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We live in uncertain times. For two years, the pandemic turned the world on its head from business to the day-to-day. Now we’re facing a global logistics crisis that experts are scrambling to solve. Not to mention the rising fears of recession and increased economic instability.
That is why businesses must prepare themselves for whatever the future brings next. They need to be future-proof. But how do they go about this daunting task?
In short, the answer is SaaS management.
Proper SaaS management enables an organization to reduce compliance and security risks, optimize and save on SaaS costs, and enable sustainable business growth.
Future Proof Your Business Through SaaS Spend Management
IT and technology spending is typically the 2nd largest expense for an organization, immediately under headcount. This is because the proliferation of SaaS throughout all levels of an organization has caused an excess of redundant and unoptimized applications. Thus, it is a natural place to begin to future-proof business.
A Chance to Optimize Tech Investments
Simply reducing tech investments for the sake of saving costs is a blunt instrument approach to a fragile problem. Rather, and this is where SaaS management shines, businesses should endeavor to maximize their investments.
For example, are you using all of the purchased licenses in your stack? Is everyone with a premium license utilizing the premium features? There may well even be entire applications going unused in your SaaS stack that are impairing your budget.
SaaS management allows you to reduce these costs, and make the most of your current investments. When done correctly, you can identify where your organization wastes SaaS spending, and optimize your SaaS stack so every dollar serves a purpose.
Optimization Means Reinvestment Opportunities
By cutting the dead weight from your SaaS stack, you free those funds for other initiatives.
This is something that Brad Pollard, the former CIO of Tenable, learned early in the Covid-19 pandemic. He shared his insights into how SaaS optimization allows for reinvestment on SaaSMe Unfiltered.
Revisiting the office early in the pandemic, Pollard noticed how many phones were going unused as everyone had gone remote. Rather, they were using Zoom and Slack to communicate. Which prompted a question. How much was being wasted here?
“So, I went into your tool and I was looking at my adoption of my unified communications as a service.” Said Pollard, “I’m looking at what the bill is we’re paying – okay, where can I save money?”
Pollard found that the customer service team was the only team still using the service, but it was still scaled for broader use in the organization. To solve this inefficiency, they moved their voice IP to Zoom Phone at a fraction of the cost.
“We ended up saving a ton of money we could then reallocate to other projects,” said Pollard. “So, we ended up staying flat on budget, not losing any functionality, and then having money to do innovation, do new projects.”
This practical application is but one small real-world example of how SaaS management can future-proof a business.
Future Proof Your Business by Reducing Risk
Many risks stem from an unmanaged SaaS stack. A $10 expense that goes unnoticed today can lead to thousands in costs in the long term. These hidden costs include click-through agreements and shadow applications that have gone unnoticed due to the ease of access to SaaS solutions.
Worse yet, unmonitored SaaS usage in organizations can lead to data security breaches. According to IBM, the cost of a data breach reached an three-year high in 2023 with an average cost of $4.45 million.
Compliance violations can be even more costly. Anthem Inc. faced more than $16 million in penalties and $115 million from class-action lawsuits. All of these costs were due to the largest-ever HIPAA breach.
That is yet another reason why visibility is so important. You cannot take action on what you can’t see, and that means security and compliance risks could be hiding right under your nose.
SaaS management gives you this visibility and enables you to mitigate these risks. Users can do this by creating a governance framework that grants a long-term solution.
Chris Asing, the head of business technology at Redis, shared this with us on SaaSMe Unfiltered on the importance of procedure when balancing risk and security.
“We need a procedure to do the work, and procedure is important because, like anything, I think inconsistency is the cause of a lot of errors.” Said Asing, “We have a focus on consistency, and then we start to focus on automation and efficiency.”
Future Proof Your Business by Enabling Sustainable Business Growth
SaaS management is vital when scaling a business. In the short term, it helps you identify short-term wins like rightsizing and optimizing the SaaS stack.
In the long term, it enables you to establish a recurring and programmatic approach to optimization that will sustain your business in the years to come.
When we talked with Chris Asing about this, he went on to say, “Consistency is key for us… and truly is about scaling a company. How do you do things faster, better, cheaper? Well, first you write it down, and two, you do it consistently. Then you make it better and better over time, you iterate it, and you engineer out the waste and errors.”
Brad Pollard also found this to be the case during his time as the CIO of Tenable. He found this approach allowed them to remain flat on headcount despite growing 5 times in 5 years.
“With growth companies, you can’t grow your IT staff linearly with the rest of the company.” Said Pollard, “You need to do more with less. And the expectation inside those companies is, I have the same things that my biggest competitors have, then you have a fraction of the budget.”
SaaS Management Makes It All Possible
Overall, SaaS management comes with an abundance of future-proofing opportunities for your business. These include optimizing your tech investments, reducing data risk to ensuring long-term scalability.
With Zylo’s management solutions, you can:
- Uncover Shadow IT in your organization
- Ensure the scalability of your tech solutions
- Optimize SaaS applications and licenses
- Plan for SaaS renewals
- Ensure compliance by establishing SaaS governance frameworks.
- And more
Schedule a demo with us today and take a peek at the ways we help you manage and optimize your SaaS and future proof your business.