6 Benefits of Efficient SaaS Management in Your Organization

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SaaS has changed how organizations operate. However, its adoption has led to a new challenge - SaaS sprawl.

On average, SaaS accounts for 70% of the total software in a company’s app stack, projected to reach 85% by 2025.

However, managing these many SaaS solutions is very challenging. As your SaaS portfolio increases, inefficient management leads to soaring costs, security risks, and productivity drains.

Efficient SaaS management is then very crucial. When you streamline your SaaS portfolio, you can optimize spending, ensure compliance, and ultimately drive innovation.

Read on as we discuss more on the top six benefits of efficient SaaS management in your organization.

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What is SaaS Management?

SaaS management is all about managing, monitoring, and optimizing SaaS applications that are being used by an organization.

With good SaaS management, you will be able to effectively manage licenses, spending, contracts, security, and user access across all your SaaS apps from a unified platform.

SaaS management helps consolidate your entire SaaS stack into one platform, granting complete control. You will optimize costs through usage insights, forecast budgets accurately with spend visibility, and streamline operations by eliminating redundancies.

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Why Efficient SaaS Management Matters

Efficient SaaS management matters for many reasons. Below are why organizations need it:

Skyrocketing SaaS Adoption: As organizations rapidly adopt cloud solutions, the number of SaaS apps in use has skyrocketed.

Without proper management, this sprawl will quickly get out of control. When this happens, it will lead to redundancies, security risks, and wasted resources.

Soaring Costs: Unmanaged SaaS subscriptions will result in hefty costs due to overlapping licenses, underused tools, and lack of negotiating power. Efficient management helps you optimize spending and avoid budget overruns.

Security and Compliance Risks: SaaS apps often handle sensitive data, prioritizing security.

Inefficient management leaves you vulnerable to data breaches, compliance violations, and reputational damage. Proper oversight ensures robust security measures and regulatory compliance.

Productivity Drains: Disjointed SaaS tools will always hinder collaboration, create silos, and impede workflows. Efficient management fosters seamless integration, enabling teams to work more productively.

Vendor Management Challenges: Juggling multiple vendors, contracts, and billing cycles is a logistical nightmare. Centralized management helps simplify vendor relationships and contract negotiations.

Manual Tracking: Tracking and managing SaaS subscriptions manually is becoming increasingly difficult as your organization expands.

SaaS management helps automate app provisioning, deprovisioning, and scaling and ensures seamless alignment with your growing SaaS stack.

Lack of Visibility: Without a centralized view, you have limited visibility into SaaS usage, spending, and potential risks. Efficient management provides invaluable analytics and insights.

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Benefits of Efficient SaaS Management in Your Organization

1. Complete Visibility Over Your SaaS Stack

Efficient SaaS management lets you get complete visibility into your entire SaaS stack. With a centralized platform, you will gain invaluable insights and analytics that will help you have a clear view of every aspect of your SaaS portfolio.

You can easily track and monitor usage patterns across all your SaaS applications. This helps you identify underutilized licenses, redundancies, and opportunities for optimization.

Efficient SaaS management will also help you with a comprehensive view of your SaaS spending, enabling you to manage costs proactively.

You can analyze expenditures by department, application, or vendor from there, ensuring accurate budgeting and cost allocation.

You will also gain visibility into potential security risks and compliance violations. This will allow you to take prompt action and mitigate threats.

With complete visibility into SaaS usage, efficient management helps you detect shadow IT. This insight lets you promptly revoke access to unsanctioned apps, preventing security risks and eliminating redundancies within your portfolio.

2. Optimized Costs and Control Over Spend

Efficient SaaS management helps you optimize costs by identifying duplicate, unused apps and consolidating your stack.

First of all, you gain visibility into app usage across your organization, pinpointing ones with overlapping functionalities. This insight helps you rationalize your SaaS portfolio, eliminating redundant tools that drain resources.

Another one is that you can easily detect apps with minimal or no active users, allowing you to cut ties with unnecessary subscriptions.

Continuously monitoring usage patterns prevents accumulating shelfware - unused software that incurs unnecessary expenses.

You can consolidate your SaaS vendors, leveraging enterprise-wide agreements to bundle multiple app subscriptions. This bundling approach often unlocks significant cost savings and simplifies vendor management.

Efficient SaaS management facilitates app rationalization, helping you streamline your stack to align with your evolving business needs. You can retire outdated or non-essential apps, reallocating resources to more strategic investments.

So when you identify duplicates, remove unused apps, consolidate vendors, and rationalize your SaaS stack, you optimize costs and gain control over spending.

3. Streamlined Workflows and Increased Efficiency

Efficient SaaS management helps streamline workflows, automate time-consuming tasks and increase team efficiency.

Instead of manually handling processes like user provisioning and deprovisioning, you can leverage automated workflows within your SaaS management platform.

