SaaS management platforms are many and varied, offering a range of spend management and IT operations capabilities, and, in some cases, a mix of the two. For this reason, you need to be clear on your objectives from the start, and choose a product that gives you the features and capabilities you need without additional configuration.
It is notoriously difficult to track and manage all of the SaaS apps that individual employees and business units sign up and use. This can lead to significant negative impacts, such as:
Multiple teams investing in the same type of software tools, but without the economies of scale of a single purchase order
Different teams using different project management software or other tools, making it hard to share information and collaborate across the business
Divisions or departments paying for more licenses than they need or use, leading to poor ROI from software apps
To make things better, many IT teams are now looking for tools that help them take a more proactive and strategic role in SaaS procurement and management. This can potentially deliver a wide range of cost savings, operational efficiencies, and SaaS planning improvements, as outlined in our webinar: What successful IT teams get right about SaaS management.
But with so many different SaaS management platforms available, it can be challenging to know how to choose a SaaS management platform that meets your organization’s needs.
Every SaaS management platform provides discovery capabilities that help you see which apps are running in your environment and who is using them. There are various complementary methods to support this, from scanning expense data to log analysis or a browser extension to monitor user activity. This makes SaaS management platforms fundamentally different from traditional software asset management tools, which tend to focus on known, formally procured software.
There’s a critical choice to be made here around how intrusive you want to be when monitoring user activity to discover SaaS apps. Understandably, many IT teams don’t want to risk being perceived as ‘Big Brother’ by their users and colleagues. If your long-term objective is to cultivate IT/business collaboration, discovering user activity through email might not be worth it. Email discovery requires the ability to read all company emails. Whilst this may be acceptable in some small organizations, most IT teams do not want to grant third-party access to all corporate email communications, as that is extremely risky, and that risk significantly outweighs the benefits. As such, different SaaS management platforms support different discovery methods. It’s important to understand your priorities and the trade-offs you’re prepared to make so you can identify the right tool for your situation.
When you look beyond the basic discovery capabilities, the differences between SaaS management platforms quickly start to emerge.
For example, some SaaS management platforms focus almost exclusively on spend management. This means they look at opportunities for cost reduction across your SaaS inventory based on an in-depth analysis of your apps and licenses, ensuring you’re only paying for what you actually use.
In other cases, some SaaS management platforms focus more on IT operations, with capabilities for automating employee onboarding and offboarding, access requests, access reviews and other IT operations to deliver significant time savings. Another key driver here is compliance, i.e., ensuring that user access is being granted and revoked in a consistent, repeatable and audit-friendly fashion to support SOC 2 or ISO 27001 requirements.
There are several key questions you can answer to determine which kind of SaaS management platform is right for you. These include:
What are you trying to achieve? If your only goal is to cut down on SaaS spend, a spend management solution may well do the job. However, the challenge with spend-management-focused vendors is that cutting SaaS spend is often done blindly without data on employee usage, last login data, and employee communication. On the other hand, if your primary challenge is automating IT operations, such as employee onboarding and offboarding, access requests, and access reviews, these tools often lack understanding on entitlements and different license types the business has purchased in their SaaS contracts. That’s why it’s so crucial to have a SaaS management platform that brings both IT operations and financial operations together to make these decisions.
How well do your existing tools cover your SaaS management needs? IT teams using Okta or Azure AD may have configured groups and workflows to manage user access to key enterprise apps. As we all know, this can be expensive to get right and painfully time-consuming. However, it’s worth remembering that Okta and Azure AD will rarely cover your full SaaS portfolio. Many popular apps either don’t support SSO (or SCIM for user management), or they reserve these features for the more expensive enterprise plans, or it’s simply too time-consuming or complicated to integrate. Also, SSO only works for the applications that IT teams already know about. There are many SaaS tools individual employees and teams are using that go under the radar. In addition, while SSO is great for some IT operations, it does not provide help with contract renewals. In addition, some applications do not provide usage data to assist with license optimization. Therefore, it’s important to get a true sense of exactly what level of coverage you have so you can augment the bits that are working, and implement new tools to cover any gaps. If that’s your situation, you could benefit from deploying a feature-rich SaaS management platform that covers both spend management and IT operations, and minimizes the need to purchase additional tools in the future.
Is information security a priority for you? Unchecked SaaS proliferation increases the risk of ‘shadow IT’. Focusing purely on SaaS spend misses a whole raft of potentially risky user activity in relation to apps that might be totally free to use. By contrast, broader SaaS management platforms will monitor and flag users granting third-party access to company data or resources such as Google Drive or One Drive folders or even their email accounts, helping you to take fast and appropriate action to improve data security.
Are you looking to actively engage with end-users on SaaS strategy? While simple spend management tools focus on detecting and deprovisioning unused or underused licenses, they do little to determine if SaaS apps are really meeting end users’ needs. To achieve this, you might consider a platform that helps you collaborate with individual employees and lines of business, by asking questions and sending surveys to end users through automated workflows to get their feedback on the apps they’re using, while saving time and resources. These engagement methods help you to get a clear view of user satisfaction, and to ensure that future SaaS procurement decisions are aligned with user needs and preferences.
SaaS has fundamentally changed the way businesses use software, and while it’s attractive to focus on the cost implications of this shift, choosing the right SaaS management platform can address broader operational and governance challenges beyond simple spend tracking:
Spend control is a game of diminishing returns. If you’re building a business case based on the huge initial savings you’ve identified, it’s worth remembering that once you’ve optimized in year one and are running lean, those savings will start to look different over the longer term in year two and three.
SaaS is decentralizing your technology stack and that comes with certain IT operations headaches. Failing to address these issues will inevitably result in long term inefficiencies and compliance risks.
By democratizing access to enterprise software, SaaS has changed the IT team’s relationship with the lines of business. Irrespective of which budget the SaaS spend is coming from, simply focusing on optimizing on spend misses the bigger strategic decisions around which technology is being adopted in the first place. Choosing the right SaaS management platform ensures your IT and finance team can optimize spend, automate workflows, and maintain compliance. Not all SaaS management platforms deliver both spend optimization and lifecycle automation; selecting one that does can save time and reduce risk.
Ready to move beyond spreadsheets and take control of your software stack? Watch our webinar on SaaS management best practices to learn how to identify hidden apps and manage your spending.
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