Automation

  • 5 min read

4 Signals that it's Time to Automate SaaS Management in Your Organization

Tathagata Chakrabarti

6th January, 2023

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Manual tasks can be automated to attain effective results. It simplifies the various IT tasks for seamless SaaS operations in an organization. However, it is crucial to understand the appropriate time to automate IT tasks with a SaaSOps platform.

Organizations practice traditional methods to manage SaaS operations. Due to this, organizations need a complete view of the IT infrastructure.

Since SaaS adoption has increased, managing multiple SaaS apps manually has become a complex task, especially in larger organizations. This traditional IT practice creates a huge barrier to business progress. For this reason, you should automate the various IT tasks to streamline the SaaS app management and business processes. This can be done with the help of a SaaSOps platform.

There are several benefits to IT automation when added to your organization. This includes:

• It minimizes the workload of IT teams and improves productivity.

• The accuracy of IT tasks increases as automation helps to reduce human errors, and the error percentage of tools is negligible.

• IT teams performing repetitive tasks is time-consuming and needs more time for other activities. IT automation will automate these tasks and help you focus on essential tasks, increasing efficiency.

IT automation is more beneficial than manually managing SaaS apps with spreadsheets. This is because it reduces the workload of IT teams. But it is vital to know the indications for automating SaaSOps in the organization. Understanding when to automate with a SaaSOps platform helps businesses make effective decisions. 

This post will mention the various signals to automate your SaaSOps.  

When to Automate With a SaaSOps Platform 

Let us discuss the various signs of why you need to automate SaaSOps in your organization and how you can utilize a SaaSOps platform to do it. 

1. Increase in usage of SaaS apps in organizations

Due to the increased usage of SaaS applications in organizations, the IT team needs help to discover and monitor the SaaS apps manually. The IT team's lack of visibility into the business' SaaS inventory makes it complicated to optimize and measure SaaS apps, identify cost savings opportunities, and reduce risks. 

Further, it leads to significant issues such as shadow IT, the inability to discover the organization's applications, and the inability to identify redundant and duplicate apps. This increases the risk of cyberattacks, SaaS sprawl, data breaches, and SaaS spend. 

It becomes complex for an organization to manage multiple licenses and contracts manually. They have to keep track of licenses as per the organization's requirements, which can be time-consuming. In addition, you must ensure the contracts comply with the regulatory standards to reduce the chances of monetary and reputational loss for the organization.

Improper SaaS operation management can reduce the organization's productivity. This is when you realize the importance of automating SaaSOps with the help of a SaaSOps platform. Ensure the business processes work seamlessly by making effective management decisions. 

SaaSOps platforms such as Zluri help IT users gain visibility into the SaaS inventory. Zluri helps IT teams discover all the SaaS applications present in the organization with the help of 5 discovery methods. These are SSO or IDP, finance systems, direct integrations, browser extensions, and desktop agents, which allow IT users to monitor and evaluate the apps. 

Zluri helps IT teams eliminate redundant and duplicate SaaS apps and eliminates shadow IT. This allows organizations to make effective cost-saving decisions and prevent cyberattacks and data breaches.

It offers you the renewal calendar, which will update you about all the upcoming renewal payments and contacts so that you can take advantage of all important renewals and prioritize the renewal updates of specific contacts by setting alerts. 

Additionally, Zluri helps you right-size your licenses and downgrade to suitable tiers to reduce unnecessary expenses on unwanted licenses, which will help your business reduce SaaS expenses. 

Further, it manages the SaaS licenses, subscriptions, contracts, and perpetual in a single place along with the required documents. You can view the total licenses purchased and the number of unmapped licenses. With these insights, you can plan to renegotiate the licenses at the renewals.

2. When IT teams consume more time on employees' onboarding & offboarding process

Employees' onboarding and offboarding are crucial parts of the organization. This process streamlines the provisioning and deprovisioning of applications to the employees. But IT teams manually performing these tasks is time-consuming and prone to human error. 

It can take days or even months to give or revoke access to the SaaS apps. This will impact the productivity of the employees and the IT teams. Also, it makes the employee onboarding and offboarding process complex when done manually. 

Automating the employee onboarding and offboarding process with a SaaSOps platform will help the IT teams use their time on other crucial work. 

With Zluri, you can automate your onboarding process. For example, you can set different playbooks for onboarding per your requirements, and with a few clicks, you can use while onboarding a new employee. This reduces the repetitive tasks of the IT teams and makes the process efficient. Also, you can set various automation rules that will fasten the process with accuracy.

Similarly, With Zluri, the IT teams can revoke or terminate access during the employee offboarding process. This will ensure that ex-employees cannot access the data or any organization apps. Hence, reducing the security and compliance risks of the organization. In addition, it prevents the organization from data breaches or cyber-attacks.

3. Large number of tickets/requests for app approval

When an employee requires a new app, approval is required by the IT teams to access the app. This includes raising a ticket, the IT team analyzing the app request, and then giving authorization for the same. Once approved, the employee can start using the app. But this complete process is time-consuming and, thus, impacts productivity. 

However, the automated approval process will enhance productivity for IT teams and employees. As a result, they can focus on other activities to improve productivity and maximize the overall ROI.

Zluri offers organizations a self-serve model - Employee App Store (EAS). This app store helps employees access applications of their choice and reduces the workload for IT teams. In addition, it automates the whole SaaS access management process and streamlines the SaaSOps. 

Though employees get to choose the applications, it is the IT team that creates the whole Employee App Store. With Zluri, you can decide the applications shown to the employees in the app store and control employee access. This will also empower employees to select applications faster and reduce the waiting time for approvals.

With EAS, IT teams can focus on achieving goals to maximize the overall ROI. You can permit employees to select their required apps from the employee app store that IT admins approve. 

Moreover, the solution will enhance the visibility of the apps available in the organization. The app store helps IT teams with SaaS approvals and licenses assignment to your employees. It simplifies the onboarding process, updates SaaS, and saves time on repetitive tasks of the IT teams. 

Read more about the Zluri employee app store here.

4. Rise in security and compliance risks

In a decentralized organization, security and compliance risks increases. This is due to having the freedom to choose their apps per their requirements without understanding the security and compliance of the apps. This can lead to monetary loss to the organization. 

Organizations must ensure the apps comply with the required regulatory standards to avoid penalties, increasing the organization's Saas expenses. 

However, manually managing the SaaS apps will not give you complete visibility of the organization's SaaS landscape. Furthermore, the apps which still need to be discovered might result in security and compliance risks. Therefore, using an appropriate SaaSOps platform will help save the business from potential risks. In addition, it will eliminate the chances of data breaches and cyberattacks.

Zluri helps you to monitor access to SaaS applications by assigning authorized access to authorized users. You can view the insights of SaaS apps, such as risks level, threat level, events, etc., associated with the apps. You can eliminate or restrict the apps which have a chance of compromising security to ensure the safety of sensitive data. 

Zluri not only enables accessibility but also gives risk analysis alerts so that you can identify and resolve the risk at an early age. In addition, you can perform regular audits to ensure things are in place per your requirements. 

Additionally, you can view all the critical apps and users in the organizations. 

Critical Apps

Critical Users

With Zluri, you can even check the compliance standards of the SaaS applications, and accordingly, you can make decisions to continue with the app. 

Also, you can check whether the SaaS vendors comply with the guidelines. Accordingly, you can continue purchasing SaaS products or look for alternative SaaS vendors. Zluri even helps with SaaS buying, ensuring security and compliance standards.

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.