Glean Security Risks You Need to Know: A Guide on Adopting AI Securely

In 2025, organizations are adopting some of the most innovative AI tools and technologies to make their teams work smarter, not harder. 

However, one of the biggest considerations the C-Suite has when adopting new AI tools is the security risks. Companies want - and need! - to innovate, but how do they do this safely in a way that protects their data? 

What is Glean, & How Does it Impact Your Data Security?

One of the newest up and coming AI applications is Glean: an enterprise search and AI assistant platform designed to help employees quickly find information and answers across all of their company’s SaaS applications.

Employees can use Glean to quickly find files, answers, or even summarized insights across different systems without leaving the flow of work.

Here’s how it works: Glean continuously syncs with connected SaaS applications, building a 'knowledge graph' that maps people, content, and interactions. It then applies a blend of search algorithms and large language models (LLMs) to surface relevant results. 

This allows employees to ask natural-language questions like “Who owns this project?” or “Where’s the latest customer contract?” and receive accurate, referenceable answers.

However, despite these cool and new productivity benefits, many organizations remain concerned about the security risks of giving an AI-driven platform access to their most sensitive SaaS data. 

Questions around permission handling, data exposure, third-party access, and compliance are top of mind for IT and security leaders - including many of our own partners and customers. In our honest conversations with them, they’ve shared a common theme: they want to embrace innovation and harness the power of AI, but they’re understandably cautious about the risks it may introduce. They want to move fast, but not at the expense of their data security.

That’s why we created this guide. In the sections that follow, we’ll break down what Glean does and the benefits it offers, take a critical look at the potential security risks it introduces, and explain how DoControl empowers organizations to monitor, govern, and protect their SaaS environments while confidently adopting innovative tools like Glean.

What are the Benefits of Glean?

Glean is designed to solve a pesky challenge in today’s SaaS-driven workplace: knowledge sprawl. 

Information lives across dozens of applications, making it difficult for employees to find what they need without slowing down work or leaning on teammates for answers. By connecting with more than 100 business applications - including Google Workspace, Slack, Salesforce, and more - Glean unifies documents, conversations, and data into a single, searchable experience.

Here are three of the top benefits organizations see when adopting Glean:

1. Faster Knowledge Discovery

By centralizing information across multiple SaaS tools, Glean significantly reduces the time spent searching for files, conversations, or project details. Employees can quickly access what they need and redirect their focus toward high-value work.

2. AI-Powered Assistance

Glean’s AI assistant and agents allow employees to ask natural-language questions and receive context-aware answers, drawn directly from company systems. This eliminates repetitive back-and-forth and speeds up decision-making.

3. Improved Onboarding and Enablement

New hires gain immediate access to historical knowledge and organizational context. Instead of relying exclusively on peers, they can independently find the policies, documents, and project history they need to get up to speed quickly.

What are the Security Risks of Glean?

Despite these perceived benefits, there are significant security considerations that IT and security teams are struggling to justify when their boards push for AI adoption. 

Organizations everywhere are racing to integrate AI into workflows to “keep up with the Joneses” - with the pressure to innovate and keep pace in competitive industries being greater than ever before.

But, innovation cannot come at the expense of security. If sensitive data is exposed, the very tools meant to drive efficiency can create new risks and bring business ops to a halt completely.

These are the most pressing risks Glean can pose to your organization:

1. Permission and Data Sprawl

Glean (as they state in their product details) mirrors the permissions of the systems it connects to - which means it will faithfully surface whatever access permissions already exist. 

For example, say your HR Lead is searching for product roadmap data in an attempt to maliciously exfiltrate files. She asks a pinpointed question to Glean, and it will ONLY show her documents she is already shared on - which are all of her HR files and employee data - NOT product specific data. Sounds secure enough, right?  

The problem is that most SaaS environments - specifically Google Workspace - already suffer from misconfigured permissions and overly broad sharing practices BEFORE a tool like Glean is integrated. 

New (and more realistic) example: your HR Lead searches a pinpointed question on product roadmap data, and a ‘2026 Feature Integrations Document’ had 'Anyone with the link can access' sharing permissions - so, she was able to quietly open it, share a copy with her personal email, and exfiltrate it as she planned.

