We are excited to announce that CloudEagle.ai has been featured as a vendor to watch in KuppingerCole’s 2024 Leadership Compass report. This recognition underscores our innovative approach to SaaS and privileged access management (PAM), enabling enterprises to optimize and govern their SaaS and enhance access governance.
With enterprises spending $1,000 to $3,500 per employee annually on software—adding up to $40 to $100 million annually for large organizations—cost control and secure access are critical priorities.
In 2024, even Microsoft, known for its top-tier security, fell victim to the state-backed Midnight Blizzard group. The attackers exploited compromised credentials and OAuth vulnerabilities, accessing sensitive data and forcing Microsoft to scramble for solutions.
This breach highlights a critical truth: no organization is immune.
CloudEagle.ai’s platform is uniquely designed to tackle these dual challenges. It enables enterprises to manage SaaS apps, prevent sprawl, and secure access to critical resources, preventing companies from facing security consequences.
Our recognition by KuppingerCole reaffirms our commitment to helping organizations achieve both operational efficiency and secure access management.
Managing Privileged Access and SaaS: Critical Challenges for Enterprises
1. Unauthorized Access and Data Breaches
Enterprises face significant risks when unauthorized users gain access to critical systems, exposing sensitive data and compromising business operations, like the Microsoft data breach.
Unauthorized access can lead to data breaches, regulatory non-compliance, financial losses, and reputational damage.
Why does it happen?
- Weak password policies allow attackers to exploit common passwords and brute-force entry into systems.
- Lack of multi-factor authentication (MFA) increases the risk of compromised credentials being used without detection.
- Inadequate monitoring of privileged accounts makes it difficult to detect unauthorized access in time to prevent damage.
- Poor access hygiene—like shared accounts or default passwords—exposes the system to both insider and external threats.
- Poor deprovisioning process resulting in ex-employees having access to sensitive data and internal systems.
2. Overprivileged Access
Many enterprises overprovision access to employees or contractors, granting more permissions than necessary for them to perform their roles. This creates security risks and management overhead.
Over-privileged access makes enterprises vulnerable to insider threats and accidental misuse of critical systems, exposing data to breaches.
Why does it happen?
- Role-based access models are poorly defined, resulting in employees receiving broader permissions than required.
- Temporary or time-based access is not revoked promptly, leaving unused privileges open for exploitation.
- Access creep occurs when employees accumulate permissions over time without proper reviews.
- Lack of enforcement of least privilege policies increases exposure to insider threats and unintentional misuse.
- Poor Just-in-Time access policies.
3. Manual Provisioning and Deprovisioning
IT teams often rely on manual processes to add or remove user access to applications, increasing the risk of errors and delays.
Manual processes are prone to human error, slowing productivity and leaving organizations exposed to security risks from orphaned accounts.
Delays in provisioning prevent new employees from accessing essential tools on their first day, hindering productivity and potentially damaging the organization’s reputation.
Why does it happen?
- The lack of automated workflows means IT teams must manually track access requests and user terminations.
- The high workload on IT teams leads to delays in onboarding new employees or offboarding departing ones.
- Provisioning errors can prevent employees from accessing necessary tools or allow former employees to retain access to critical resources.
- Multiple applications with different access controls complicate the management of user provisioning across platforms.
4. Shadow IT and SaaS Sprawl
Shadow IT occurs when employees use unsanctioned applications without IT approval, leading to cost inefficiencies and security risks.
It creates security gaps and increases spending because the finance team is unaware of the purchase, resulting in contract auto-renewal.
Why does it happen?
- Poor visibility on SaaS applications and lack of automated alerts to flag unauthorized apps enticing the system through SSO.
- Decentralized SaaS purchases happen when individual teams or departments bypass procurement processes.
- Miscommunication between departments leaves many tools unnoticed, leading to redundant licenses.
- Lack of a self-service app catalog where users can choose required tools from the list of sanctioned applications.
Here’s Joshual Peskay, CIO, CISO, and CPO from RoundTable Technologies, sharing his insights on preventing shadow IT in the modern workplace.
5. App Access Reviews and Compliance Challenges
Regular app access reviews are essential for maintaining security and meeting compliance requirements, such as SOC 2 and ISO 27001. However, managing these reviews manually is complex and time-consuming, increasing the risk of compliance failures and over-provisioned access.
Without efficient access reviews, enterprises risk non-compliance, audit failures, and overprivileged access, leaving critical systems exposed to insider threats and security breaches.
Why does it happen?
- Manual reviews require logging into multiple apps, making it difficult to track and audit access effectively.
