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The widespread adoption of SaaS applications has helped organizations scale their business operations in a competitive market.
SaaS applications are indeed great tools. But many enterprises do not realize that uncontrolled SaaS adoption is the cause of serious concerns like redundancies, duplicate apps, shadow IT, unauthorized access, security breaches, etc.
IT teams are responsible for averting these issues and optimizing the organization’s SaaS stack. However, it is a tedious manual process; and that’s where the SaaS management platform comes in.
CloudEagle is a popular software for managing SaaS applications - their spend, licenses, vendors, etc. And in this article, we look at why IT teams at popular enterprises choose CloudEagle for effective SaaS management.
Why is managing your SaaS stack necessary?
Organizations use SaaS applications to enhance productivity, collaboration, and efficiency to give them a competitive edge.
However, the rapid proliferation of SaaS tools at the workplace makes it a challenge for IT teams to manage and control them effectively without centralized visibility. These unmanaged SaaS applications are increasingly impacting business growth.
CloudEagle reports revealed that SaaS spend is the third-highest in an organization, after employee and office lease expenditures.
Many organizations realize that the uncontrolled purchase and use of SaaS apps will impact their bottom line. They have started investing in SaaS management platforms like CloudEagle to manage and optimize their applications and related spend.
Here’s the importance of SaaS management:
a) Improved Security: Managing SaaS applications ensures proper access controls, data encryption, and compliance with industry standards, safeguarding sensitive information.
b) Cost Optimization: With a well-managed SaaS stack, enterprises can eliminate redundant or underutilized applications, reducing unnecessary expenses.
c) Streamlined Procurement: Effective SaaS management reveals the requirements and usage patterns of the tools. This data helps procurement teams purchase the right applications based on demand.
Check out why procurement teams are using CloudEagle →
d) Enhanced Productivity: Centralized SaaS management streamlines workflows, simplifies access, and minimizes downtime, leading to increased employee productivity.
5 Reasons Why IT Teams are Choosing CloudEagle
1. Complete Application Visibility
SaaS management isn’t possible without 100% SaaS visibility. CloudEagle has a vast library of 300+ direct out-of-the-box integrations. It can integrate with your:
- SSO systems
- Finance systems
- HRIS systems
- Contract management systems
- User provisioning systems.
These integrations enable CloudEagle to provide complete visibility into your SaaS stack. Here’s what IT and other teams can see after CloudEagle is integrated.
- Total number of applications (including free, risky, and duplicate ones)
- Free and paid apps
- Usage patterns of each application
- Total spend on each vendor and their respective applications
- Total number of users accessing the applications
- Contract data and purchased licenses
- Departments and hierarchy of users and applications
- And many more.
With this comprehensive visibility, IT teams can identify potential issues before they escalate to the next level. By proactively addressing these concerns, IT teams can prevent app downtimes, increase employee productivity, save vendor relationships, and maintain a high level of application availability for users.
Paul Lanzi is one of our customers from Remediant, CloudEagle helped him and his IT team get complete visibility, including usage and user insights, making it easier for his team to manage SaaS applications effectively. Here’s Paul recalling his experience with CloudEagle:
2.Prevent Shadow IT
Shadow IT is the practice of using unauthorized applications within an organization, which can pose significant security and compliance risks and escalate SaaS spend.
If you’re tracking your applications using spreadsheets or other manual methods, you won’t be able to identify shadow IT. This practice is responsible for the rise of risky, free, and duplicate applications within the SaaS stack.
So, how are IT teams preventing shadow IT using CloudEagle?
Well, application visibility is the key. It reveals all the applications used by the teams, including duplicate and free apps. CloudEagle lets you engage with the application's users to understand why they use an unsanctioned application.
Here’s an interesting scenario with one of our customers:
Our customer had an Outplay subscription for email marketing, primarily used by the sales team. Upon onboarding with CloudEagle, our platform revealed that the marketing team was using Lemlist to send emails - this tool wasn’t approved by IT.
Now our customer had two applications with overlapping functionality. Upon understanding the marketing team's requirements, the customer's IT team eliminated Lemlist and purchased more Outplay seats to avoid overlapping functionalities.
