Updated: Oct 23, 2025
A marketing head in Gurugram uploads campaign files to her personal Google Drive to share them with a freelancer. A sales manager in Pune connects his private Gmail to the company’s CRM for convenience. None of this is malicious, yet the enterprise’s data is now outside its control. In hybrid work, productivity often outruns policy.
That’s the gap Cisco Umbrella Tenant Controls aims to close, by enforcing precision access boundaries that preserve collaboration while keeping data within approved tenants.
Tenant Control defines which SaaS tenants your users can access and how. It allows you to approve your organisation’s Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace tenant, while blocking or restricting personal or external ones. The result: sensitive information stays inside corporate tenants without slowing legitimate work. Unlike traditional Data Loss Prevention (DLP), it operates before data leaves your environment, preventing accidental exposure instead of cleaning up after it.
In simple words, Tenant Control acts like a digital security guard for your SaaS apps. Imagine your company’s YouTube channel or Google Workspace as your office premises. You want employees to walk in through the official entrance, not through any random side door. Tenant Control ensures everyone uses only the corporate-approved doors, keeping data exchanges safe while letting work continue without barriers.
For organisations scaling on SaaS, from fintechs in Bengaluru to manufacturers in Pune, the problem is not a lack of tools but a lack of control between them. Employees shift between work and personal identities across dozens of SaaS platforms every day. Blanket blocks frustrate users, while open access invites risk. What’s needed is visibility and governance that adapts to identity, device, and context, exactly what tenant control delivers.
That’s where policy-driven enforcement becomes the bridge between security and freedom. Cisco Umbrella Tenant Controls give IT teams the ability to manage SaaS access without turning collaboration into a compliance nightmare.
Cisco Umbrella Tenant Controls act as a policy engine for SaaS access. They allow administrators to define which tenants of Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, Slack, Dropbox, GitHub, or YouTube are approved. Any attempt to sign in to unapproved tenants can be blocked, restricted to read-only, or monitored, depending on risk tolerance. Because enforcement happens at the DNS and HTTP layers, these controls work both on-network and off-network, across users and devices.
The beauty lies in its context awareness. Integrated with identity systems like Azure Active Directory (AD) and device posture checks via Cisco Secure Client, it recognises who the user is, what device they’re on, and whether the session meets corporate trust levels before granting access. That’s how modern Zero Trust access is meant to function: adaptive, granular, and invisible to end users.
Before you enforce, you discover. The first step is to map which SaaS tenants are currently in use, often a surprise for IT. Umbrella’s discovery capabilities show which applications and tenants employees access most. From there, organisations can define policy categories:
Each rule can be tied to business functions, giving security teams and line managers a shared view of access governance. Over time, analytics reveal usage drift and potential shadow IT growth.
Tenant Controls feed actionable telemetry — user IDs, devices, app names, actions, and policy decisions — into your Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) or Extended Detection and Response (XDR) stack. This allows your Security Operations Centre (SOC) to correlate SaaS access with other indicators of compromise and prioritise investigations by impact. Pairing Umbrella Tenant Controls with Cisco Secure Access, Secure Client, and Duo Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) builds a unified enforcement layer that spans SaaS, web, and private apps.
For organisations pursuing compliance with India’s Digital Personal Data Protection (DPDP) Act or ISO 27001, tenant control also provides measurable proof of access governance. Every discovery, policy update, or enforcement event can be logged and audited. Security teams gain a continuous view of access behaviour rather than snapshots.
One retail conglomerate in Bengaluru reduced unsanctioned SaaS logins by 72% within six weeks of deploying Tenant Controls. Across clients, the pattern is consistent: teams collaborate more freely once access is defined, not debated. Helpdesk calls about blocked apps fall, exceptions follow automated expiry, and compliance teams gain real-time visibility.
CIOs can track improvements as metrics, not anecdotes: lower SaaS risk exposure, shorter detection times, and reduced shadow IT by measurable margins. That’s the kind of balance most enterprises want: agility without chaos, governance without bureaucracy.
Proactive Data Systems is a Cisco Gold Partner and an Advanced Customer Experience (CX) Specialised Partner. Our experts design and implement tenant control policies tailored to your SaaS environment. We integrate Cisco Umbrella Tenant Controls with identity, posture, and SIEM systems, and help you measure results through defined Service Level Objectives (SLOs).
The outcome is not just compliance, it’s sustainable, visible SaaS governance that scales with your business. Email [email protected] to book a 60-minute tenant control consultation.
