5 Alarming Signs It's Time for a SaaS Management Platform

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Despite your business size, managing multiple SaaS applications can quickly become overwhelming. As your organization grows, tracking and managing your SaaS applications can be exhausting.

Without a streamlined and automated approach, you may face inefficiencies, and your business may become vulnerable to increased spend, operational hassles and security risks.

Recognizing the signs that it's time for a SaaS management platform can save your business from these pitfalls. From dealing with too many apps to handle to teams wasting time on repetitive tasks – various red flags indicate your current system isn't keeping up.

However, implementing a SaaS management platform can streamline operations, enhance security, and optimize software investments.

This article will discuss five clear indicators that suggest you need an SMP to maintain control and optimize spending. If any of these signs seem familiar, it’s time to consider a robust SMP.

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TL;DR

• Managing numerous SaaS applications can lead to inefficiencies, security risks, and increased spending without a streamlined system.
• A SaaS management platform (SMP) offers a centralized solution for monitoring and controlling software usage, optimizing costs, and ensuring compliance.
• Shadow IT, unauthorized app usage and lack of visibility can expose your business to potential data breaches and wasted resources.
• An SMP automates provisioning, procurement, and contract renewals, saving time and improving operational efficiency.
• CloudEagle is a comprehensive SMP that simplifies SaaS management, enhances cost optimization, and automates key onboarding and contract management processes.

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What is a SaaS Management Platform?

A SaaS management platform is a comprehensive solution designed to help you optimize your business’s SaaS applications.

But why should you consider an SMP? Your business may use various cloud-based software solutions, and tracking all these subscriptions can become overwhelming.

Without a centralized system, maintaining visibility and control can be challenging, leading to redundancies, wasted resources, and potential security risks.

An SMP provides a centralized dashboard where you can manage all your SaaS applications in one place. This centralized approach helps streamline operations, enhance security, and optimize software investments.

Thanks to SMP’s capabilities in consolidating your software management processes, you can gain visibility into application usage and ensure compliance with security standards.

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Signs It's Time for a SaaS Management Platform

SaaS can bring numerous challenges to your business, especially in terms of management. Thus, recognizing the need for a SaaS management platform can be a game-changer for your business.

Here are five clear signs that indicate it's time for you to implement a SaaS management platform. If any of these scenarios sound familiar, it strongly indicates that your business requires an SMP.

Sign 1 - Too Many Apps to Handle: Feeling Drowned in Subscriptions

Does this scenario sound familiar? Your marketing team depends on CRM, your sales team needs their prospecting tool, and your HR department uses performance management software. Meanwhile, there are countless other SaaS applications scattered across your organization.

If your company is juggling dozens or even hundreds of SaaS applications, it's easy to feel overwhelmed. While each new application can address a specific problem, it may get out of control over time. It often leads to redundant applications, wasted resources, and overlooked security risks.

When you’re spending more time managing your software, it's time to consider SaaS management software. Thanks to SMP’s centralized dashboard, you can view and control all your applications in one place.

You will know your business's applications, who is using them, and how many licenses are being utilized effectively. This will allow you to eliminate duplicate and redundant apps.

In short, an SMP can help you have proper control over your business’s SaaS applications. You can ensure that each application is essential, cost-effective, and aligned with your business objectives.

Sign 2 - Uh Oh, There Might Be Apps You Didn't Know About!

Have you ever heard of shadow IT? It's when employees use unauthorized apps without your knowledge. This can be a major security risk, making managing your IT environment much more challenging.

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Employees might also sign up for free trials or purchase tools with their own money, bypassing the official procurement process. While these shadow IT apps might seem harmless, they pose significant risks.

Using apps outside the authorized list will also severely affect your business. These include data breaches, compliance issues, and increased vulnerability to cyberattacks.

A SaaS management platform can help you tackle this problem effectively. As you will have a granular view of all the SaaS applications, you can bring shadow IT into light. You will also know if any employee is using unauthorized applications.

Thanks to this insight, you can integrate valuable unauthorized apps into your official toolkit or restrict access to those that pose a risk. This will help you ensure that all software meets your security standards and business needs.

