Microsoft asked IT admins how many cloud apps they thought their people were using. The average guess was 30 or 40. The real number is over 1,000.
I think about that every time I sit down with a CPA firm.
Nobody in your office is trying to cause a problem. Someone needs to get a 40MB client file to a partner, Outlook rejects it, and they find a free converter site in about nine seconds. Someone else signs up for a scheduling tool with their work email because it saves twenty minutes a week. That isn't recklessness — that's people doing their job with whatever is one click away.
The catch is that each of those tools now holds a copy of your client's data, and you don't know who the vendor is, where that data sits, or what happens the day they get breached. "I didn't know we were using that" is not a sentence you want to say to a client you've had for fifteen years.
Here's the part most firms miss: you may already own the tool that shows you the list. Business Premium includes Entra ID P1, and Cloud App Discovery comes with P1 at no extra cost. It checks what's actually in use against a catalog of 31,000+ apps, each scored on 90-plus risk factors.
You can't make a decision about a list you've never seen. Worth pulling before your next cyber renewal.
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