SaaS Management

  • 7 min read

6 Investments CIOs Must Make Before Recession Hits

Tathagata Chakrabarti

3rd November, 2022

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Proper investment strategies can help CIOs overcome the recession and run their business smoothly. We have prepared this article with a list of 7 investments that every CIO should make to make their organization recession-proof.

A recession is the least desirable thing any business wants. If a recession occurs, it affects the economy and the business flow. To maintain the company on a growing track, CIOs need to take some actions to stay ahead in business during recessions.

The question here is: what can you do to overcome the recession?

The most common answer to this is to cut costs. Cutting costs can help to minimize resource usage, but what about business growth? Business investments are always crucial for business growth. So you have to make informed decisions, like introducing new assets in the organization.

An organization invests many resources in procuring software, hardware, and other tangible and intangible assets. So, it is permissible to invest in such assets, which can give you long-term benefits and increase the overall revenue.

The investment can be different for various organizations. It is different from investing in any software available. You should analyze and go for software that offers high ROI and meet your business requirements. You must build a list that includes all the standard assets every organization should have working in the digital sector. These software investments can provide long-term service and benefit the organization from the day of implementation. 

This article discusses six investments a CIO should make to benefit their organization even during a recession.

6 Investments that CIOs and CFOs Should Make to Make their Organization Recession-proof

1. Invest in the right SaaS apps

CIOs should ensure budgets and investments are aligned with ROI-generating projects for your organization.

Organizations require many SaaS apps to simplify tasks efficiently. Post-pandemic, remote work has led to an increase in the use of SaaS apps. There can be more than one SaaS app available for any task. Sometimes it becomes essential to choose the best SaaS from the available options.

You can get multiple suppliers offering the same SaaS, but choosing the appropriate one can be confusing. During a recession, you must make a proper decision after analyzing all the available options and comparing the suppliers to get the best deals. Then you can go for your suitable SaaS. 

Take your time buying any SaaS. Before purchasing, ensure you have checked a few criteria.

• How can SaaS benefit your organization?

• Do you have the resources for purchase and maintenance?

• Do you have the right team for the implementation and SaaS use?

• Do your internal and external stakeholders are involved in the SaaS introduction?

Make your SaaS procurement efficient with the help of experts during the recession. SaaS buying can be complex for you in a downturn. If you are bulk purchasing the software, it is better to negotiate.

Here comes Zluri's SaaS buying service. We help you make strategic decisions and find the appropriate vendor to get the best deal. In addition, we have experts who help you in negotiation.

2. Invest in a SaaS management platform

An SMP provides your organization with a streamlined process for discovering, managing, sharing, and storing data and creating workflows to automate your tasks. A SaaS management platform like Zluri can help you manage your SaaS landscape and optimize the ROI. 

Zluri offers the world's most extensive SaaS app library with over 225000 apps and 750+ integrations. It can discover 100% of SaaS apps in your organization.

An organization uses many software licenses. It is hectic to keep track of every license manually. In addition, it can cause renewal failure if you forget the license renewal dates. 

Zluri provides a dashboard with all the details. It notifies you 30 days, 15 days, and one day before your contract expiry.

You want to take advantage of all renewals. You may stop using any app, but remember to remove auto-renewal. It will cost you after the licenses expire. So, to never miss renewals, Zluri manages all your software renewals in one place. It maintains a renewal calendar and notifies you before renewals.

Zluri manages all your vendors in one place. It helps you to have a long-term business flow with the vendor. You can get discounts on contract renewals and during new software procurement if you have a decent relationship. In addition, Zluri provides a dashboard by which you can track and analyze your vendor's details.

Additionally, with Zluri IT teams can automate onboarding, offboarding, and vendor relationship management. As a result, it will save time spent on repetitive manual tasks.

3. Invest in an asset management software

Organizations have many assets. It can be software assets such as apps, licenses, cloud, and hardware assets such as physical devices, networking devices, and other devices. So, you need to keep track of your inventory. If you cannot manage your assets, it can cause resource wastage.

To prevent wastage, you can invest in asset management software. It will help you to keep track of and monitor every asset. Then, you can analyze the insights and take the necessary actions to optimize your spending.

CIOs should focus on encouraging IT teams and employees to efficiently use their existing IT setup and try to maintain a streamlined process to communicate internally. You should remove all the unnecessary assets that affect spending. This is possible by using an efficient ITAM tool. 

Zluri is a software management tool that helps you manage software and IT assets. It removes the manual effort of storing every detail and gives you a single dashboard with all the asset details. You can monitor, and after analyzing, you can take necessary steps to eliminate redundant assets that are wasting your resources.

During a recession, CIOs come under pressure to review and reign. You should focus on the tools and platforms to efficiently view ROI and expense overhead. Centralized data management should be introduced in the organization to grow the business. Modern businesses are dependent on a massive amount of data. 

As businesses are moving towards cloud-based and SaaS architectures, centralized data management has become essential to store, managing, and analyzing the data. Understanding data with analytics and visualizations help CIOs to make proper decisions that can be leveraged to address customer needs and business goals.

