IT Procurement's SaaS Preparedness Checklist

The shift in the way SaaS is purchased and utilized across organizations is accelerating and will continue to do so as organizations introduce new innovations and revised internal purchasing processes.Due to the sheer amount of SaaS being added, removed, or changed each year—even each week in many cases—those organizations that are prepared to handle their SaaS applications and cloud subscriptions will be able to scale and remain proactive in the coming years.In a recent press release, Gartner states, “More than $1 trillion in IT spending will be directly or indirectly affected by the shift to cloud during the next five years...This will make cloud computing one of the most disruptive forces of IT spending since the early days of the digital age.”For IT Procurement teams, it’s critical to take the necessary steps in order to become proactive with SaaS. How prepared is your organization to handle this shift? Take a few minutes and consider the following questions to determine if your organization has a proactive SaaS mindset, or a reactive one:

• Do you have a process/system for managing and optimizing your cloud-based IT licensing?
• Do you have visibility into all applications renewing in the next 90/180/365 days?
• Do you know how many licenses you have purchased & provisioned for each application? Do you know how many are actually being used?
• Do your line of business owners have visibility into other applications in use across the organization?
• Do you know how your employees feel about each application?

If you answered, “No” to any of the questions above, now is the time to implement a system and process for SaaS management. By doing so, you will be able to drive strategic organizational conversations around spend, utilization, and sentiment across all cloud applications.At Zylo, we believe cloud licensing can make IT Procurement strategic.