With just a few clicks, you will grant or revoke access to applications, ensuring the right people have the right tools at the right time.

Procurement and renewals

Procurement and renewal processes also become seamless. You can set up approval workflows for new software purchases. This will ensure compliance and budget oversight.

Renewals are automatically tracked, eliminating the risk of surprise charges or lapses in service.

License management

License management becomes easier. You can easily monitor usage, redistribute underutilized licenses, and scale up or down per your team's evolving needs. This level of automation helps minimize administrative overhead, freeing up time for your IT staff.

Centralized billing and invoice management help consolidate your SaaS expenses into a single platform, simplifying tracking and payments.

No more juggling multiple vendors and due dates; you will get a streamlined process that saves time and reduces errors.

When you embrace automated workflows through efficient SaaS management, you empower your team to work smarter, not harder.

Tedious, repetitive tasks are offloaded, enabling your staff to focus on more strategic, high-impact initiatives that drive innovation and growth for your organization.

4. No More Redundancies

Efficient SaaS management helps eliminate redundancies, ensuring you maximize the return on investment for every application in your stack.

With complete visibility, you will quickly identify underutilized licenses and shelfware—applications gathering virtual dust due to lack of adoption. This insight helps you optimize usage by redistributing licenses or retiring unnecessary tools altogether.

It also helps you gain transparency into functionality overlaps across your SaaS portfolio. This allows you to consolidate apps with similar capabilities, preventing redundant subscriptions that drain your budget.

By rationalizing your stack, you streamline operations and focus your resources on the essential solutions that drive productivity and growth.

Automated workflows and centralized access controls prevent unintentional software sprawl, where teams inadvertently acquire duplicate tools without proper oversight.

This approach helps prevent redundancies, ensuring a lean, efficient SaaS ecosystem tailored to your organization's needs.

5. Data-Driven Decision Making for Continued Optimization

SaaS management apps integrate directly with your SaaS applications. This gives you clear visibility into how they are actually being used across your organization.

The management apps also provide you with detailed data on license utilization, costs, user activity and more for each SaaS application.

This insight helps you to quickly identify underutilized or duplicate licenses that may be wasting money.

You can see which departments or teams are adopting applications well and which may need more training. The integration data shows areas where you can consolidate overlapping tools to streamline costs.

Essentially, these integrations enable you to analyze every aspect of your SaaS usage thoroughly.

With this insight, you will ensure applications are being properly utilized and make informed decisions on renewing, expanding, or discontinuing specific tools based on actual needs.

When you integrate, you can accurately forecast the software you will need in the future and budget precisely instead of reacting to surprise costs.

6. Improved Security and Compliance

Efficient SaaS management is pivotal in improving security and ensuring compliance within your organization. It mitigates risks associated with unauthorized software usage.

Through centralized access controls and approval workflows, you prevent employees from inadvertently subscribing to unsanctioned applications that may compromise your data security posture.

You gain visibility into the specific data types and sensitive information handled by each SaaS application in your stack.

This allows you to implement appropriate security measures, such as multi-factor authentication, data encryption, and strict access policies, to safeguard your organization's sensitive data effectively.

Efficient SaaS management simplifies compliance with data regulations like GDPR, HIPAA, and CCPA. You can easily monitor and audit user access, data flows, and data residency, ensuring adherence to relevant data privacy and protection laws.

Automated workflows streamline processes like deprovisioning. It helps ensure that former employees instantly lose access to sensitive data and applications upon departure.

This approach helps secure your systems from potential data breaches or misuse by revoking permissions quickly, fortifying your organization's overall security posture against internal and external threats.

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Conclusion

Today, businesses are cloud-driven, and efficient SaaS management is a necessity. However, the rapid adoption of SaaS has also introduced new challenges - sprawling subscriptions, redundant tools, and uncontrolled costs.

Efficient SaaS management helps mitigate these issues. From cost optimization and enhanced security to streamlined workflows and data-driven decision-making, centralized SaaS management helps you maximize ROI while minimizing risks.

In an era where agility and innovation are paramount, don't let SaaS sprawl hinder your success. Make efficient SaaS management practices a top priority to harness the full potential of your SaaS portfolio while maintaining control over it.

Take the first step now by booking a demo with CloudEagle's advanced SaaS management platform today.

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Frequently Asked Questions

1. How do you manage a SaaS?

Managing a SaaS involves streamlining operations through automation, controlling costs with license optimization, securing user access and data compliance, and leveraging analytics for strategic decision-making.

2. Is SaaS operation management the same as SaaS management?

No, SaaS operation management and SaaS management are not the same. SaaS operation management focuses on running and maintaining the SaaS product itself, while SaaS management refers to managing the usage, costs, security, and governance of SaaS applications within an organization.-

3. What does SaaS management mean?

SaaS management is the centralized oversight, control, and optimization of an organization's cloud software subscriptions and usage across multiple SaaS applications.

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