SaaS Management
Gain total visibility of
your tech stack
Control your SaaS spend with Vertice’s SaaS management platform.
What is SaaS management?
SaaS management is the process of identifying, managing, and governing the software applications that exist within an organization’s technology portfolio.
When software goes unmanaged, it not only puts the business at risk of data breaches and security issues, but it can also lead to a substantial amount of wasted spend as a result of redundant and duplicate SaaS apps, not to mention unused licenses.
Why do businesses need SaaS management?
There’s no denying that cloud-based software applications offer substantial benefits to businesses, including lower costs and greater flexibility to scale. But the accessibility of software has ultimately transformed the way that companies purchase these applications. Or more specifically, the way that employees purchase them.
Ultimately, with increased autonomy comes decentralized purchasing — something that’s causing huge issues for IT, procurement and finance teams alike.
Challenges that include:
- Lack of visibility into the software being used across the organization
- Wasted SaaS spend caused by duplicate, redundant, unused and costly licenses
- Increased security and compliance risks, including shadow IT and data exposure
Vertice’s SaaS management platform equips businesses with the tools they need to regain control over their software portfolio and put an end to wasted spending.
The risks of poor SaaS management
From security breaches to spiraling costs, there are many organizational risks associated with poor SaaS management. Finance, procurement and IT teams have been reckoning with these risks for years, but SaaS solutions can now alleviate threats with greater levels of visibility, efficiency and control.
Below are four of the key risks of poor SaaS management:
- Security — When a new SaaS license goes live, businesses are presented with immediate security risks. Without clear oversight of SaaS operations and integrations, businesses boost the potential for security breaches. Improvements to security in license management are inherent to SaaS management platforms. The ability to identify shadow IT spend, for instance, enables companies to spot where potential security breaches may occur across SaaS services that have limited business-wide visibility.
- Onboarding — GDPR’s introduction has placed a greater emphasis on data protection than ever before, and introducing new employees to SaaS products without sufficient management solutions in place represents a compliance risk. Leveraging the Diligence Insights tool, Vertice’s SaaS management solution includes automated checks for compliance with frameworks such as GDPR, ISO 27001 and SOC2. This process makes employees more aware of compliance risks, protecting sensitive data in the process.
- Offboarding — When employees leave your organization, an appropriate approach to offboarding involves a comprehensive review of the individual’s interaction with SaaS products. Without this, former employees can retain access — often entirely without malice — to confidential information. Poor SaaS management here poses another security risk. Individuals are unlikely to adhere to the same security standards as companies do when it comes to their devices, leaving valuable information more susceptible to malicious online threats. This issue is exacerbated when just one member of an organization has access to a specific SaaS license, thereby limiting the chance that IT, security and compliance teams can identify and resolve the risk.
- Wastage — Most importantly of all, few organizations can afford to waste the money lost to ineffective SaaS management. We estimate that 90% of businesses are overpaying SaaS vendors by 20-30%, while many others are failing to utilize subscription products to their full extent. For startups and SMEs in particular, this waste simply isn’t sustainable. The Vertice SaaS management platform cuts wastage in a number of ways: taking stock of all products in the stack; analyzing product utilization at a granular, department and business-wide level; and notifying users when contracts are up for renewal. Money, and time, can then be better spent elsewhere.
Opportunities yielded by effective SaaS management
SaaS procurement is inextricably tied to your organization’s development: as your company’s ambition and workforce grows, so too does the number of SaaS licenses you require.
In a broad sense, then, opportunity for growth is the benchmark of effective SaaS management, but here’s how it applies to specific areas of license management:
- Automations — The ability for SaaS management platforms to automate processes across your organization’s entire workflow represents significant time and cost savings potential. For instance, a Monday pricing tier includes an automation feature that notifies workers when pieces are ready for review or have progressed to the next stage. When these platforms integrate with one another, automations trigger responses across different teams and departments within your organization. This cuts the time required for approval checks, and employees across respective projects are automatically kept abreast of progress and bottlenecks.
