Confront shadow IT with the SysAid Browser Extension

Shadow IT isn’t just an inconvenience. It’s a security blind spot, a compliance risk, and a quiet drain on your software budget, all at the same time. And it’s growing fast. 

By 2027, Gartner predicts 75% of employees will acquire, modify, or build technology that their IT department can’t see. That’s up from 41% in 2022. Application discovery, automatically finding every app running across your organization, is how you keep up.

SysAid’s License Manager Advanced gives your IT team that visibility. Here’s what it already catches, and where the gaps still are.

The gap in your application discovery

License Manager Advanced builds a live inventory of every app your organization uses. We offer discovery with Microsoft Entra ID to track sign-ins. When employees log in, License Manager Advanced catalogs, classifies, and flags every tool for review, and also discovers applications that may not be approved by your organization.

This discovery catches applications accessed through single sign-on, which means that if your app doesn’t require a login, it slips through unnoticed. Think AI tools, freemium apps, and one-off departmental purchases. These are exactly the tools most likely to carry risk, and the ones your application discovery is least likely to catch.

Meet the License Manager Browser Extension

The Browser Extension closes that gap. It runs in Chrome and Edge and can detect more than 140 supported cloud apps your employees open using their business accounts, whether or not those apps require SSO to sign in.

How the Browser Extension works

1. Deploy. IT rolls the extension out organization-wide through Intune, Jamf, Group Policy, and other endpoint management tools.
2. Detect. The extension recognizes an existing signed-in browser session tied to a business domain. There’s nothing for your employees to set up.
3. Discover. Browser Extension flags usage of 140+ apps, including ChatGPT, Claude, NetSuite, Salesforce, Tableau, and Workday. Some apps offer both personal and business versions. The extension is built to catch only the business side.
4. Sync. Discovered apps and usage sync daily straight into the Applications tab in License Manager.

Protecting your privacy

Visibility into shadow IT shouldn’t come at the cost of your employees’ privacy. The Browser Extension is built to see only what it needs to flag business app usage, and nothing more.

Here’s exactly what the extension collects:

• The application that was detected
• The business domain
• Usage per user

The Browser Extension does not collect passwords, cookies, or logins. It does not read emails, chats, or messages. It does not touch files, documents, or form inputs. And, it does not log keystrokes or track full browsing history.

Employees don’t have to take our word for it, either. Anyone can click the SysAid Application Discovery icon at the top of their browser to see exactly what the extension can see.

For IT managers, all information about the discovered apps is visible in License Manager Advanced. SysAid Copilot automatically enriches each application with its logo, category, official website, a short description, and compliance indicators such as SOC 2, ISO, and GDPR. Your team gets context on an unfamiliar app the moment it shows up, instead of spending an afternoon researching it.

Entra ID + Browser Extension: Better together

Entra ID and Browser Extension work best side by side; however, you can use one or both of these methods to discover applications across your organization. Both methods provide a 30-day scan of usage history the moment you turn them on, uncovering AI tools, freemium apps, and shadow purchases hiding in your browsers.

SysAid Browser Extension is available for all customers using License Manager Advanced. To learn more about SysAid’s application discovery capabilities, get a demo.