The uncontrolled growth of SaaS apps inside a company — the gap between the tools IT knows about and the tools employees actually use.
Also known as: app sprawl, SaaS proliferation
SaaS sprawl is what happens when individual teams buy individual tools without central coordination. Sales has its stack, marketing has its stack, engineering has its stack, and finance has a bill from each one.
The average mid-market company runs 250+ SaaS apps. IT can usually name 40 of them. The gap is sprawl — and inside that gap are duplicate tools (3 different note-taking apps), inactive accounts from former employees, and renewals that nobody's tracking.
Containing sprawl doesn't mean shutting tools down. It means seeing the full inventory in one place, deduplicating overlap, reclaiming dormant seats, and making the renewal calendar visible to finance and IT at the same time.
Any software, SaaS account, or cloud service an employee uses for work without IT approval or visibility.
Software a company has paid for but isn't using — licenses that sit on the metaphorical shelf, billed monthly, generating zero value.
The process of identifying SaaS seats that aren't being used and recovering them, either by deprovisioning the user or downgrading the tier.
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