4. Invest in FinOps software

Cloud usage is rapidly increasing in organizations. Therefore, it is always permissible to go for FinOps software for managing your cloud services. The FinOps software (Financial Operations) is designed to analyze and manage cloud costs. The software calculates the costs of cloud usage by analyzing the cloud providers.

It helps organizations plan, budget, and forecast spending in cloud services such as Microsoft Azure and GCP. It restricts your cloud wastage spending and optimizes it properly. CIOs should invest in software that helps in spending optimization and provides proper budgeting and management.

Zluri is efficient in spending optimization. It maintains a great relationship with vendors and plans, budgets, and forecasts your spending using its analysis. It alerts you about your spending and helps you understand what resources the organization uses.

Spend Optimization: You can optimize your department-wise monthly spending. It helps you to use your resources efficiently.

If you categorize your spending department-wise, you will have better visibility of your resource usage. You will understand how much resource is used and how much value it provides to your department. Accordingly, you can increase or reduce spending on that department or any software asset.

During a recession, creating a monthly spending budget will surely help you stay persistent in business. You will have a proper budgeting plan to use your resources for months and years. With a budget, resources will be used appropriately with your understanding. 

You should focus on creating a budget using Zluri.

Zluri provides you with the capability to budget your organization's spend. You can efficiently create monthly and department-wise budgets. You can optimize your budget with time using analytics. It can be your investment in a recession.

IT department budget

Support department budget

Procurement department budget

5. Invest in SaaS security tools

Security is always a concern for organizations to be safe from unauthorized access to secretive data. Employees use a lot of SaaS tools within the organization, which leads to minor loopholes that can provide hackers the chance to get access to the systems and sensitive information. After the increase in cloud infrastructure migrations and remote work availability, it has become a challenge for organizations to give extra emphasis to security to secure the organizations.

CIOs are advised to invest in security software that can help organizations secure information from any security breach. During the recession, you can't let any data misuse happen, which can harm the business in the upcoming times. So, better invest upfront in security that can help sustain the business and grow the organization.

You can invest in Zluri, which is secure enough to save you from any security issues and can notify you before any security risk becomes a threat.

Zluri's security module provides great analytics and a strong risk mechanism that runs security checks within your organization. It finds all the threats possible to alter your system. It checks all the SaaS in your stack and reports you their security risk level as low, medium, and high. It also alerts you about the threat level from 0 levels to the 5th level. So you can take action before it becomes a big issue.

It provides a score of 100 to ensure your organization's security. The lower the score, the more secure the organization is, and the higher the score leads to security threats for your organization.

You can share responsibilities among users and control the access level to tolls for users. It will help you to control the risk levels of apps. For example, suppose you have shared a document with a user. You can set priorities and access levels to the users.

• You can give only view access. That leads to low risk and level 0,1 threat.

• You can assign edit or comment access. This is medium risk and level 2,3 threat.

• You can assign delete access. This is a high risk and level 4,5 threat.

With proper security, you have taken care of the proper analysis of the organization. You can invest in analytical software. Modern business requires you to deal with data and analytics. If you analyze data correctly, it can help you make informed decisions. It is better to have analytical software that generates real-time reports related to your requirements.

6. Invest in training employees

You should invest in employee training. Sometimes it is overlooked, but an essential part of business growth. If your employees fully understand the software, they can utilize it properly. In most cases, organizations purchase software, but their internal team doesn't fully utilize it due to a lack of knowledge.

Suppose if you have purchased software and your usage is 30%; then you are wasting 70% of the resources you already have paid. So, to mitigate this situation, you can build an internal coaching plan that trains your current employees and gives new joiners proper training.

You can take help from third-party training such as E-learning courses. These training courses provide the following enhancements.

• Better employee performance: Performance is directly proportional to skills. If the employees get proper skill training and knowledge about specific software, it will help them perform efficiently.

• A wider understanding of the business: The basic understanding of business is essential for employees to do tasks. But, when it comes to growing as a company, you need to properly understand the whole business. It will help you engage in more important tasks, and you can perform well to contribute to the organization.

• Higher employee engagement: You can't engage yourself fully in any task if you don't know how to complete it. To ensure your compatibility, you need proper training from the organization that helps you increase employee engagement and contribute your skills to grow the business.

• Lower staff turnover: It's always quality over quantity when you have set a high business goal. If you have skilled employees with equipped knowledge, you can solely believe in the core team to do their tasks. You won't need many employees' involvement in any specific task as the employees can handle more than one task themselves.

• Develop the business: Your employees are the bottom line that strengthens your business. So, if you have maintained a strong team, you are already in business growth. Your employees will give their best to contribute to the company. It will benefit your organization in the long term.

About the author

Tathagata Chakrabarti

Tathagata is a Technical Content Writer with 4+ of experience in the SaaS industry. He has a keen eye for research and understanding macro trends in the SaaS & AI-based technology space. He has worked across several marketing & strategy roles in various domains like banking, e-commerce, and education sectors. In his leisure time, Tathagata is a full-time PC gamer.