Sign 3 - Lack of Visibility and Control into Apps, Spend, Users and Usage

This is another alarming sign that indicates you need a SaaS management platform. You may face problems tracking software usage, spending, and user activities despite your business size.

When you don’t have clear visibility and control over your SaaS applications, you’ll just operate your business without any transparency. Your business will also become vulnerable to inefficiencies and security risks.

With an SMP, you can easily detect these blind spots. You will know which applications are being used, how much they cost you, who's using them, and how they're being utilized. This is undoubtedly a higher transparency level.

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This level of transparency will help you know which applications are essential for your business. Thus, you can eliminate duplicates.

You can identify opportunities to optimize your software budget with detailed spending analysis. This way, you can get the most value from every dollar spent on subscriptions. Eliminating unused licenses and negotiating with vendors will also help you reduce software expenses.

A robust SaaS management platform also includes license reclamation workflows. These workflows allow you to reclaim unused licenses and reassign them to new users, maximizing your return on investment and ensuring that every license is utilized effectively.

Additionally, an SMP provides extensive spend data, allowing you to see department-wise spending and analyze spending reports. This insight can help you forecast budgets more accurately and make strategic decisions about software investments.

Sign 4 - Teams are Spending More Time in Repetitive Tasks

When your teams spend more time completing repetitive tasks, it’s a clear sign that you need to upgrade your SaaS management process. IT, finance, and procurement teams often face such inefficiencies, wasting time and resources.

IT Teams

Your IT staff might be spending countless hours manually provisioning and deprovisioning users. Visiting each app to grant and revoke access and permissions is time-consuming and prone to errors.

This manual process can slow down onboarding and offboarding, impacting productivity and leaving security gaps if access isn't revoked when employees leave.

Finance Teams

Finance departments often struggle to see where the company's money is going. Without a clear understanding, it’s hard to know if software investments are bringing value. Sometimes, hidden costs go unnoticed, making it hard to identify areas for cost-saving.

Procurement Teams

The procurement team may have difficulty tracking approvals and purchases. This leads to poor procurement processes and missed opportunities for bulk buying or negotiating better terms.

Do you want to help your IT, finance, and procurement teams tackle such problems? This is where the SaaS management platform comes into the picture. An effective SMP can automate many of these repetitive tasks.

For example, IT teams can automate user provisioning and deprovisioning to ensure access is granted and revoked efficiently.

Let’s see what Alice Park from Remediant says about CloudEagle’s onboarding and offboarding process.

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The finance teams will get detailed reports on app usage to identify underutilized apps and uncover hidden costs. For example, With our no-code procurement workflows, you can automate the approval request process. This way, you don’t need to waste time raising requests and following up on emails.

Furthermore, you can boost the approval process with CloudEagle’s native integration with Slack. Procurement requests can be created, tracked, and managed entirely within Slack, streamlining the process for users.

Sign 5 - You’re Losing Your Contracts and Are Unable to Find Them

When contracts are stored in shared folders or individual employee inboxes, they can easily get lost in the shuffle. This can lead to serious consequences, such as contract breaches, unwanted auto-renewals, penalties, and even application downtimes.

Without proper contract management, you risk overlooking critical renewal dates and missing compliance requirements, which can harm your business financially and operationally.

A SaaS management platform offers a streamlined solution for contract management. Instead of scattering contracts across various locations, you can store all your agreements in a centralized, easily accessible repository. This ensures that every contract is at your fingertips when you need it.

Moreover, a SaaS management platform can automate the renewal process. With built-in workflows, you can set up reminders for upcoming renewals and approvals.

This approach helps you avoid the pitfalls of auto-renewals that you may no longer need or want and prevents potential penalties for missed deadlines.

CloudEagle - The Right SaaS Management Platform For You

We have discussed how the right SaaS management platform can benefit your business. By now, you might be intrigued to choose the perfect SMP that can help your business grow while saving costs.

