When faced with an endless stream of SaaS bills, the temptation is to reduce costs fast. Instead of taking a slash-and-burn approach, we recommend taking a step back to look at the bigger picture. Here are some smart ways to get better value using SaaS optimization. You can reduce SaaS costs while increasing the value applications bring to your users and your business.
If you’ve started doing some SaaS discovery in your business, you’ll be aware that a key cost-driver is the number of redundant SaaS tools in use. While there might be good reasons for keeping similar apps, there are also benefits to consolidating the number of applications in use: eliminating duplicate spend,, lower operational overhead, and reduced security and compliance risks.
The right approach to understanding usage and improving SaaS optimization often depends on the type of application being used. In this blog post we’ll look at SaaS optimization in the context of project management tools, such as Monday.com, Click-up, Wrike, Jira, Trello, and Asana.
Collaborative tools are great for teams looking for a way to plan work together, and see what everyone is working on.
These tools make it easy for employees to get started; They can sign-up in a browser within minutes and start inviting other team members to join.
Unfortunately, the initial ease of adoption can create problems down the road. Although many of these platforms offer free plans to start, once you hit certain usage limits you have to pull out a company credit card. Importantly, the IT team may be unaware of these applications because the costs might be expensed with a company credit card. IT soon finds out that the business is paying a lot more than is necessary when several teams start separately paying subscription fees.
Tl;dr SaaS vendors have made it easy for users to adopt and pay for apps without involving procurement or the IT team. When multiple, redundant apps proliferate, it gets complicated and expensive, fast.
Why encourage multiple teams to standardize on a single platform? Surely one of the benefits of SaaS applications is that staff can pick the tools they like best?
Many IT teams find that it pays (literally!) standardize on a single product. This kind of SaaS optimization has multiple benefits:
Most vendors are open to offering reduced rates for larger deals. By consolidating SaaS licenses, even for a single application, you can often negotiate a better price.
When you bring together groups of users, you can often justify upgrading your plan, which gives you additional benefits. This can be a win-win. IT will be happy because a higher tier offers better enforcement of password policies, centralized logging, or single-sign on, and your business-users may find that a paid plan gives them better functionality.
Reducing the number of applications in use will make your organization more efficient. People won’t have to remember which application is used for which project – they’ll be able to see all their tasks in the same dashboard. Increased familiarity with an application also means people develop deeper skills and get better results.
Moving people from one application to another isn’t to be taken lightly, so a simple first step is to optimize the number of seats you are paying for existing applications.
People may have signed up to multiple tools over time, and forgotten that they’ve got a paid seat on something they stopped using a while ago.
The process of trimming unused seats doesn’t just reduce costs, it gives you a better understanding of how well-used different applications are, and gives you a more accurate sense of the number of people who actually need access to a tool.
In each application, you can manually review the user list page, which (with some luck) shows the last login date for each user. This will tell you who is actually using the tool. You can often export this to Excel and sort it. You’ll want to decide some rules about what constitutes an unused account – it might vary from product to product, but active use of a collaborative tool would generally be shown by a login within the last 30 days.
Once you’ve identified unused accounts, the next step is to deactivate them, right…?
Wrong.
Deprovisioning is a much more subtle process. You need to understand two key things before you move forward:
Has the user really stopped using the tool? Maybe they just use it once a year for a specific annual job like end-of-year reporting?
What happens to the user’s data when you deprovision them?
You should always reach out to users who haven’t logged in for a while and ask them if they are still using the application; there’s nothing worse than needing to get into a tool urgently and finding that IT has pulled the plug on your account.
If you email users, it’s worth putting in a back-stop to say that if they don’t reply, you will go ahead and deprovision their account. This doesn’t completely cover you: for example, they might miss the email, or might be off work long-term. Whether you make further efforts to contact someone probably depends on what happens when you deactivate them.
The consequences of deprovisioning can be drastic, and you may need to dig into documentation, and ideally test this in each SaaS tool you use.
Here’s a few of the common ways deprovisioning works:
The account is just marked inactive. The user can’t login but no data is altered, and the account can be re-enabled at any point.
As above, but after a period of time (e.g. 30 days), data linked to the user is automatically deleted.
