Managing the unseen – getting started with SaaS management
SaaS – the growing present and the imminent future
Claiming that SaaS is the future is a broad statement until you take a second and look around you. Be it for your business or everyday needs, every problem has one or more SaaS solutions to solve them. People today are well aware of this growing reality that simpler, cheaper SaaS solutions are available all around them to make their lives easy. Therefore, today’s workforce expects the same too – easy-to-use, always-on SaaS solutions that solve their business needs with merely their laptops and good WiFi.
A reality check
On average, enterprises are looking at about $3000 worth of SaaS subscriptions per employee, i.e., if you have a workforce of 1000 employees, you have to manage about $3M worth of SaaS subscriptions per head. Parallelly, when we see about 288 apps used by enterprises on average, it’s glaring that SaaS solutions can effectively and successfully solve about 288 business problems.
Organizations see this apparent advantage, and hence 73% of them say that nearly all their software solutions will be SaaS by 2021. Post-pandemic, this percentage is prone to go up as more organizations shift to SaaS solutions to support a work-from-anywhere-anytime model with the increasingly popular work cultures – Remote and Hybrid.
The paradigm shift with SaaS – democratized adoption
Traditionally, IT teams strictly governed software rollouts and their lifecycles. The software adoption lifecycles were longer, more cumbersome, and the control was always with the IT team – from evaluating solutions, purchasing and implementing them, and training the workforce.
But with the advent of SaaS solutions, things have changed. The adoption lifecycles have shortened to a large extent and have become increasingly democratized. Employees today do not necessarily have to go through the IT teams to adopt SaaS tools. They can:
- Evaluate tools in a simple search: Once employees identify a business need, a simple search can give them visibility into various SaaS options available in the market.
- Purchase them in a swipe: Employees can seamlessly purchase tools with a swipe of a card without involving IT teams.
- Implement and adopt solutions with ease: Ease of use is the primary driver in designing SaaS solutions. Most SaaS solutions offer 24/7 support and endless documentation, making implementation and adoption a breeze.
Shortened and increasingly democratized adoption lifecycles slowly result in ungoverned SaaS sprawl in organizations, becoming a growing challenge for IT teams to solve.
Empowering Employees Vs. Empowering IT teams
The spirit of innovation triggered by democratized SaaS adoption is a great sign – employees today are empowered to bring their own tools to work that help them execute more effectively. But there is a flip side to this when you look at it with an enterprise-wide lens.
The flip side
As the need for SaaS solutions increases, the availability of multiple vendors also increases. Therefore, siloed adoption of SaaS solutions will continue to grow, with employees and teams bringing their tools into an organization’s ecosystem. Your SaaS sprawl continues to expand, with more solutions deployed to solve similar business needs. If not streamlined and governed right, the potential is high for increased security risks and unmanaged IT costs.
The Onus is still on the IT teams
As we reinvent the wheel with the advent of democratic SaaS adoption, the challenge to streamline and govern these tools is still the IT team’s responsibility – despite the fact that traditional software asset management solutions were never built to manage SaaS. From discovering these tools, to license management up to managing renewals and purchases, everything is different ground up when it comes to SaaS.
The need for a solution is real and raving
IT teams require a modern solution that can scale to manage an organization’s SaaS sprawl. A single source of truth and a centralized system of governance has become critical in solving the following challenges:
Visibility – Lack of visibility into what apps are used and who is using them.
Usage – Inability to track usage trends and patterns to know how apps are used.
Renewals – Difficulty in tracking renewals (especially with auto-renewing SaaS tools) and proactively optimizing license utilization to renew intelligently.
Costs – Renewals for more than what is used due to unmanaged SaaS usage results in increased, ungoverned SaaS costs.
Embracing the change – A five-step checklist to get started
Getting started with managing your SaaS solutions isn’t as daunting as it seems. Taking your first step is simple with this 5 step checklist:
- Discover your SaaS sprawl: Build a single system of record for all SaaS applications used in your organization, the users using these tools, and their licenses.
- Understand usage metrics and patterns: With all information about your SaaS tools in a single pane, start tracking how these tools are being used. Identify areas to consolidate tools, de-provision or downgrade inactive users, and improve compliance and security.
- Optimize with insight-driven actions: Once you have the necessary insights to back your optimization efforts, go ahead and act on them to ensure that your next batch of renewals is done in the most optimal, efficient manner.
- Streamline renewals: Prevent siloed, non-compliant subscriptions by proactively managing your SaaS licenses. Renew what matters and cut costs by ensuring that all optimization efforts are taken care of before the next batch of renewals.
- Automate SaaS lifecycle processes: Setup automated governance processes to enable zero-touch, agentless resolution of SaaS lifecycle processes like license provisioning and de-provisioning, upgrades, downgrades, onboarding, offboarding, and much more.
SaaS solutions create challenges that IT teams have to deal with at the crossroads of empowerment and digitalization. Therefore, in this tug of war between empowering your workforce and your IT teams, it’s time to tip the scales in favor of your IT teams to empower your business better.
Manage the unseen in Freshservice
With Freshservice SaaS management, integrate with leading identity providers to discover, manage and optimize your SaaS applications in a single pane. Enable centralized governance with a tightly coupled service-delivery engine and automation to power SaaS lifecycle processes.
Curious to know how you can use this 5 step checklist to get started with Freshservice SaaS management? We’ve made it easy for you.
Take your first step to manage your SaaS apps in Freshservice with this webinar: Watch now
