How to Fully Offboard a User from All SaaS Applications After Termination

Martin Snyder
Jul 16
3 min read

Employee offboarding is one of the most overlooked risks in SaaS security. When someone leaves your organization—whether it’s a resignation or a termination—their access to company systems should be cut off immediately.

In theory, that sounds simple.

But in practice, it’s anything but.

Even if you’re using an Identity Provider (IdP) like Okta, Microsoft Entra ID, or Ping Identity, there’s a blind spot that most teams miss: unmanaged identities. These are SaaS accounts created outside of IT’s visibility—sometimes using personal email addresses, and often through unsanctioned tools.

If you don’t know which SaaS accounts exist, you can’t be sure a former employee is truly gone.

The Hidden Risk of Incomplete Offboarding

Here’s how offboarding usually goes:

✅ HR notifies IT of the employee departure

✅ IT deactivates the user’s account in the IdP

✅ Access to core systems like email and file storage is revoked

❌ But access to SaaS tools the employee signed up for independently? Still active.

These “orphaned” accounts can live on for weeks, months—or even indefinitely. That includes:

Cloud storage apps with shared company files
AI assistants integrated with Google or Microsoft accounts
Marketing or sales tools with customer data
Project management platforms where strategic plans are visible

This creates a serious security and compliance gap, especially if your offboarding process relies solely on identity management systems.

How Waldo Security Closes the Offboarding Loop

Waldo Security helps organizations solve this challenge by providing full visibility into both managed and unmanaged identities across all SaaS platforms.

1. Offboard Managed Identities

For accounts connected to your IdP, Waldo integrates with your existing systems to ensure that all access is removed—including any lingering sessions or residual permissions.

2. Detect and Offboard Unmanaged Accounts

Waldo also scans for SaaS accounts created outside IT’s control. These may be tied to personal email addresses, unauthorized tools, or third-party integrations. Once detected, Waldo provides options to investigate, disable, or remove access entirely.

Learn more in our post on How to Detect Shadow SaaS and Manage Risk.

Why It Matters

1. Reduce Compliance Risk

Standards like SOC 2, HIPAA, and GDPR require clear offboarding procedures. Allowing former employees to retain SaaS access—especially unsanctioned access—can lead to violations and audit failures.

2. Prevent Insider Threats

Even if the employee leaves on good terms, accidental data exposure is common. And in malicious cases, lingering access can result in stolen IP, deleted records, or unauthorized data transfers.

3. Save Time and Headaches

Manually hunting down every SaaS account is inefficient—and unrealistic. Waldo automates the process so security teams can focus on higher-value tasks.

Complete Offboarding with Waldo Security

With Waldo Security, your team gets:

✅ Discovery of all SaaS accounts tied to current and former employees
✅ Automated deprovisioning of accounts linked to your IdP
✅ Identification and remediation of shadow IT and personal-email accounts
✅ Confidence that your offboarding process is complete and compliant

You can read more in our full guide on How to Make Sure You Remove All SaaS Access of an Employee.

Conclusion: Offboarding Shouldn’t Be a Guessing Game

Disabling a user in your identity provider is only half the battle. To truly offboard someone from your SaaS environment, you need full visibility—across both managed and unmanaged tools.

Waldo Security gives you that visibility, along with the workflows to act on it. So you’re not just checking boxes—you’re securing your environment and protecting your data.

Because when an employee leaves, their access should too.