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.