Beginning your SaaS discovery journey

Traditional IT spend has always required long-term planning. Organizations had to make their best estimates as to what they’d need, not only in the present but in the future, as they provisioned IT infrastructure. Naturally, this became increasingly challenging as the pace of technology accelerated.

Wrong decisions could easily lead to missed opportunities a few years down the road, or overspend on rarely-used features.

However, the birth of the cloud changed all of that forever.

The traditional processes for purchasing IT software are not applicable with the flexible cloud technology stack, especially Software as a Service (SaaS) and the teams leveraging or operating it.

SaaS costs incur as soon as users subscribe to services. However, the historically used approval processes are not always followed and the respective decisions are often made by business units and teams directly.

In addition, the respective business units could have different goals and KPIs which may conflict with commercial interests or the reduction of costs.

Therefore, it is critical for IT teams to maintain overall visibility of SaaS products and applications used within their environment, while ensuring they have agile processes in supporting the business with their needs, with security and speed in mind.

Thankfully, there are ways for organizations to optimize their SaaS spend.  Organizations must take steps to understand their SaaS utilization and spend, then build out a step-by-step roadmap to reduce sources of overspending by managing SaaS discovery. Let’s take a closer look at why many organizations are opting for SaaS discovery, and how you can start building capabilities to manage and optimize SaaS spend.

The SaaS statistics you need to know

SaaS usage has exploded over the last few years. Although many organizations had already adopted SaaS applications to streamline business operations, the need for remote workforce collaboration during 2020’s stay-at-home orders drove many organizations to scale their SaaS adoption rapidly. As departments shifted their operations to the cloud, they increasingly added more applications, often without formal procedures. This increased the number of applications used in the environment and compounded the difficulty of managing them.

This growth won’t slow down in the foreseeable future. In July of 2020, Gartner predicted that companies would continue to adopt SaaS applications, and anticipated the market would grow more than 25 percent over the course of two years (SaaS spend is predicted to be over $117B USD in 2021).

However, as businesses continue to adopt SaaS applications, they are struggling to maintain the visibility required to manage their spend. According to the Flexera 2021 State of Tech Spend Report, less than a quarter of all survey respondents said they’re mature in optimizing software license spend, identifying shadow IT, and identifying wasted IT spend. And as Netskope’s research out, organizations with 500 to 2,000 employees use an average of 690 distinct cloud applications per month, 97% of which are shadow IT applications that business units adopt outside of traditional procurement processes. This means that a significant portion of SaaS applications running within your network could be entirely unaccounted for, and your organization is missing huge opportunities to optimize costs. This contributes to security risks as organizations do not have full visibility into their SaaS spend.

What is SaaS discovery?

SaaS discovery is the process that typically involves utilization of a central platform that has the capability to expand visibility of SaaS spend and/or consumption across the organization, utilizing various integration methods. The SaaS discovery process is crucial to the success of your overall journey as it’s the first step and sets a base for an effective SaaS Management process. After all, if you are unable to gain visibility into your environment, you won’t know how to proceed in terms of cost optimization and risk reduction.

When you work with a partner like SoftwareOne, you will be able to realize several key benefits of SaaS discovery. It is important that your organization is able to receive insights about your consumption and better understand your cloud health across multiple dimensions. An effective SaaS management process will help you eliminate risks that come with Shadow IT. You will also be able to get a better grip on your future spend for budget forecasting. All of these pieces of the puzzle will come together to set you up for the next phase of your SaaS management journey: cost optimization.

Building out your roadmap with SoftwareOne

SaaS discovery sets the foundation for organizations on their journey to cost optimization by helping them gain visibility into the applications and their consumption. In order to kick things off, there are a few next steps your organization should take. These include:

• Discovering key applications in your environment and defining the level of visibility needed
• Defining SaaS application owners to ensure accountability and transparency
• Finding out current purchasing trends
• Identifying SaaS discovery sources like SaaS provider API, Single Sign On (SSO) technology providers, expense system or web monitoring to obtain an accurate inventory of applications used in your environment

At SoftwareOne, we know it is no small feat to build a strong SaaS Management process. That’s why we have developed our SaaS Management service to guide you through every step of the process. SoftwareOne’s SaaS Management service is designed to enable organizations to gain visibility into their SaaS spend by helping them discover, track and optimize their SaaS usage and expenditure, while promoting a culture of accountability across the business.

With SoftwareOne’s SaaS Management offering, organizations can engage in ongoing SaaS discovery activities so that they maintain continuous visibility into their SaaS applications and categorize them for easy reporting.