When the pandemic hit, we left our offices and quickly moved to virtual work environments, relying heavily on innovative cloud technology to keep business running and employees engaged.
Our workplaces became fully decentralized.
According to the 2022 SaaS Visibility and Impact Report, 53% of technology executives reported that their company increased its SaaS tool adoption during the pandemic. That increase, however, wasn’t solely driven by IT teams. In the same report, 52% of respondents acknowledged that individual employees were purchasing apps without IT’s knowledge.
For enterprise businesses, this type of decentralized IT adoption isn’t new; it’s just normal. But as Gartner points out in the Market Guide for SaaS Management Platforms, “These distributed centers of ownership and control can mask the true complexity being undertaken to manage SaaS at an organizational level.”
SaaS management platforms (SMPs) unmask that complexity, giving enterprise IT teams a clear, full-picture view of their SaaS portfolio and the power to put checks and balances in place that control chaos associated with:
Keep reading to learn more about these four challenges and how SaaS management solves them for enterprise IT teams.
1. Lurking Shadow IT threats
Decentralized IT decisions empowered department leaders and individuals to find technology that works best for them in their specific roles. Exploring new technology can be a great thing, but unsanctioned applications lurking in the shadows of your organization also pose threats.
Shadow IT—software or tech services licensed without the IT department’s knowledge— is 69% of IT executives’ top concern related to SaaS & cloud application adoption, and for good reason. Since the start of the pandemic, 55% of organizations have reported lapsing security protocols, and 80% of these breaches were caused by applications adopted outside of IT’s purview.
How enterprise SaaS management helps:
You can’t control, secure or act on what you can’t see. SMPs bring shadow IT into the light.
Torii’s advanced discovery system automatically surfaces every SaaS and cloud app in your portfolio—the good, the unsanctioned, and the orphaned—and key data. With that visibility, enterprise IT teams can:
- Build a central, “shoppable” catalog of sanctioned tools
- Understand which apps are fan favorites and which can be cut
- Monitor new shadow IT signups
- Map out and mitigate security risks
Learn more about how Torii illuminates Shadow IT.
2. Clunky onboarding and offboarding workflows
The full-scale global pandemic may be over, but remote and hybrid work models aren’t going anywhere.
In our decentralized reality, SaaS apps are the lynchpin of organizations’ digital headquarters and define the employee experience. They support virtual water cooler chats, whiteboard brainstorms, team project planning and so much more. As such, SaaS stacks need to be (un)locked and loaded for new employees starting day one.
It’s equally important for IT teams to properly offboard employees so security threats can’t slip through a backdoor that’s left cracked open. According to 76% of IT leaders say “offboarding is a significant security threat” because sensitive data is exposed when access privileges aren’t revoked.
But, as your organization’s workforce ebbs and flows and the costs of on and offboarding multiply, bouncing from one SaaS interface to another to complete tasks isn’t sustainable for enterprise organizations.
How enterprise SaaS management helps:
Torii helps enterprise IT teams breeze through on and offboarding checklists, without compromising security. In a single platform, Torii users have the power to:
- Create workflows that trigger the creation of SaaS profiles the moment new employees sign onto the team, and remove them when they leave
- Request a user seat to apps in your portfolio with the click of a button, reducing bottlenecks around access privileges
- Follow offboarding audit logs to ensure that apps are properly deprovisioned and potential cracks in security are sealed up tight
And that’s just skimming the surface. Learn more about how Torii puts onboarding and offboarding on autopilot.
3. Wasted licenses and factors undermining ROI of SaaS investments
SaaS licenses can cost a pretty penny but 35% or more licenses go to waste, and 25% of those wasted licenses have capabilities that overlap with other apps.
Maybe your marketing team prefers Zoom, your engineering team loves Google Meet and your sales team needs Gong. Do you have the data to prove it?
There’s a lot of room to optimize IT budgets, but without a centralized view of all of your applications, user usage and spending data, it’s hard to know which apps are worth the expense. An enterprise SMP is the tool to manage all tools, the solution to your SaaS ROI.
How enterprise SaaS management helps:
SMPs in the market centralize the data enterprise IT departments need to trim the fat. It might sound too good to be true, but it is insanely easy to accomplish with Torii. Once SaaS apps are integrated, Torii your one-stop-shop to:
- View a full, unified picture of SaaS expense, ERP, and contract data, plus visualizations that anyone can understand. Your boss’s boss will want to see these.
- Remove redundant licenses and reclaim unused user seats, or even validate where redundancies are okay re: the Zoom, Google Meet, Gong cluster
- Implement automations that deprovision users that remain inactive for 60 days, give or take
There are more ways Torii does the heavy lifting so you can get more out of your SaaS investments. Learn about those solutions here.
4. Surprise renewals and vendor management woes
If you’ve ever started a free trial, not enjoyed the product, but forgot to cancel before getting charged for the real deal, you know how frustrating surprise renewals are. Imagine that at the scale of an enterprise business.
Torii customer data revealed that businesses experience 3-4 surprise renewals per month. Enterprise SaaS management keeps those surprises at bay.
How enterprise SaaS management helps:
By using SaaS management, you continuously track app use, spending, and application adoption (both sanctioned and unsanctioned). With this data, your business is poised and prepared to:
- Make the best decision possible when renewals loom
- Facilitate cross-department collaboration to make more proactive SaaS decisions
- Discuss options with department leaders to gauge the importance of tools within their workflows.
- Negotiate your contract with vendors and scale up or back where needed
Torii is here to help you gain control of vendor management.
Enterprise IT orgs aren’t immune to inefficiencies—SMPs are their booster
Enterprise SaaS sprawl is easy to ignore in our decentralized reality, but the consequences can be costly. A powerful SMP puts all that data in a dashboard and all that power to overcome, at your fingertips. And yet, in regards to SMP adoption, Garter reported that, “Growth has been strongest among small to midsize businesses (SMBs). Large enterprises, by comparison, have been slow to adopt these tools.”
Get ahead of the curve by trying Torii. Or get back to basics with this guide on “6 Best Practices for SaaS Management”