SaaS Management

  • 7 min read

5 Reasons Why You Need a SaaS Management Platform

Team Zluri

9th October, 2023

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There has been a significant shift in how organizations operate in recent years. They have transitioned from traditional on-premises systems to cloud computing environments. This shift has led to a surge in the adoption of SaaS applications. But how to manage a large SaaS stack efficiently. The solution is to opt for a SaaS management platform (SMP).  

As a CIO, do you feel your IT team is struggling to manage the ever-growing number of Software as a Service (SaaS) applications within your organization? Is monitoring app usage, managing licenses, and ensuring security and compliance becoming a never-ending headache for them? 

If so, then it's time for your IT team to take control of your SaaS stack with a game-changing solution, i.e., a SaaS management platform. With an SMP, your team can automate tedious IT tasks, gain valuable insights into your organization's SaaS usage, optimize costs, and do much more.

It's the ultimate platform for streamlining your SaaS management processes, enhancing security, and ensuring compliance. 

So in this article, we'll discuss a few crucial reasons in detail why SMP is the solution that you need to consider opting for. 

5 Reasons How SaaS Management Platforms Help Your IT Team 

This section covers 5 reasons for adopting an SMP and provides insights into why it is the ideal choice for effectively and efficiently streamlining your SaaS management process.

1. Helps Your IT Team Gain Complete Visibility Into Organization's SaaS Stack  

With the increase in the adoption of new SaaS applications, it becomes difficult for your IT teams to manually manage all the SaaS apps, leading to a lack of visibility into an organization's Saas stack. Also, at times, your employees purchase and use applications that are not approved by IT teams. In such a scenario, your team remains unaware of these applications, and hence they cannot monitor or manage apps such apps. This gives a way to Shadow IT. 

So how can you mitigate this challenge? You can opt for an efficient SaaS management platform such as Zluri to help your IT team gain complete visibility into your organization's SaaS stack. But how does Zluri make it possible? 

Zluri uses 5 Discovery Methods, i.e., SSO and Identity Providers (IDP), finance and expense management systems, direct integration with apps, desktop agents (optional), and browser extension (optional). These methods help your IT team trace all the SaaS applications in the organization's stack. But how does it help in preventing shadow IT?

• Prevent and reduce shadow IT 

Well, with Zluri, your IT team can classify the identified SaaS applications into distinct categories. These categories are: managed (which are approved by the IT team), unmanaged (which are not yet approved by the team), restricted (applications that are restricted due to security reasons), and need review (apps that need to be reviewed by the IT team). 

This helps your team to keep track of all the SaaS apps used in the organization seamlessly and reduces the likelihood of unapproved apps being used. This helps eliminate the shadow IT and enables your team to have full control over the SaaS stack. 

• Eliminates redundant and duplicate applications

Additionally, Zluri helps your IT team remove redundant and duplicate apps, reducing SaaS usage and spend. It displays the application details, shows applications with similar functionality, and which apps are being used the least in a centralized dashboard. 

For instance, your organization is using Zoom and Google Meet for video conferencing, so what Zluri will do is it will fetch the data and show you that both tools have similar functionality. Accordingly, you can decide which tool you want to continue with and which one needs to be suspended. 

2. Allows To Manage Licenses Efficiently 

Nowadays, organizations frequently purchase SaaS tools to meet the employee's requirements; however, manually managing the licenses becomes more difficult and time-consuming. But not with Zluri's SMP.

Zluri streamlines and simplifies the SaaS license management process by providing your IT team with complete insight into the number of licenses purchased, underutilized licenses, unused licenses, and the cost of each license - all in one centralized location. 

For instance, with Zluri, you can track under-utilized and unused licenses by tracking how many users actively use the app and how many licenses are unassigned. Accordingly, your team can eliminate unused licenses incurring unnecessary costs, and shift to a suitable tier.  

By consolidating this information, Zluri's SMP empowers your team to optimize license usage and reduce costs.  

How can one view all these details? From Zluri's main interface, click on the licenses module and select licenses from the drop-down list. Your team will land on the licenses page, where four tabs can be viewed: licenses, subscriptions, Contracts, and perpetual.

Under the licenses tab, your team will be able to see the number of licenses being used in the company, like it's shown in the image that this organization has 245 licenses.

Under the subscription tab, your team will be able to see which subscriptions are active, the total number of licenses bought for the application, and the number of license types.

Similarly, under the contacts tab, your team will be able to view all the active contracts, vendors, assigned licenses, and license types. 

However, Zluri is not restricted to this only; you can click on any application and view all the details, such as how many active users there are out of total users, which departments are using the applications, estimated cost (YTD), and more. 