Now, the exfiltration here wasn't necessarily Glean’s fault, but it magnifies and enables existing weaknesses within SaaS environments when it comes to access controls + basic security. 

Without continuous monitoring and remediation of SaaS permissions, Glean can accelerate exposure of data that otherwise would have remained hidden.

The takeaway? Even if Glean claims to enforce permissions faithfully, it can unintentionally amplify the risks of misconfigured SaaS environments. If sensitive files are broadly or publicly shared, Glean makes them easier to find - accelerating data exposure, insider threats, and exfiltration. Without continuous monitoring and remediation of permissions, organizations are leaving the door wide open.

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2. AI Agents and Third-Party Risk

Glean isn’t just a search tool - it also uses AI agents to summarize, act on, and even orchestrate workflows across your SaaS environment. On paper, this makes employees faster and more efficient.

For example, say your Sales Director asks Glean to “summarize the last 10 deal opportunities in Salesforce and draft a follow-up email.” The agent pulls the data, composes a clean summary, and saves hours of manual work. Sounds like a win, right?

But here’s the problem: once you introduce AI agents with elevated access, you create new attack surfaces. If an AI agent, API token, or integration service is compromised (through credential stuffing, voice phishing, social engineering tactics, etc.), a malicious hacker could access across ALL the systems the agent has permission to query - potentially including sensitive customer data, employee data, sales contracts, company financials, you name it...

This risk isn’t just a hypothetical one - it has already happened countless times within the last year. Third-party apps and integrations are one of the most notorious (and common) entry points for attackers: 

• Salesloft/Drift Breach: Hackers stole OAuth tokens tied to the Drift app (owned by Salesloft) and used them to query Salesforce environments. From there, they bulk-exported large volumes of sensitive customer data from hundreds of organizations’ Salesforce instances.
  
  
• Anthropic “Vibe Hacking” Campaign: Attackers leveraged Anthropic’s Claude AI in a novel form of “vibe hacking.” They targeted at least 17 organizations, using AI to determine what data to steal, how much to demand in ransom, and how to manipulate victims during extortion attempts.
  
  
• Workday Third-Party Breach: Hackers impersonated IT and HR staff over the phone to trick employees into handing over personal details and credentials. With that access, they infiltrated Workday’s customer support system, exposing sensitive ticket data - including names, emails, and phone numbers of high-profile enterprise customers.

Should we go on? We certainly can!

The takeaway? AI agents are powerful, but if compromised, they become a single point of failure - accelerating data exfiltration at scale and putting your entire organization at risk. The fallout goes beyond the technical damage of a hack - impacting brand reputation, eroding customer and investor trust, and costing billions in remediation and recovery.

3. Governance and Compliance Considerations

Glean maintains a strong compliance posture - with certifications like SOC 2 and ISO 27001. At face value, this should ease security concerns.

For example, imagine a healthcare provider adopts Glean to help clinicians quickly find treatment guidelines across internal systems. On paper, the tool respects permissions and is covered by enterprise-grade compliance. Feels reassuring, right?

But regulators, auditors, and even your own vendors often don’t stop at the vendor’s certifications. They want to know:

• Where exactly is the data processed?
  
  
• How is third-party access controlled?
  
  
• What visibility does the customer have into audit logs?
  
  
• How are downstream risks managed if an integrated app is breached?

Here’s where reality sets in: compliance frameworks are necessary of course - but not always sufficient. A board member, investor, or partner may still be uneasy about whether an AI platform - sitting on top of your most sensitive SaaS data - can truly be trusted and hold its own against third-party breaches or misconfigurations.

The takeaway? Even if Glean itself is secure and compliant, the perception of risk in your ecosystem doesn’t disappear. Without governance tools to monitor data exposure, third-party activity, and SaaS-to-SaaS sharing, compliance gaps remain a barrier to confident AI adoption - especially with other stakeholders and partners involved.

How DoControl Monitors and Protects Your Environment So You Can *Securely* Innovate with AI 

While Glean delivers value by helping employees find information faster, it doesn’t solve the underlying security and governance challenges that come with exposing sensitive SaaS data. That’s where DoControl steps in. 

We provide you with all the capabilities you need to ensure innovation with AI tools like Glean never comes at the cost of security.

DoControl offers real-time visibility into every file, every identity (human and non-human), and every action happening across your SaaS stack.

