As the company grew rapidly, teams across the organization developed overlapping needs for reliable information about SaaS and AI use.
Manual processes and fragmented visibility created noticeable inefficiencies, limiting the company’s ability to govern its expanding SaaS and AI ecosystem, respond to alerts, and maintain security while supporting a culture of innovation.
The company’s former IT systems engineering team lead (IT lead) recognized the need for a single source of truth for tracking SaaS and AI use—a shared system of record that could provide consistent answers about tool usage and adoption while enabling efficient cross-functional collaboration.
The company initially adopted Nudge Security to quantify and manage risks associated with shadow SaaS, reducing the time its IT team spent manually tracking down answers.
As the organization’s needs evolved, the team expanded Nudge Security into a company-wide SaaS and AI system of record.
“What started as a tool for the IT team is now used by at least four other teams,” the former IT lead explained. “Anybody who cares about security, usability, or SaaS trends knows about Nudge. It’s become part of our daily workflow.”
The value the company realized from Nudge Security continued to grow as new priorities emerged, including cross-functional collaboration around workforce AI security and governance.
“Our detection and response team uses Nudge to identify AI agents they may want to block, as well as publishers or geolocations that might be unsafe. On our side, we use it to spot adoption trends—who’s signing up for what and what’s gaining traction in the AI world. Other teams use it for anomalies and predictions,” he said.
Nudge Security continuously discovers SaaS and AI use across the company’s workforce, checks the security posture of critical apps for risks and misconfigurations, and surfaces adoption and usage trends.
“Nudge helped us make sense of the madness that is SaaS sprawl,” said the former IT lead. “Nudge gives us data that we care about quickly, and it’s our source of truth for almost everything SaaS-related. In the world of SaaS management, Nudge Security is a must-have.”
Nudge Security gives the company a shared system of record for cross-functional teams—without restricting them to yet another “single pane of glass.”
Instead, Nudge Security’s flexible custom workflows and public API allow the company to integrate Nudge Security data into its broader security and IT infrastructure, powering seamless security and governance workflows across its SaaS and AI ecosystem.
“My team uses the Nudge API extensively. It’s a part of the machine that we’ve built,” the former IT systems engineering team lead explained. “Nudge data flows into our inventory process and helps us decide which apps to add to our identity provider. It’s fundamental to our workflows.”
For the IT team, Nudge Security has been essential for streamlining security posture risk detection and response.
“Nudge Security exposes potential attack vectors and anomalies that could have been ignored so that we can act on them. It could be a finding or something reflected in an email that Nudge captures,” the former IT systems engineering team lead explained.
The immediate contextual information Nudge Security provides enables faster decision-making and more efficient prioritization of potential security issues, saving the team approximately two days per alert.
“Nudge gives us clarity and helps us understand the severity and scale of an alert without digging,” the former IT systems engineering team lead said, explaining that SaaS security alerts are typically noisy and can require several days of investigation. “With Nudge, the data is correlated for us. We save at least a couple of days’ worth of work because we’re past that first step of correlation.”
Armed with context about a finding’s potential severity, the team can right-size its response.
“Without Nudge, we wouldn’t understand context, and that context is everything. Before, you think everything is bad, everything’s on fire, when it’s actually just one person testing something.”
With Nudge, we’ve been able to calibrate and say, ‘This is an issue; this is noise.’ We’re not reacting to everything anymore.
The company values Nudge Security’s alerts on SaaS and AI supply chain breaches as an early warning system. Nudge Security maps the supply chain for each SaaS and AI provider. When an upstream vendor is compromised, Nudge Security immediately alerts the company with specific context about affected internal accounts and data, enabling a prompt response instead of forcing the team to wait for delayed vendor disclosures.
This speed advantage proved valuable during a breach involving one of the company’s SaaS providers. Nudge Security’s alert arrived roughly a week before the provider notified customers.
“The early notice from Nudge gave us focus, so by the time the provider notified us, we already knew what we needed to act on. We understood the severity and were able to assess it. It gave us an upper hand,” the former IT systems engineering team lead said.
The early notification enabled the team to proactively triage the issue, assess its impact, and begin response measures—transforming what could have been a reactive emergency into a managed response.
As AI tools have rapidly proliferated, Nudge Security has helped the company respond to the changing landscape and establish a workforce AI governance program that supports innovation while maintaining security and compliance standards.
“Within my team, we monitor AI vendors to understand what’s gaining traction in the world of AI agents, who’s signing up for what, and which OAuth grants are connecting to our environment. We look at internal adoption trends and contextualize them,” explained the former IT lead.
This visibility allows the company to stay ahead of emerging AI tools that could benefit the organization. For example, Nudge detected the rapid rise of an AI development tool inside the company, prompting the security team to assess its potential as a new standard.
“We got ahead of it. We saw the culture shift and the adoption, and we evaluated the risk associated with that type of tooling. We determined it was acceptable, moved forward with providing it for the company, and employees were excited,” he explained.
With this approach, the company has established thoughtful AI governance that balances experimentation with oversight. Employees can experiment until app use reaches a business-critical threshold, at which point the organization conducts a thorough vendor review to ensure compliance.
“We have an internal adoption culture around AI tooling, but we need to understand risk registers,” he explained. “Nudge Security gives our compliance and legal teams a dataset so they can see which AI tools are popular and current, investigate how they handle our data, and evaluate them from privacy, security, and compliance perspectives.”
This approach has been crucial to the company’s governance strategy. “Nudge Security has been paramount to our compliance and legal teams in choosing what becomes approved AI tooling. Nudge helps them approve new tools without introducing friction into the culture.”
Nudge helped us make sense of the madness that is SaaS sprawl.
