A security team traces an active breach, but the origin is absent from any official asset inventory. It is an unapproved third-party SaaS tool, which is invisible to compliance audits and entirely unmanaged. According to a CloudZero’s 2024 report, 42% of SaaS applications in use are classified as shadow IT, therefore creating a blind spot attackers increasingly exploit. With the SEC’s new cyber incident disclosure rules demanding rapid reporting and global privacy regulations tightening, organizations can no longer rely on periodic compliance checks. Hence, continuous third-party cloud discovery has become the new baseline for application security.
For Meenakshi Alagesan, an Application Security Engineer and an IEEE Senior Member, this challenge defines the modern security mandate. With over 15 years of experience, specializing in threat modeling, cloud security and web application security assessment, she focuses on making the unseen visible.
“Security is more than the assets you control,” she says. “It concerns the ones you never even know you have.”
The Compliance Illusion: Why Known Systems Are Not Enough
Compliance audits validate what is known. They neither cover the SaaS tools adopted independently by departments nor the PaaS services provisioned without centralized oversight. These leave security teams unprepared when incidents involve assets beyond the audit’s scope. High-profile breaches have shown how attackers use these unmanaged services as entry points, thereby bypassing hardened environments entirely.
“You cannot defend what you do not know exists,” Meenakshi emphasizes. “Audits are important, but they are a snapshot in time and the cloud changes by the hour.”
Tighter regulations amplify the stakes. Incident disclosures now have to be filed within days, thus leaving little time to investigate shadow services before reporting. As a 2025 Business Intelligence Awards Judge, Meenakshi has observed that the most forward-looking organizations integrate continuous discovery into daily operations, thus treating compliance as the floor rather than the ceiling. At work, she applied this philosophy to address a persistent visibility gap.
Closing the Discovery Gap: From Blind Spots to Real-Time Awareness
Across the industry, the complexity of cloud ecosystems is growing faster than governance models can adapt. With SaaS and PaaS tools proliferating at the departmental level, security teams face an ever-expanding perimeter that is difficult to monitor in real time. These make the ability to discover and assess third-party services continuously a strategic differentiator for enterprises operating at scale.
“Scale without visibility is a liability,” Meenakshi remarks. “The faster an organization grows, the more important it is to know exactly what services are in play and who is responsible for them.”
When Meenakshi saw the risks posed by untracked third-party services, she led an initiative to design and develop her company’s Automated Third-Party Cloud Footprint & Risk Prioritization capability. The approach was engineered for scale: core discovery integrated enterprise SSO data, endpoint telemetry and DNS security logs, therefore automating ingestion so that new services were identified within hours of adoption. This closed the costly adoption-to-discovery gap.
The capability went even further by enriching discovery results with over 25 contextual datasets, asset ownership, vendor details, infrastructure mappings and much more. Automated ETL processes normalized and deduplicated the data, consequently consolidating it into a structured security database. This integration meant security teams could see new services as they appeared and, better yet, immediately understand their context and potential impact.
Turning Data into Decisions: Prioritization at Scale
An exhaustive inventory without prioritization risks overwhelming security teams. Meenakshi’s system embedded a classification engine to score each service on business criticality, data sensitivity and compliance exposure. High-risk services were escalated for immediate review, while lower-risk entries remained monitored without consuming critical response time.
“Effective security is about focus,” Meenakshi notes. “Knowing which risks demand attention right now makes the difference between being reactive and being ready.”
This approach aligns with the industry’s shift toward risk-based security strategies as reflected in the CISA’s “Secure by Design” principles. It also echoes the methodologies from her co-authored scholarly article, titled Product Innovation and Security: Data Science-Driven Approaches to Secure Software Engineering, where data science is applied to improve both the rigor and adaptability of security processes. By operationalizing prioritization, her work allowed her company’s security teams to shorten incident response cycles, improve compliance reporting and engage earlier with business units adopting new tools.
Raising the Standard for Cloud Security
Modern enterprises cannot afford blind spots in their cloud environments. If a service is absent from the inventory, then it is still a part of the attack surface, just an unmanaged part. Compliance-driven discovery remains reactive and incomplete; security demands continuous, contextual visibility as an operational norm.
Organizations that adopt such capabilities will respond faster to incidents, adapt to new regulations without major overhauls and prevent misconfigurations before they escalate.
“The real measure of security is contrary to how well you follow the rules,” Meenakshi reflects. “Instead, it concerns how quickly you adapt when the rules, or the risks, change.”
In an age where breaches increasingly originate from services no one remembers approving, continuous discovery is, in contrast to a mere innovation, a necessity.