Data is reassigned to another user. In Box, for example, files and folders linked to a user can be transferred to another user. In Asana, any tasks that the user is involved in become assigned to you. In this case, you may want to set up a separate admin account for deprovisioning so that your personal account isn’t swamped with tasks from users you are deprovisioning.
This is a very manual process today. Alternatively, SaaS management tools like 1Password SaaS Manager can help you with these sorts of processes. 1Password SaaS Manager can utilize automated workflows to reclaim licenses, communicate with employees on Slack and Microsoft Teams, and deprovision users who have not logged into the tool in several months, saving time and reducing errors.
For example, deprovisioning workflows can automatically flag users who could be deprovisioned, notify them by email, and handle their responses. SaaS Manager can even suggest specific best-practice actions for different applications. For Asana, it might assign deprovisioning tasks to a user’s manager, instead of the admin doing the deprovisioning. 1Password SaaS Manager, together with 1Password Enterprise Password Manager and Device Trust, can handle these workflows securely and efficiently.
Tl;dr A SaaS management tool can save you a lot of time and avoid mistakes when manually filtering, emailing, following-up and deprovisioning.
Once you’ve trimmed back inactive users to optimize licenses, the next SaaS optimization step is to consolidate different subscriptions for the same product category, or potentially try to reduce the number of redundant tools in use.
A good starting point is to conduct a survey to understand who uses which tools, how they pay for them (e.g. expensed on credit card, free version), and what features they use on a regular basis.
1Password SaaS Manager can help you create and send surveys like this. You might send this survey to everyone in your organization, or you could be more targeted if you know who is using specific applications. If you use Google Workspace then you may have users using ‘Sign in with Google’ to connect to applications. Analyzing these so-called social logins can tell you what people are using. Again, a SaaS management tool like 1Password SaaS Manager can do a lot of this work for you.
Regardless of how you contact people, you will probably need to explain in some detail why you’re asking – you’ll get a better response rate if people understand the reasons and the benefits of everyone working on the same tool. Some arguments that might help:
Having all company projects and tasks in one place improves visibility and communication
Management can see where people are overloaded and extra resources are needed
Improved functionality to make planning more effective, and execution more efficient
Bear in mind that some departments, such as software engineering, will still need specialized tracking and planning tools like GitHub, Favro or Jira Software. Even if you’re standardizing everyone on another product, you should call out teams that need more specialized tools so that people don’t panic.
Once you’ve reached consensus on the tool you want to standardize on, you’ll need to build out a plan for making the move. Some tools can migrate tasks from competing platforms, but generally this sort of migration is imperfect, and a safer strategy is to transition people over a period of time. A hard stop is more likely to meet resistance.
A softer rollout will mean people having accounts on both their old tool and the new one. Ideally, new work is done on the new tool, whilst users try to naturally close out existing tasks on the old system.
You should still aim to put in a cut-off date so that it’s clear that the old tool will be going away. The exact timing of this will depend on the specifics of the SaaS contracts for each of the products you’re phasing out. Pay particular attention to the contract term. Month-to-month gives you precise control over when to stop; with an annual renewal you may have more (or less) time to transition people.
Above all, always aim at transparency. If you’re trying to sunset a product which has an annual renewal coming up, then explain the reason for the rush to your users. They’re much more likely to be supportive if you’ve been transparent about the reasons for the change.
Finally, if you’ve uncovered three or four redundant tools, you will need to think through whether you consolidate them all together, or incrementally.
There’s a temptation to go with a “big-bang” approach and move everyone together. It gets it out of the way and vendor negotiation is easier as you’re increasing the user count in one big step.
The advantage of going one-by-one is that you will learn from the process, and success migrating from one tool can be turned into good news to share with the users of the others on your list. It also lets you time the change around expiring annual contracts.
If you’ve done your research and know the number of users you will ultimately be moving over, you should consider explaining the incremental plan to the vendor, and still negotiating on the total number being transitioned.
SaaS optimization is most effective when it’s part of a broader, ongoing SaaS management business process.
Conclusion
Regardless of which path you take or which tool you decide to keep, 1Password SaaS Manager can make the transition faster, easier, and less manual for your team.
Ready to learn more about how 1Password SaaS Manager can help you optimize your SaaS spend? Talk to an expert today.
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