The issues around managing SaaS in today’s enterprise
The increase in SaaS sales and prevalence of cloud software have increased the need for formalised SaaS management suites.
Published on 18th September 2024
Data released earlier this year by Gartner shows a 19.4% predicted rise in SaaS software spending in 2024. Unlike a generation ago when local software installs made software auditing a relatively easy task for IT teams, SaaS application use in the modern enterprise today can often be described by a range of phrases from ‘unmonitored’ to ‘out of control.’
That’s down to some more descriptions that can be applied to many SaaS: powerful, convenient, and easy to deploy. Conversely, using SaaS at any scale can bring issues to the fore like data compliance and sovereignty, cost, data silos and patchy interoperability.
SaaS management platforms aim to remove many of the negative aspects of the cloud and promote all the positives. Such platforms bring benefits to a range of stakeholders – CFOs love the cost-savings, compliance officers’ work becomes easier, operations professionals benefit from joined-up data, and IT gets a canonical basis for its development and cybersecurity functions.
This article looks at some of the issues encountered in today’s SaaS-using organisation and ways that effective SaaS management systems can help.
SaaS management addresses cost concerns
In every sector, finance professionals must keep track of the various SaaS platforms an organisation uses. Each instance costs money, and after payroll, software is typically high on the list of OPEX items. In addition to software subscriptions that continue despite no one using them, many SaaS instances charge on a per-seat or per-user basis. It’s common for companies to keep paying for licences they no longer use or pay for too many licences.
Basic cost-benefit analysis only becomes effective when the company knows exactly what SaaS it’s paying for and the accruing benefit. Knowledge at this level of detail is important to plan spend, assign costs against projects and ensure financial validation of the organisation’s activities.
SaaS management solutions provide information on extant financial agreements with all the company’s SaaS providers, their expiry dates, renewal costs and the numbers and types of end-users.
Compliance, sovereignty and the law
As companies’ operations become more cloud-based, more data is hosted externally by third parties in the form of SaaS providers. Often, that means companies based thousands of miles away. Yet even purely domestic businesses have to comply with international data governance laws, and among the portfolio of SaaS products in typical daily use, there are few guarantees that the end-user organisation is fully data compliant.
An oft-quoted example is Russian law’s requirement that data on any Russian citizen must be held on Russian soil. While it’s an esoteric example, it shows some of the complexity which has to be navigated when seemingly simple business processes take place in the cloud.
Checks and mandatory audits are increasing in depth and number, pushing up the administrative costs of compliance. The additional issue faced by compliance officers is that SaaS use can be transitory: the data environment changes constantly as companies sign up for, use, discard, extend and limit their use of multiple SaaS products.
Therefore, managing SaaS software platforms is necessary for individual companies to comply with data policies without the massive costs associated with manual tracking of a company’s liabilities in multiple jurisdictions.
Operational improvements
At any organisation’s virtual coal face, staff to take advantage of any available cloud platform to work efficiently. Even in small workgroups, it’s common to find individuals running their own SaaS services that they’ve spun up and are paying for with a company credit card.
On a bigger scale, dedicated cloud platforms manage the combined work of departments, divisions or territories. If company-wide ERPs are not the sole mandated software solution (that is, in the vast majority of organisations), separate applications are used to run HR, marketing, finance, communications and many more. Applications may or may not interface with one another, and issues around data duplication, inefficient work processes (typified by staff cutting and pasting from one platform to another) and data silos create company-wide inefficiencies and bottlenecks.
A modern SaaS management platform helps address the added ‘complexity from convenience’ – the overhead created by staff using the convenience and specialist functions of SaaS platforms. Proper SaaS management helps create an automated, interoperable environment where direct SaaS database access and API management are abstracted away from the end-user. That means less time spent hunting, correcting and copying data by hand and more time on productive work.
Additionally, managing multiple SaaS instances centrally allows the organisation to expand its total computing power according to demand. Identifying and taking advantage of the ability to scale operations should be seamless. Without this ability, business operations are defined by the software it can use rather than software enabling what the business wants to achieve.
IT’s life made easier
SaaS management effectively creates a data lake from interoperating data sources without the overhead of managing brittle APIs. It also allows for direct database access to the company’s data held in discrete instances by the various cloud providers. This creates a simpler resource to address in any application development work and lowers data administration costs.
Additionally, the cybersecurity function has an up-to-date and relevant audit of the cloud attack surface, with detailed information on who and what has access to the various applications used by machines and people. SSO or SASE functionality is easier to deploy and more broad-reaching, as well as presenting granular data on users, groups, and privileges.
Issues like historic SaaS and API access by subcontractors and ex-staff become easier to manage, and overall, management platforms create tighter security and make security policies and password management easier to create and implement.
Conclusions
Despite the different complications that SaaS brings, the overall advantages and effectiveness of cloud software make it a net positive for most businesses. But like every tool, it can be mishandled, and it’s too easy for companies to allow the raft of applications to grow and become an administrative, security, and cost burden.
With impactful SaaS management software, however, organisations can bring their software portfolio into line, ensuring they gain all the benefits while suffering few of the potential downsides.
