Your workforce adopts AI and SaaS, connects applications, grants access, and shares data every day. We call this the Workforce Edge—where modern work happens, and where more of today's technology risk takes shape.
As work changed, security evolved with it—from protecting networks, to managing identities, to securing a workforce operating across SaaS, AI, agents, identities, and integrations.
~1995–2010
Security focused on the corporate network, devices, and connections. Work largely happened inside the perimeter, and security was built to protect it.
~2010–2020
Cloud. SaaS. BYOD. Remote work pushed work beyond the network. Identity became central to securing access, but primarily for the technology IT knew about.
Today
SaaS, AI, agents, identities, and connections now form continuously through the way the workforce gets work done—often beyond traditional security processes.
The workforce edge is the sum of all of the decisions your employees make as they use the Internet on a daily basis. I'm Russ Spiller. I am the cofounder and CEO of Nudge Security. When Jaime and I founded Nudge Security, one of the things that we recognized is that most security programs these days are set up around dated concepts of technology use. And that really kind of evolves from the idea that you have an endpoint that you're gonna lock down, and we're gonna prevent bad things from happening on that. We have a network perimeter, and we're gonna keep all the good data inside my network and keep all the bad things on the outside, prevent people from getting to the bad things. And then, of course, we kind of evolved past that and Okta came along and made it easier for us to run-in single sign on in Salesforce one and everything went to SaaS applications and we kind of have this identity as the sort of edge that we're really focused on. But all of that really kinda breaks down when you kinda look at how the world is actually operating today. Because we have an entire workforce that every day sits down on their computer and logs onto the Internet. When we think about the Workforce Edge, this is the sum total of all of those risk decisions your employees are making. It is the missing piece of your security program when you think about moving beyond that identity layer and actually looking at the app layer and the actions that are being taken within those applications that your employees use every single day, every single hour, and all of the incremental risk decisions that they make going into that. This is a completely distributed problem. This is one that's driven through every single interaction your employees are making. You need to have them be part of the solution. Ultimately, your employees are not coming into work and saying, hey, I wanna waste time and sign up for a new tool. They're trying to get their job done. They're trying to do whatever function they do, whether that's design product, create code, you know, balance the books, create the next year's roadmap, run an m and a process. They're trying to do their job. And if we sit there and start to make them come back to a centralized team every time they need to enable a new workflow, enable a new technology, make a new decision in the technology that you provisioned to them, all of a sudden, business slows down to a crawl. So what we really need to be able to do is enable that productivity for your employees while still mitigating that risk. We're not gonna do that by shutting off the Internet. We're gonna do that by making them part of solution and making sure that as they're taking those risk decisions, we're sitting there with them and making sure that we're not accepting more risk than the organization wants to take, but still allowing them to get their jobs done. And that's what Nudge does. The first thing that we've seen, and we did, research with, doctor Aaron Kaye, who's a professor of psychology at Duke University, where we actually saw the compliance along with those security policies increase by about two x overall. So it went from a thirty two percent compliance rate when we block them, at the network level up to a sixty eight percent compliance rate when we actually engage them as they're taking those actions. A massive shift, but that compliance rate is only a small side effect. What we're now doing is building trust with the security organization. You gotta start from a place of trust in order to come back when you really want them to stop doing and you may not give them a choice, or when you need them to engage and explain a little bit further in terms of the decisions that they have made. All of that is about automatically engaging those employees, building that trust relationship between IT and security, and ultimately driving towards that compliance of your security policies and reducing that risk in your organization.
Every new app, account, identity, and connection can introduce risk. But when they form outside traditional security processes, teams are left managing an environment they can't fully observe or understand.
“Today, every employee acts as their own CIO and can easily reach for a new cloud or SaaS tool to solve virtually any problem.”
Ed Amoroso · CEO, TAG Infosphere
Modern work happens beyond those boundaries. That creates visibility and control gaps traditional security approaches weren't designed to address.
Network-based tools see traffic that passes through them. They miss SaaS and AI apps used on personal devices, home networks, or outside the corporate network.
API-based security tools need a direct integration before they can see what's happening inside the an app. That leaves visibility gaps across the long tail of SaaS and AI tools adopted by the workforce.
Blocking every unknown SaaS or AI app creates unnecessary friction. But visibility alone isn't enough either. Security teams need controls that match the response to the risk.
Nudge Security helps you discover what's happening across the Workforce Edge, understand what matters, and respond based on the risk—without getting in the way of work.
Discover AI and SaaS apps, accounts, identities, OAuth grants, and integrations across your workforce—even when they fall outside traditional security processes.
AI-powered risk assessment continuously evaluates your SaaS and AI environment, so your team can focus on what needs attention.
Nudge AI agents analyze risk, automate repetitive work, and take action with human oversight, helping your team keep pace with a growing attack surface.
Guide people in the flow of work through Slack, Teams, email, and browser nudges. Automate what security shouldn't have to chase. Step in when the risk calls for it.
“Some of these people don’t respond to emails or tickets, but they responded to the damn nudge. It just works.”
Manager of IT · Wallace Plese + Dreher
Before
Third-party risk assessments can't keep pace with SaaS and AI adoption, leaving newly discovered apps unvetted.
With Nudge
Continuously assess third-party risk across SaaS and AI apps as they're discovered.
Before
Data and access move across apps faster than security can track them.
With Nudge
Security sees where sensitive data and access are going and can respond based on the risk.
Before
Traditional identity controls like SSO only cover managed apps, leaving accounts and connections outside their view.
With Nudge
Continuously discover and monitor accounts, identities, OAuth grants, and connections across your workforce.
Before
Security teams are forced to choose between allowing risk and adding friction.
With Nudge
Match the response to the risk—with guidance, automation, or intervention when it's needed.
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