SaaS Operations (SaaS Ops) - The Complete Guide

SaaS implementation accelerated post the pandemic, resulting from increased cloud adoption. Managing these SaaS applications became a hassle as the network perimeter no longer existed. Here’s what resulted from work decentralization and SaaS acceleration.

• SaaS sprawl: Too many applications inside the companies without any supervision. It's easy for any employee to sign up for a new application, leading to security, compliance, and financial threats for organizations.
  

• App redundancy: Most of the time, companies have redundant applications in the form of duplicate apps, unused or underused apps, extra licenses, or wrong-tier plans. You can use our DUAAS framework to deal with it.
  

• Shadow IT: Zero visibility into the applications being used within an organization. Un-provisioned SaaS applications can bring security and compliance threats to your business, leading to hefty fines and loss of reputation.

Key Takeaways:

• SaaS Operations Management is the need of the hour, given the SaaS accelerated landscape post-pandemic.

• SaaS Management platforms give complete visibility and management capabilities on SaaS, cut costs on SaaS spending, and ensure regulatory compliance.

• How Zluri, a SaaS Management Platform, solves all the above-mentioned problems from one place.

What is SaaS Operations (SaaS Ops)?

SaaSOps or SaaS Operations encompasses the entire lifecycle of a SaaS application, from discovery and procurement to onboarding and offboarding and everything in between. SaaSOps aims to ensure that SaaS applications are used effectively and efficiently; thi includes tasks such as:

• Identifying and evaluating SaaS applications

• Managing user access to SaaS applications

• Monitoring SaaS usage and performance

• Troubleshooting SaaS issues

• Provisioning and deprovisioning SaaS accounts

• Managing SaaS costs

Challenges of improper SaaS Operations Management

1. Lack of Visibility

Since there is no one-stop dashboard to manage all of your applications, it creates a lack of understanding of the applications currently being used within your organization. This leads to Access sprawl - Zero understanding of who has what level of access to which applications.

2. Overspending

It is a tad bit difficult to spot overspending on SaaS unless the finance department regularly audits all transactions & spending, which ultimately requires manual effort. Overspending can happen because of unused or underused, similar apps, or unrecorded license true-ups by individuals or departments.

3. Inefficient lifecycle management

In a setup where a new employee joins the organization & requests access to every birthright tool, it results in wasted IT hours and productivity loss. Similarly, when an employee leaves your organization, it is the HR and IT team’s responsibility to revoke access. Doing this can be time-consuming, leads to human errors, and, when left unchecked, leads to costly data breaches.

4. Compliance threats

While procuring SaaS, you need to ensure that the vendors comply with industry regulations. If it's just a couple of SaaS tools, you might know their compliance status by heart, but when thousands of tools lie in your SaaS stack, keeping track of every tool is impossible. Breach of compliance might push you to pay expensive fines and face lawsuits.

5. Security threats

When your employees sign up for an application, they overlook the security factor and start using it if they feel it's better than the one prescribed by IT. So, they give out critical information while signing up for an application, making your organization vulnerable to phishing and other cyber attacks.

Benefits of SaaS Operations for Companies

SaaSOps comes with three key benefits to any organization. It allows you to take control of the SaaS stack by managing, optimizing, and automating your SaaS applications from one place.

1. SaaS Management & Governance

A SMP helps you with insights into which users use which applications and to what extent. Then comes the governance part, where you can easily monitor and manage the users by defining rules and their access privileges for applications from one place.

Managing policies, contracts, vendors & renewals all from one place by also ensuring all the applications used are authorized and compliant with industry-standard regulations.

2. Fast and Secured Onboarding and Offboarding

Onboarding and offboarding are some of the IT department's most strenuous, repetitive, and time-consuming tasks. But if they are left loosened, it might bring disruptions and data leak threats to your organization.

With a SaaS management system, you can automate the onboarding and offboarding process, making it easy to give access to new joiners and revoke accesses while offboarding. With Zluri, you can quickly create and automate onboarding and offboarding playbooks that do better deprovisioning than SSOs.

3. Manage SaaS spends

Our survey report found that for 31% of companies, SaaS takes 10% of their overall budget. By centralizing your spending, you get a picture of where your money is being spent. This will help you get more from your SaaS stack by eliminating unnecessary applications.

You can use our DUAAS framework to eliminate SaaS waste. In short, you remove duplicate apps and unused licenses, opt out of auto-renewal of apps, eliminate abandoned apps, and rightsize your license tiers. It will help you cut out all excess expenses, helping improve your return on the SaaS stack.

Two signs your company might need SaaS Operations Management Software

• You need more visibility into the SaaS applications being used within the organization. There isn’t a system that helps you manage all these applications from a single dashboard.

• Your team has application accessibility issues. Your employees face severe productivity crunch when they don’t have access to the applications they need access to.

Why Should You Use a SaaS Operations Management Software?

A SaaS management platform (SMP) is a centralized system that serves as a single source of truth to discover SaaS apps and get insights on their usage to make procurement, renewal, and termination decisions.

SaaS management platforms can be an effective investment for companies with many SaaS apps trying to get the best out of them. It can help you in the following ways:

• Get visibility into your SaaS ecosystem: When you are an enterprise with thousands of applications, a spreadsheet for managing them is cumbersome. A SaaS management platform can bring all this information automatically in one place and provide accurate deep insights into each application.

• Build smooth and efficient workflows: When you have plenty of tools, it can get messy with accessibility issues. An SMP can streamline workflows and eliminate redundant and manual application management tasks. It means more time working on strategic tasks and less time managing access.

• Enable fast and secure onboarding and offboarding: You can efficiently manage joiner, mover, and leaver by enabling the right access at the right time. This can be streamlined by creating self-operating workflows.

• Track your expenses efficiently: When you have too many applications, it is difficult to keep track of the costs of all the applications. Having a single source of truth for all your expenses, an SMP helps track your spending and manage all your subscriptions effectively. 

• Stay secure and compliant: An SMP helps you with visibility into access information. This ultimately helps you remediate unwanted access to non-privileged users, making organizations secure and compliant.

How Can Zluri Help with your SaaS Operations

Zluri is a single source of truth for all SaaS apps in your organization. It helps you monitor, manage, and optimize your SaaS spending and also identifies whether a particular application brings an ROI to your business. With this data, you can eliminate dormant, unused, and underutilized subscriptions.

Zluri helps you manage the SaaS landscape in the following ways:

• 360-degree view of all your apps.

• Manage contracts, vendors & renewals.

• Eliminate unused and redundant applications.

• Automate user onboarding and offboarding.

If you are looking for a one-stop solution for all of your SaaS operations and management needs, Zluri might just be what you’re looking for. You can contact us and get a Free Personalized demo from one of our SaaS consultants.