods Miss Applications

Browser-Based SaaS Monitoring: Full Visibility into Shadow IT and GenAI Usage

How It Works:

The Obsidian Security Browser Extension offers rapid time to value by removing the complexity of deploying an agent or custom browser. The extension is privacy-focused, only monitoring for corporate applications; it only collects limited information, avoiding sensitive data like browsing history.

Obsidian provides deep, real-time visibility into SaaS and GenAI usage directly from the browser, including:

Unique advantages:

"During the Cyberhaven incident, Obsidian helped us uncover five other extensions that were using Generative AI. With no controls or visibility into what data was being read from our systems, this quickly became a top priority for the team. Using Obsidian, we were able to prioritize and block access to these unauthorized AI instances, ensuring safety of our data." - Leading Financial Services Company

Conclusion

As SaaS and GenAI adoption accelerates, traditional discovery methods—like email scanning—fall short on their own, as they often miss applications accessed directly through the browser. In-browser monitoring provides superior visibility into app usage, balancing security and privacy where most Shadow IT and AI tools actually operate—the web browser.

Get started for free to begin inventorying every SaaS and GenAI application in your environment.

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