- Integrations — A key part of the SaaS management process is to ensure integrations are not only possible but smooth. The underutilization of software integrations is common among misfiring SaaS spend management projects. To use a simple example: if your company is using both Google Calendar and Slack, then it makes sense to sync the two together, bringing Calendar notifications to the instant messaging tool that employees will tend to check more frequently throughout the day. This simple solution that might mean your team never misses a virtual meeting again.
- Actionable insights — In order to manage SaaS subscriptions effectively, feedback on things such as use cases, usage data and contract renewals must be easy to interpret and action. For instance, the process should involve highlighting scorecard dates well in advance so that teams have time to prepare for SaaS contract negotiations and renewals management. Forecasting key dates like these gives procurement teams a level of insight and control that are invaluable amidst SaaS negotiations.
- Optimized vendor management — Underutilized features of products, or underutilized products on the whole, aren’t working hard enough to contribute to wider efficiencies and profitability. Continuously monitoring usage data and interaction with SaaS products paves the way for highly optimized vendor management, along with more proactive vendor relationship management. By looking closely at how employees interact with subscription services, SaaS management platforms separate the wheat from the chaff. With these insights, procurement teams are equipped with a deeper understanding of the products and features that are most valuable to their company — subscriptions adding true value can be retained or improved, while the rest can be whittled down or retired altogether.
- Efficient spending and cost saving — Automations, clever integrations, and easily digestible data bases all amount to significant cost savings. Comparative analysis of the platforms performing well — along with those falling short — enables companies to quickly identify where improvements can be made. By supporting the buyer and negotiator between vendors and users, high-quality SaaS management platforms can significantly empower procurement teams across the business spectrum. The transactional data available on these platforms reveals the prices organizations pay for their subscriptions, equipping procurement teams with huge amounts of leveraging power during negotiations.
Gain total visibility over your SaaS stack
In order to effectively manage your SaaS portfolio, you need to know which software applications exist within your organization. More specifically, you need to discover and catalog them.
Vertice’s platform gives you complete visibility of all subscriptions, user licenses, owners, contracts, renewals, and costs. This allows you to make informed decisions about future software purchases and renewals, as well as eliminate any shadow IT eating into your budget.
Get total SaaS visibility with Vertice ›
Reduce your SaaS spend
Once you have total oversight of the software in use (or not) across your organization, you can begin to optimize your SaaS stack.
With so much money being wasted on SaaS, not to mention soaring inflation rates, it’s never been more important to look for ways to streamline your portfolio and reduce your spend.
Vertice can help you to analyze the utilization and value of each software application, to ultimately identify whether it should be kept, replaced, retired, or consolidated.
Take control of renewals and negotiate better contracts
Vertice’s automated SaaS management allows you to keep on top of your SaaS renewals.
Manual tracking might work if you’re managing only a handful of software applications, but the average organization uses hundreds of tools. This contributes to what can only be described as a Frankenstack — and it can become incredibly easy to lose oversight, miss renewal dates, and end up paying for both expensive and unwanted subscriptions and licenses.
Ensure your software is secure and compliant
Regulatory legal guidelines safeguard the sensitive personal data belonging to both your customers and your employees. If unvetted applications are being used within your organization to handle this data, you run the risk of breaches that can be costly both financially and for your reputation.
Vertice provides you with the necessary visibility upon your entire software stack, to inspect and verify that every step of the workflow is safe, secure, and regulation-compliant.
This way, you protect your data and your business.
Discover all the software your company utilizes
It can be challenging to locate and accurately document the many tools in use within your organization. Beyond just asking your employees which applications they subscribe to, you’ll need to ensure that you have procedures in place to discover any new software use — sanctioned or unsanctioned — in real-time.
Vertice’s SaaS management platform enables you to uncover these tools, informing decision making and eliminating shadow IT before it puts your business productivity and data security at risk.
Discover all your SaaS usage with Vertice ›
Vertice in action
How we recently helped a technology company save big on their SaaS costs.
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Ready to save 20% or more on SaaS?
Businesses spend over $150 billion annually on SaaS, across more than 15,000 software vendors. The odds are that you’re overpaying by as much as 20% per year for SaaS.
On top of that, buying, renewing, negotiating and managing your company’s SaaS stack are all major headaches.
We’re here to fix that.
