SaaS management is the monitoring, managing, purchasing, onboarding, licensing, renewals, and offboarding of all the software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications within a company. In other words, managing SaaS applications is a lot of work. With approximately 30,000 SaaS applications currently available, it’s predicted to grow and reach a valuation of $307 billion by 2026. Thankfully, with the rise of new technology, comes new opportunities to expedite tedious business practices. Understanding the importance of SaaS management can save businesses both time and money. With that in mind, let’s briefly discuss how SaaS works.
How SaaS Works
SaaS runs on a cloud delivery model, meaning the application runs on any web browser or device that has an active internet connection. Organizations can directly integrate SaaS applications with other softwares via APIs (Application Programming Interface). These integrations typically take time and development resources to build, test, and launch successfully.
In today’s day and age, businesses are constantly looking to simplify how they manage, use, and integrate SaaS applications. This is where SaaS management comes in.
SaaS Management: An Essential Tool
Setting up effective SaaS management tools gives you visibility into your organization’s SaaS applications and automates tedious IT provisioning tasks, allowing you to optimize costs, increase productivity, and protect your company data. Here is how a SaaS management tool can help your organization:
Visibility of All Apps
With proper SaaS management in place, you will have transparent visibility of all applications in use across your business. This creates centralization of the application portfolio, provides right-size licensing on the basis of user requirements, and ensures only safe and approved apps are used by teams.
Cost Optimization
SaaS costs can be reduced by identifying and removing insufficiently used licenses and consolidating license subscriptions across teams. The leading SaaS management tools help you collaborate with users to gauge the utilization and efficiency of specific app renewals and remove poor-value or underutilized applications.
Increase in Productivity
Replace time-consuming manual provisioning procedures, such as employee onboarding and offboarding, with automated and auditable workflows. This plays an excellent role in saving time for both the IT department and new employees, increasing productivity and allowing teams to focus on valuable tasks.
SaaS Consolidation
With an effective SaaS management tool, you’ll identify which apps can be consolidated across teams.
Project management applications, as an example, are typically used by multiple departments, such as Monday.com, Airtable, Smartsheet, Asana, and Clickup. By identifying overlapping business use cases and consolidating SaaS tools, organizations can lower licensing costs, simplify operations and procurement processes, and make inter-team collaboration simple.
Subscription Tracking
SaaS subscriptions generally have an annual or monthly renewal date. Having visibility into the cost information, licenses utilized or unutilized, and renewal data will help your team plan for upgrades, cancellations, or renewals based on your optimal utilization.
Prevent Shadow IT
Shadow IT happens when applications or systems are purchased by employees without the IT department’s direct approval or knowledge, contradicting the IT as the gatekeeper provisioning or deprovisioning applications in a centralized way. This can become especially problematic when employees leave the organization and still have access to internal data or assets.
A strong SaaS management tool can identify shadow IT applications used within your organization in order to centralize license management, optimize costs, and secure access to company data.
The countless benefits of SaaS management tools, it is time to implement a platform that can easily give you the visibility and control of your SaaS footprint, while creating efficiency in your organization. Josys will help. Contact us for a demo and get started for free.
