How to Drive Security AND Innovation in the Age of the Subscription Economy

The Ease of Subscribing to Services Creates Subscription Overload

To paint the picture of the challenges enterprise CIOs and CFOs are facing today, I like to relate what we’re doing at Zylo to the benefits and challenges in our personal lives created by the subscription economy. As I think about the dozens, likely more, subscriptions that my family of 3 subscribes to on an annual, monthly or consumption based model, I definitely don’t know if we’re getting the full value from each one or how much we’re spending on an annual basis. I’m sure I don’t remember every subscription we have actually purchased either!

The Enterprise is in an Impossible Position to Drive Security AND Innovation

Unfortunately, Zylo doesn’t solve your personal subscription challenges. Zylo does provide a SaaS Management platform for the enterprise to have one SaaS System of Record for all of the SaaS in an organization, which is far bigger than any of the challenges we have in our personal lives. According to our data, the average organization has one SaaS renewal every business day. Today’s CIO and CFO are in an impossible position to drive security and governance and not stifle innovation.

Balancing SaaS Governance and Productivity is Critical

Both IT and Finance want to be a business partner and drive value into the business while also maintaining a secure environment that is fiscally responsible. It is really difficult to accomplish all of these objectives with lean teams and the speed of technology innovation. The most successful IT and Finance leaders that we work with have struck a balance to offer the right tools without sacrificing security. The IT leaders let users know they can talk openly to IT about the problems they are trying to solve and the services they’d like to use. This open culture, as opposed to the heavy-handedness usually applied under a shadow IT policy, helps IT understand why users need certain tools. It is critical for IT to understand why users bring in a new service and the gap it’s filling to ensure each application is optimizing functionality, not duplicating it, in a safe way.

Using a SaaS for SaaS Platform

While the subscription economy continues to skyrocket in our personal and professional worlds, now is the time for the enterprise to get a handle on SaaS and Cloud applications. In today’s security climate, it is too risky not to know what is being used in your organization. For the first time, it is possible to bring all of the SaaS spend, utilization and feedback data into one platform to drive value into the business. With a real-time SaaS discovery process and a SaaS spend and vendor management platform, IT and Finance can support innovation in the enterprise with confidence that employees are empowered to get their jobs done and the enterprise technology stack is safe and secure.