3. Streamline SaaS Renewal Management

When your organizations’ procurement team manages SaaS renewal manually, they often miss out on dates as they don't get timely alerts on upcoming renewals. Due to which, it gets difficult for them to effectively keep track of renewal dates. 

For instance, if you have planned to discontinue any app licenses, there is a possibility that your procurement team may miss out on key dates due to a lack of real-time alerts, and you may get locked into another payment cycle. 

However, with Zluri's renewal calendar, your procurement team get notified on the upcoming renewals. This further helps them to make informed decisions about which subscriptions and contracts to continue with and which to cancel based on app usage, be fore ending up paying for another month or year. 

In addition, it gives your procurement team a choice to prioritize renewals according to the requirements. For instance, if a contract payment includes a significant sum, your procurement team can prioritize that specific renewal first. They also have the option to manually create alerts at their convenience, which enables your managers to stay updated about crucial renewal deadlines. 

Your procurement will, however, automatically receive timely alerts for contracts 30, 15, 7, and 1 days prior to renewal, while they will also receive alerts for payments 7 and 1 days prior to renewal. This helps ensure that they get complete control and visibility into  SaaS renewal.

4. Helps Your Procurement team Gain visibility Into SaaS Contracts 

When the procurement team manually manages SaaS contracts, they frequently overlook hidden charges, resulting in unnecessary expenses. However, Zluri addresses this issue by offering the procurement team comprehensive insights into SaaS contracts through a centralized dashboard. 

With this feature, the procurement team can easily access essential details such as vendors from whom any of the team members have got the contract, upcoming renewal date, total costs of the contract, the status of active or inactive contracts, how many licenses have been assigned, and more. By providing these complete contract insights, Zluri enables the procurement team to avoid any unexpected costs associated with SaaS subscriptions.

Furthermore, the procurement team can select any application contract to obtain more details like start date, end date, payment term, and more. 

Apart from that, Zluri also provides the procurement team with the cost (which comes from contracts) and actual spend (YTD) (which comes from finance and expense) data. With the help of this data, your procurement team can identify the accurate hidden charges difference associated with true-up costs.

5. Enables Your IT Team To Maintain Data Security 

With Zluri your IT team gets real-time alerts on unauthorized access attempts, which helps them take preventive measures to safeguard SaaS app data from potential cyber attacks and data breaches. 

Additionally, it puts applications that pose a high risk score and threat level under critical users and those with access to critical apps under critical users. 

Zluri is not restricted to that only, it further enables your IT team to inspect each SaaS application thoroughly, providing details related to events, shared data, compliance, and security probes. This will help your team meet compliance standards while also fulfilling security objectives.

From where will all these details be visible? Your team can follow these few steps. 

Step 1: On Zluri's main interface, click on applications; it will display all applications that are categorized under managed, unmanaged, restricted, and need reviews.

Step 2: Click the application that your team wants more information about. All the related details will be displayed, including how many active users are using the app, the IT owner of the app, risk level, which departments are using the app, and more.

Step 3: To get in-depth detail, click on the security & compliance tab; it will display 4 tabs events, data shared, compliance, and security probes.

By clicking on the events tab, your team can view all events related to the applications. Zluri fetches this information from multiple authentic online sources, including critical updates, data breaches, security vulnerabilities, and other news associated with the application.

The score will vary depending on the event's impact; if the event has a high-security impact, the score will be low, and vice versa. For instance, due to X application's multiple security breaches, the score will be low.

Moving ahead, in data shared, your team can view who has read-only, modify, and delete access. If any user has read-only access, the threat level is comparatively low compared to users having to modify and delete access. Also, the more sensitive the data that an app accesses, the higher the threat level. 

For example, an app with access to Google Drive and the ability to delete files would be considered a high threat.

Furthermore, in the compliance tab, your team will be able to view which compliance standard the application adheres to. This lets your team ensure the application meets your company's compliance regulations. Moreover, Zluri's risk scoring system considers the number of compliance standards that an app complies with is taken into account. The higher the number of compliance standards, the higher will be the score, and the lower the number of compliance standards, the lower will be the score. 

Lastly, in the security probes tab, your team can get a view of technical scanning, which is conducted every once a month. 

Not only that; it utilizes secure encryption algorithms; Zluri places a high priority on the protection of your crucial data. Additionally, it gives your team access to a thorough log of important activities that can be audited, allowing you to keep tabs on all actions that pertain to the security of your app.

Also, unless a request for removal is made, all collected data, including usage statistics for SaaS applications, is kept forever. Zluri backs up all data for 60 days and keeps it in an encrypted form to ensure that it is always accessible.

So what are you waiting for? Book a demo now and see for yourself how Zluri streamlines your IT processes effectively and efficiently. 

About the author

Team Zluri

Team Zluri