Combined with automated remediation workflows, identity threat detection, and compliance enforcement, DoControl closes the gaps Glean leaves open and ensures your organization maintains control over its most valuable asset: data.

Here’s how we directly address the three biggest concerns for Glean users:

1. Stopping Permission and Data Sprawl Before It Spreads

Most breaches start with overly broad or misconfigured sharing (think the ScaleAI breach that took an entire company down due to publicly shared Drive files). This is exactly where Glean can unintentionally magnify exposure. DoControl solves this by providing:

• Visibility across every SaaS file, user, and action: Unlike native Google admin consoles, DoControl delivers a complete birds-eye view into how files are shared, who is sharing them, when, and why - across platforms like Google Workspace, Slack, and Microsoft 365.
  
  
• Policy-driven remediation at scale: With no-code workflows, we don’t just detect risky sharing - we enforce your data access governance strategy automatically, engaging your SecOps team only when necessary. For example, DoControl can:
  
  
  • Remove public or external access to sensitive files in real time.
    
    
  • Restrict sharing based on file sensitivity, department, or user risk level.
    
    
  • Require manager approval for external shares or large-scale downloads.
    
    
  • Revoke file ownership during offboarding, automatically and at scale.

The result? Fewer blind spots, fewer misconfigurations, and less opportunity for Glean (or any other tool) to surface data that should never have been accessible.

2. Detecting Compromised Identities, Apps, and Third-Party Risks

AI agents, OAuth tokens, and shadow apps can introduce new risks. If they’re compromised, they can access and exfiltrate large volumes of data. DoControl neutralizes this risk by focusing on identity security:

• Contextual user risk scoring: We aggregate permissions, behavior, department, and role data to calculate dynamic risk scores for every user - human or non-human. This makes it easy to surface high-risk insiders, compromised accounts (which is the biggest entryway in recent high-profile breaches), or negligent activity before it escalates.
  
  
• Contextual event monitoring: Instead of treating alerts in isolation, DoControl stitches signals together to tell the full story. For example, a login from an unusual IP + mass file downloads + a new OAuth connection = data exfiltration in progress.
  
  
• Custom detection workflows: Security teams can build policies that auto-restrict file sharing, suspend risky OAuth activity, or trigger MFA when high-risk actions occur.

With DoControl, you don’t just know that something unusual happened - you know who or what app is behind it, what the context is, and how to respond instantly.

3. Closing the Compliance Gap

Even with Glean’s certifications, many organizations - and their regulators, boards, and partners - remain cautious about AI-driven platforms. DoControl strengthens governance by providing:

• SaaS misconfiguration management: We check your environment against all industry frameworks, (including custom frameworks specific to your business!) and provide the exact details on which entities are affected, plus how to remediate.
  
  
• End-to-end auditability: Every file, action, and identity change is tracked, giving security and compliance teams the visibility they need to satisfy internal and external audits.
  
  
• Alignment with frameworks and standards: From SOC 2 to GDPR to HIPAA, DoControl ensures SaaS data governance supports compliance requirements across industries.

By augmenting what native SaaS tools offer, DoControl removes blind spots, reduces risk, and builds the trust your business needs to confidently adopt new AI-powered platforms.

Glean improves productivity and allows organizations to experiment with new AI tools, but DoControl ensures security, governance, and compliance remain intact. 

Together, you get innovation without compromise - faster answers paired with full visibility, monitoring, and protection.

Conclusion

AI-powered platforms like Glean are changing the way organizations work, helping employees find information faster and collaborate more effectively. The benefits are real, but so are the risks: permission sprawl, data leakage, third-party compromises, and compliance gaps can quickly turn innovation into exposure if security isn’t addressed head-on.

DoControl was purpose built to secure your SaaS ecosystems, so you don’t need to compromise your productivity in the name of security. 

We close the gaps Glean leaves open by providing end-to-end SaaS data access governance, identity threat detection, shadow app monitoring, and compliance enforcement. With real-time visibility, automated remediation, and contextual identity intelligence, we ensure that your SaaS environment stays secure - even as you embrace powerful new AI tools!

Our message is simple: you don’t have to choose between AI innovation and security.

With DoControl, you can confidently adopt platforms like Glean while maintaining the protection, visibility, and trust your business depends on.