IT teams are more proactive as CloudEagle lets you set instant alerts to catch shadow IT before users use it. This has helped IT teams eliminate overlapping applications, and keep their SaaS stack free of risks and unnecessary expenses.
3. Accurate Usage Insights for Asset Management
Apart from system integrations, CloudEagle can directly integrate with applications through an API. This direct integration capability enables CloudEagle to analyze accurate usage data on each application, including the licenses purchased and the users provisioned to the licenses.
Unused or underutilized licenses impact ROI, so IT teams are using CloudEagle to identify how the applications are used and whether the provisioned user is utilizing them effectively.
What happens if the licenses are underutilized?
CloudEagle has workflows to help IT teams deprovision users from unused licenses and reallocate them to users who need them. Or you can eliminate unused licenses during renewal negotiations.
Renewal workflows help IT teams stay ahead of contract renewals and avoid auto-renewal of contracts. They can analyze the usage, deprovision users from unused licenses, and right-size them during renegotiations.
CloudEagle's usage insights empower IT teams to understand user and departmental needs. Comprehensive visibility enhances accountability and prevents unnecessary purchases of products without substantial requirements.
This is what Terry Larock had to say about users purchasing applications just for the sake of a single task. Most unused licenses or applications result from impulsive purchases by the team.
Click here to listen to Terry’s podcast as he shares interesting aspects of procurement. It’ll be useful for you as an IT team to know what’s happening in procurement, so you can make collaborative decisions.
4. Swift Onboarding and Offboarding
Two of the major tasks for IT teams:
1. Ensure that a new joiner has access to all the relevant applications to provide a smooth onboarding experience.
2. Promptly offboard/deprovision users from the application after quitting to prevent unauthorized access.
If done manually, granting and revoking access to applications is a repetitive and cumbersome process. Visiting each application to provision and deprovision users consumes time and hinders team productivity.
CloudEagle streamlines user provisioning and deprovisioning by automating the process. HRIS integrations enable the platform to centralize all users in one location, the user module.
The user’s name, role, department, permission level, and the number of applications he or she can access are all displayed in the user module dashboard.
You can use the auto-provisioning rule in CloudEagle to automatically suggest relevant applications and access levels based on the user’s role and department. This enables IT teams to provision a user with just a click.
Likewise, as CloudEagle organizes all users in one place, all it takes is a click to deprovision users when they quit. But before deprovisioning a user, the tool takes a backup of the data from the application to avoid redundancies.
Challenges of poor user provisioning and deprovisioning
- Without app access, a new user won’t be able to collaborate with the team and complete the task.
- Hinders productivity of new users.
- Unauthorized access from former employees leads to breach of sensitive information.
Follow these best practices to streamline employee onboarding and offboarding. IT teams have saved time and increased productivity by automating the process using CloudEagle.
Alice Park from Remediant used to visit each application to deprovision users after they quit. Now she uses CloudEagle to grant and revoke access with a click.
Alice recalls her success story:
5. Centralized SaaS Management
Instead of using multiple applications for various functions like SaaS management, contract management, onboarding, offboarding etc., CloudEagle helped IT teams consolidate all those functionalities into one platform.
The unified platform provides a centralized approach that streamlines IT operations, reduces the complexity of managing various vendor dashboards, and minimizes the learning curve for IT teams.
With all critical SaaS management tasks in one place, IT teams can focus on core tasks and deliver enhanced value to the organization.
Internal communication with the finance and procurement teams is essential for IT teams to make data-backed purchase decisions.
With comprehensive visibility and usage insights from CloudEagle, IT teams can break communication silos and streamline SaaS managements.
Final Thoughts
As the adoption of SaaS applications increases, enterprises must prioritize the effective management of their SaaS stack to ensure data security, cost optimization, and operational efficiency.
CloudEagle is distinctive as a robust solution, offering complete application visibility, mitigating shadow IT risks, providing accurate usage insights, enabling swift onboarding and offboarding, and delivering centralized SaaS management.
With CloudEagle, businesses can ensure a secure and well-organized SaaS ecosystem.
Take charge of your SaaS stack, streamline your IT operations, and unleash the full potential of your organization's productivity with CloudEagle.