If you’re looking for an SMP to help you address the warning signs mentioned above, you should consider CloudEagle. We know the challenges of finding and managing your business’s SaaS tools, and we can simplify the overall SaaS management process.

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We believe that making informed decisions early can help you avoid drastic changes later. So, what’s the benefit? Well, you can save a significant amount of money and time.

Let’s discuss the core features of CloudEagle SaaS management and procurement platform.

Assisted Buying

Sometimes, your team won’t have the time or resources to handle SaaS procurement negotiations.

In such cases, our assisted buying services will greatly benefit your business. We will closely examine your requirements, conduct market research, and use pricing benchmarks.

This way, we can negotiate with your SaaS vendors properly. We will ensure you achieve maximized savings on SaaS negotiations.

Here's how we helped Nowports save 34% on their SaaS spend with expert negotiation assistance, check out their success story.

Application Discovery

We will help you gain full visibility of every app in your Slack stack. Our categorization engine automatically sorts your apps by function if you cannot allocate apps. You can track usage by department, identify duplicate apps, and streamline your subscriptions.

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Are you worried that unauthorized apps are risking company data and increasing costs? CloudEagle’s browser extension detects unauthorized apps that employees sign up for online without IT and Security team approval, preventing shadow purchases on the company credit card.

Contract Management

CloudEagle is capable of bringing all your contracts into a centralized repository. It can also connect with your spreadsheets to track contracts and automate the extraction of renewal-related details.

With the AI metadata extraction feature, CloudEagle can automatically pull out metadata from contracts.

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We provide a proper renewal calendar to ensure that last-minute contract renewals don’t affect your business. Moreover, we can integrate with various contract repositories.

Oyster HR faced challenges in managing their SaaS contracts. They used spreadsheets, and it was not easy to track renewals and renew contracts on time. CloudEagle helped Oyster eliminate spreadsheets with a centralized contract management system and renewal workflows.

Here's their success story of how they streamlined the contract management process using CloudEagle.

Cost Optimization

Sometimes, different departments of your business might purchase the same applications. Our categorization engine can pinpoint the duplicate items and eliminate the redundancies. This way, we will help you save costs.

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CloudEagle is synced with your HRIS, enabling automatic license cancellation upon employee departure. Additionally, you can identify idle licenses and allocate them to incoming staff members.

Procurement Workflows

We will help you get automated workflows to simplify the procurement process. With CloudEagle’s no-code procurement workflows, you can bring all your team members in one place.

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Moreover, our native integration with Slack will help you boost the approval process. Our Slack for Procurement bot can also speed up communication. Lastly, we will ensure you maintain excellent visibility with all the stakeholders.

Onboarding/Offboarding

With CloudEagle, you don’t need to worry about employee provisioning and deprovisioning. We will ensure users get access to relevant applications based on their roles and departments. We will automatically deprovision them when they leave so they cannot access sensitive information.

Furthermore, CloudEagle suggests applications tailored to the employee's department and role, streamlining access-granting processes and thereby enhancing productivity and efficiency.

Renewal Management

Advanced renewal features are a must when choosing a SaaS management platform. CloudEagle sends reminders 90 days before the deadline to ensure you stay ahead of renewals.

This way, you don’t need to worry about application downtime. You will have enough time to analyze and renew your contracts.

You don’t have to worry about chasing stakeholders for renewal approvals. Leverage CloudEagle’s renewal workflows to automate the entire process and bring renewals to the platforms your team already uses. With Jira integration, your team can manage renewals directly from Jira, eliminating the need to visit CloudEagle.

Additionally, manage renewals through Slack by creating a private channel for informed decision-making. This streamlines the renewal process and keeps everything organized in one place.

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Conclusion

Managing multiple SaaS applications can be extremely daunting for your business. In this article, we've identified five key signs that investing in a SaaS management platform is time.

Remember that recognizing these signs is the first step toward streamlining your SaaS management process. It’s time to take action.

Use a SaaS management platform like CloudEagle to regain control over your software subscriptions and optimize costs.

Do you want CloudEagle to manage your SaaS subscriptions effectively? Make sure you schedule a demo and the experts will help you.

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