- Coordinating with different departments to validate permissions creates bottlenecks, leading to delayed reviews.
- Proving deprovisioning actions for audits becomes challenging without centralized tracking.
- Frequent role changes and evolving job responsibilities require constant updates to access permissions.
6. Tracking License Usage and Renewals
Keeping track of license usage and renewal cycles is challenging for enterprises managing hundreds of SaaS applications, leading to overspending and missed savings opportunities.
Enterprises waste money on unused licenses and struggle to track renewal deadlines, leading to auto-renewals and poor contract renegotiations.
Why does it happen?
- Lack of centralized tracking systems causes renewals and usage data to be scattered across spreadsheets and email reminders.
- Insufficient integrations between tools and identity management systems limit insights into SaaS usage.
- Poor integrations also result in enterprises scrambling with surface-level usage data that doesn’t paint the whole picture of how the licenses and features are utilized.
- Auto-renewals go unnoticed, causing enterprises to pay for tools they no longer use.
- Over-provisioned licenses are not reclaimed or reassigned promptly, leading to idle licenses accumulating costs. Lack of license harvesting workflows.
- Multiple vendors with varying renewal terms create confusion, making planning and negotiating contracts harder.
7. Delayed SaaS Operations
Enterprises struggle to keep procurement processes, SaaS renewals, and license optimization on track, often leading to delayed and decentralized purchases, missed renewal deadlines, and redundant licenses.
These delays result in overspending on unused licenses and missed opportunities to optimize software usage.
Why does it happen?
- Lack of automation requires procurement teams to manually manage approvals, slowing down the process and creating bottlenecks.
- Manual tracking of renewals through emails and spreadsheets increases the chance of missed deadlines and unexpected auto-renewals.
- License optimization tasks, such as downgrades and reclamation, are often overlooked without automated workflows, leading to idle licenses and wasted spend.
- Decentralized procurement processes make it hard to align approvals across departments, delaying purchases and renewals.
- High reliance on IT teams for manual app provisioning and deprovisioning adds to operational delays and risks, such as orphaned accounts.
CloudEagle.ai: A Unified Solution for SaaS Management and Access Governance
1. Access Governance
CloudEagle.ai ensures that only authorized users can access critical applications and systems, reducing the risk of unauthorized access and breaches.
1a. No more overprivileged access
With Role-Based Access Management (RBAC), permissions are granted based on predefined roles, minimizing the risk of excessive access.
CloudEagle.ai also supports dynamic access adjustments, adapting permissions as employee roles and responsibilities evolve.
The platform enables timed access for contractors or temporary workers, automatically deactivating access after a set period to secure the ecosystem from unauthorized access.
CloudEagle.ai ensures that the right controls and approvals are always in place before granting access. Pre-defined playbooks enforce approval workflows, assuring that privileged access to critical apps is only granted after all required steps are completed.
Additionally, all approvals and task histories are recorded in ServiceNow or JIRA, maintaining a complete log for compliance and governance.
1b. Automate Provisioning/Deprovisioning
CloudEagle.ai eliminates the need for manual provisioning and deprovisioning, ensuring that employees have timely access to the tools they need while revoking access promptly when it's no longer required.
With automated onboarding workflows, new employees receive access to all essential applications and tools on their first day, enabling them to be productive without delays or bottlenecks.
When employees leave the organization, deprovisioning workflows automatically revoke their access, reducing the risk of orphaned accounts and unauthorized access to sensitive systems.
Here’s Alice Park from Remediant, sharing her success story of how CloudEagle.ai streamlined provisioning and deprovisioning for her team:
1c. Self-service app catalog
CloudEagle.ai’s platform offers a self-service app catalog, allowing employees to easily search for and request access to sanctioned applications they need.
They can also raise access requests directly via Slack or Microsoft Teams, streamlining the process and eliminating the need to submit traditional IT tickets.
Additionally, CloudEagle.ai’s app catalog integrates seamlessly with ServiceNow and JIRA, maintaining a complete record of approval workflows and task history.
1d. Automate App Access Reviews and Ensure Compliance
CloudEagle.ai simplifies access reviews, ensuring seamless compliance with SOC 2, ISO 27001, and other regulatory standards.
Automating the entire access review process eliminates the need for manual intervention, helping organizations stay audit-ready with minimal effort.
The platform generates centralized, audit-ready reports that provide complete visibility into access logs and deprovisioning actions, streamlining audit preparation.
With CloudEagle.ai, enterprises can confidently manage access reviews while maintaining operational efficiency and compliance.
