SaaS Management: The Most Comprehensive Guide - 2022
5th May, 2022
•8 mins
After the pandemic, SaaS adoption and usage have grown tremendously. Since the time organizations went to work from home model, their reliance on SaaS has increased multifold.
Though with all its goodness, SaaS brings financial, security, and compliance risks to organizations. Issues like SaaS sprawl give rise to shadow IT and SaaS wastage, making SaaS management difficult.
For IT teams, tasks like providing and revoking the access of SaaS apps to employees during onboarding and offboarding, or when their role changes are very time-consuming.
SaaS Challenges
It's the IT teams' responsibility to ensure that organizations take advantage of SaaS while minimizing the risks.
Small organizations can manage their SaaS applications in spreadsheets.
But this is not an efficient method for large organizations having 100s of employees using 1000s of SaaS apps.
There is a need for SaaS governance to mitigate SaaS risks.
SaaS Governance
The first step requires a diagnosis of the problem. So, you need to conduct an audit on your SaaS stack to find which apps are giving the business value and which ones are problematic.
SaaS Stack Diagnosis
SaaS operations managers can automate app provisioning and deprovisioning tasks to provide a seamless employee experience. This means employees always have access to apps they need when required.
Automate IT Tasks, like Onboarding, Offboarding, and Approvals
The right strategy and tools make it easy for IT teams to manage SaaS chaos.
Key Principles of SaaS Management
Next, you need to manage SaaS vendors.
Procuring SaaS in the right way helps you eliminate these challenges at the first step itself. Now, only employee experience plays a key role in software selection. This is because, unlike before, employees do sign up for other SaaS than the one provided by the IT teams giving rise to shadow IT. If you want to prevent shadow IT, you have to improve your SaaS procurement.
SaaS Buying
How to Optimize SaaS Stack
A lean SaaS stack is an optimized one. This means there should be no duplicate apps or apps with overlapping functionality. Furthermore, the license numbers and tiers should be rightsized based on requirements.
According to Gartner's report, one-third of the software cost gets wasted. An optimized stack ensures you there is no budget wastage of IT budget.
Security and Compliance Solutions for SaaS Stack
There are both insider and outsider threats associated with SaaS apps. According to a OneLogin report, 25% of ex-employees may retain access to SaaS apps and organizational data residing in those apps.
The existing solutions in the market are not sufficient to make sure that no employee has access to SaaS apps after they leave.
Here are Some Reports On SaaS Management
You can go through the below reports to understand how different enterprises are managing their SaaS stack.
What's Next? SaaS Management Platform (SMP)
SaaS management platforms are key to discovering, optimizing, managing, and securing your SaaS stack.
How to Choose a SaaS Management Platform?
The discovery engine is the foundation of any SaaS management solution. Any SMP can only be as good as its discovery engine. Zluri, an SMP, has the world's largest app library with over 2,25,000 apps. Furthermore, this database keeps on expanding every day. With its five discovery methods, Zluri can discover 100% of the SaaS applications.
About the author
Ritish is one of the co-founders of Zluri, the SaaS management tool for IT teams. He leads the Marketing and Partnerships as part of his role. Before Zluri, he was part of the founding team at KNOLSKAPE and Co-Founder at Cranium media. Ritish is an MBA graduate and is passionate about building, and scaling businesses ground up. He is an avid reader and loves exploring book stores and libraries in different parts of the world. He loves painting with his 4-year-old daughter.
