Detect and Control Shadow IT and Unauthorized AI Usage

Material Security’s comprehensive visibility into cloud office activity gives security teams visibility into third-party applications and AI tools connected to your environment. With Material, it’s easy to understand employee usage of these applications and enforce controls to prevent data leakage and account takeover, regardless of whether they are integrated via SSO.

Problem: Signup is easy, oversight is hard

The proliferation of SaaS productivity apps have made it very tempting for employees to sign up for unauthorized services using their company email addresses. Though often acting without any malice and with the intention only to boost their productivity, it also creates a significant blind spot for Security and IT teams. Shadow IT has taken on an entirely new dimension with the explosion of generative and agentic AI tools, which often have relatively lax (or at least opaque) data security policies while offering an even greater promise of productivity boosting for employees. 

This introduces serious risks:

• Lack of Visibility: IT and Security have no central inventory of these applications, making it impossible to assess the organization's true risk posture.
• Increased Attack Surface: Many of these applications lack proper security controls like MFA. A weak password for a third-party service can lead to the compromise of an employee's corporate identity if they reuse credentials.
• Data Exposure: Employees may grant broad, permissive OAuth scopes to these tools, giving them access to read, write, and delete sensitive data in email, files, and other core systems. An attacker who compromises the third-party app gains those same permissions.
• Compliance Gaps: Storing sensitive corporate or customer data in unvetted applications can lead to violations of compliance frameworks like SOC 2, HIPAA, and GDPR.

Solution: See and control third-party app usage

Material Security provides a unique approach to discovering and controlling Shadow IT by deeply monitoring the one system all applications rely on: email. By analyzing metadata from messages like password resets, account confirmations, and security alerts, Material can see every third-party application and AI tool employees are using—even those not managed by an identity provider (IdP).

Here’s how Material solves the problem:

• Comprehensive Discovery: Material automatically detects all third-party services employees sign up for with their work email, creating a comprehensive inventory of sanctioned and unsanctioned applications.
• Automated Risk Assessment: For each application discovered, Material surfaces critical risk context, including which users have accounts, whether the app is protected by SSO, and if it has risky OAuth permissions into your environment.
• Targeted Remediation and Control: Security teams can take immediate, targeted action from within Material. You can protect accounts on non-federated services by requiring a step-up authentication challenge for sensitive actions like password resets. For applications deemed too risky, you can block their messages entirely, preventing employees from using them, or revoke dangerous OAuth grants with a single click. This ensures that even if an account is compromised, the blast radius is contained.

Employees will always seek the tools that allow them to do their job as efficiently and effectively as possible. With Material, security and IT teams can maintain visibility into their entire IT footprint, and take appropriate action where necessary to keep it secure.