2. SaaS Management
CloudEagle.ai has an industry-leading 500+ integrations with SaaS applications, which enables it to provide complete visibility into your SaaS portfolio, detailed feature-level usage insights, and spending reports to help enterprises optimize, govern, and renew their SaaS from one platform.
2a. Detect and Prevent Shadow IT
Integrations will provide complete visibility over your SaaS ecosystem, helping to minimize the risks associated with shadow IT and SaaS sprawl.
Through real-time SaaS discovery, the platform identifies and tracks unsanctioned applications across departments, ensuring IT teams can quickly address unauthorized usage.
Automated alerts notify teams whenever unauthorized apps are detected, whether through SSO integrations or company credit card purchases, enabling swift action to mitigate the risks of shadow IT.
As discussed earlier, CloudEagle.ai also offers a centralized app catalog. This gives employees access to a pre-approved list of sanctioned tools, reducing the likelihood of unauthorized purchases.
2b. Deeper usage insights, license management and renewals
CloudEagle.ai provides detailed insights into SaaS usage, thanks to its direct API integrations. The platform goes beyond basic login metrics, enabling organizations to track feature-level usage like project hours logged in Asana or the number of campaigns executed through HubSpot.
This advanced telemetry equips teams with the data to optimize licenses and drive cost savings.
With comprehensive license management, CloudEagle.ai fully utilizes SaaS investments by identifying underused tools through license utilization insights.
The platform’s license harvesting workflows automatically reclaim idle licenses and reassign them to active users, ensuring maximum ROI. It also facilitates license downgrades and reallocations, helping enterprises align their SaaS spend with actual usage and eliminate redundancies.
CloudEagle.ai’s AI-powered metadata extraction automatically pulls key details from contracts, creating a comprehensive renewal calendar.
This ensures that procurement teams are always informed and organized, enabling them to manage renewals efficiently and avoid missed opportunities.
To further streamline the process, proactive renewal alerts notify teams 30, 60, and 90 days before deadlines, giving them ample time to analyze usage, compare pricing, and negotiate contracts.
With this proactive approach, organizations can stay ahead of renewals and avoid costly auto-renewals, ensuring smarter decisions and optimized SaaS investments.
CloudEagle.ai integrates seamlessly with Slack, Microsoft Teams, Jira, and ServiceNow, enabling teams to manage renewal approvals and requests directly within their preferred platforms.
This eliminates the need to switch between multiple tools, streamlining the renewal process and making change management more efficient.
2c. Procurement automation
CloudEagle.ai automates procurement workflows to streamline the intake-to-procure process and enhance team visibility. Organizations can efficiently manage purchase requests with no-code workflows and customizable intake request forms.
The platform provides a centralized dashboard where all requests are tracked in real time, giving both requesters and stakeholders full visibility into the status of their submissions.
Automated routing ensures that requests are sent directly to the appropriate stakeholders, accelerating the approval process and eliminating bottlenecks.
It includes customizable forms that adapt based on the type of purchase, ensuring the correct team handles each request.
Stakeholders and requesters receive automated notifications via Slack, Microsoft Teams, or email, keeping everyone aligned and eliminating the need for tedious follow-ups.
By automating approvals and enhancing collaboration, CloudEagle.ai enables organizations to eliminate manual processes, reduce procurement delays, and improve operational efficiency.
CloudEagle.ai’s native Slack integration further simplifies procurement by allowing employees to raise requests, notify stakeholders, and manage approvals directly within Slack, reducing platform switching and improving efficiency.
2d. Assisted buying and Price benchmarking
CloudEagle.ai offers a team of SaaS buying experts to negotiate on your behalf if your team is stretched thin. These experts take care of the heavy lifting of the negotiation process from start to finish, allowing your internal team to focus on strategic vendors and higher-priority tasks.
With AI-powered price benchmarking, CloudEagle.ai eliminates the need to contact peers for vendor pricing information. The platform provides real-time insights into vendor pricing trends, enabling procurement teams to negotiate better deals with data-driven confidence.
Powered by SaaSMap, a database built with AI and machine learning, CloudEagle.ai analyzes over 2B transactions and industry benchmarks to ensure enterprises secure the best possible prices for their software investments.
Acknowledgment from KuppingerCole
The 2024 KuppingerCole Leadership Compass report recognizes CloudEagle.ai as a vendor to watch for a reason—our platform addresses the two most pressing challenges enterprises face today: governing and securing privileged access.
With AI-powered automation, real-time insights, and seamless workflows, CloudEagle.ai enables enterprises to stay ahead of operational inefficiencies and security risks.
We’re proud to offer a solution that makes it easy for organizations to optimize their software stack, manage access securely, and avoid unnecessary expenses.
