What are Redundant Apps

Redundant applications in the SaaS stack cause extra spending, inefficiency, and security issues. Managing redundant applications is critical for any organization to make sure they are using resources efficiently.

Nowadays, there are many SaaS apps that make everyday life easier for employees. The applications can be for collaboration, project management, marketing, etc. Employees are heavily dependent on SaaS applications for different purposes, such as sharing files and video conferencing. 

Though these apps help increase the productivity of the employees and add value to the business, having too many applications of the same type and overlapping functionalities can cause wastage of money and bring issues such as shadow IT, which can be a potential threat for the organization. 

Redundant applications simply mean two or more applications with overlapping functionalities and similar features to accomplish the same task. For example, using Asana and Trello both for managing projects. In other words, you could accomplish your goal using any one of the Asana or Trello instead of using both. This way, you will save cost as well as time from navigating between these two applications.

Furthermore, when your organization uses the same application for all users, you will be in a better position to negotiate for pricing due to a large number of users. So overall, it will reduce the spending of the organization.

Now let’s see some of the common redundant application types found.

3 Common Redundant Applications Types

1. Collaboration Applications: Collaboration applications are used by employees to coordinate with the other team members. Further, due to the rise of remote work culture, these applications have now become even more important. Teams use applications such as Slack, Confluence, or Basecamp (can be used for collaboration and project management) for collaboration. 

2. Video Conferencing Applications: The pandemic has accelerated the remote culture and made it ubiquitous. Video conferencing applications are now commonly used for team meetings, training, sales pitch, and many other purposes. Organizations use zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Team, and many other applications for video conferencing.

3. Project Management Applications: These applications are used to manage work. There are many applications available for project management, such as Asana, Trello, Jira, Monday, and Basecamp. Using different applications for managing projects in different departments based on preference can cause redundancy of applications. For example, Jira is more preferred to be used by development teams while Trello by other teams. So, if an organization uses both for the same purposes, it brings application redundancy.

How to Reduce Redundant Applications

Every organization wants to utilize its budget optimally. However, having redundant applications wastes a lot of time and money as well as brings many challenges. So, it is important to manage and eliminate unnecessary applications from the organization.

Discover Applications: The first step is to get a list of all applications used by different teams. You can check with all departments and ask them to prepare a list of the applications they use. Further, you can ask for what purpose they are using the application. To ease the discovery process, you can use SaaS management platforms such as Zluri to get complete visibility into your SaaS stack.

Standardization of Application: IT teams can standardize the application for different purposes to bring clarity throughout the organization. This will reduce the application redundancy and SaaS sprawl and ensure smooth collaboration.

Understand the Applications Usage: Having a better understanding of different applications and their use cases will help in reducing the number of applications by not procuring applications with overlapping features. IT teams can thoroughly understand each application–features, and functionalities. 

For this task, you can use SaaS management systems, like Zluri.

Overview of Apps Usage

You can also see who are your power users and users who don't use them at all. Maybe the users who don't use it often have low productivity? If that is the case, reach out to them and train them. This makes IT teams a business enabler.

Keep Check on Automatic Renewal: Once IT teams understand how applications are used, they can decide which applications to continue and which to revoke. Further, having automated renewals can give rise to applications redundancy if renewals are not monitored properly. So, it's always good to check applications and their utilization metrics before renewals.

Zluri allows you may filter apps with low usage and terminate them.

Conduct Regular Application Audit: This helps you to find out redundant applications even if you fail to discover them earlier. So, integrating regular audits for applications in workflow always gives an edge to the IT teams. The application audit can be done quarterly/bi-annually or annually, depending on the scale of application in your organization. For example, if your organization has very few applications, then it is easy to find redundant apps. But as the number of applications increases, the regular audit period can be increased.

How Zluri can Help

Zluri is a SaaS Management Platform (SMP) which empowers IT teams to gain complete control over their applications. Let’s see how Zluri can help your organization to reduce redundant applications.

Application Discovery: Zluri has an application library size of more than 2250,000 applications, enabling IT teams to discover applications quickly. It usages five discovery methods to surface 100% of your applications. It provides information about how different applications are used and helps you in making data-driven decisions. Further, it has direct integration with over 600 most commonly used applications to give you granular-level insights.

Gives Real-Time Usage Metrics: Zluri gives granular level information about real-time application usage. This enables you to understand different applications used as well as monitor users. Further, it detects the threat and provides alerts about the same. 

Manage Renewals: Zluri manages your renewals and always keeps you notified about upcoming renewals. Further, it provides insights into applications, and based on that, and you can decide to renew or not. With Zluri, you can efficiently manage all your application renewals.

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