The Complete Guide to SaaS Operations (+ Strategies and Tools)

Many organizations have begun to recognize SaaS Management as a driver of cost savings and risk mitigation. However, the obstacle to driving business outcomes lies in execution. The answer? SaaS Operations (SaaS Ops).

Today, your organization likely runs on hundreds of SaaS applications. While critical for daily operations, your stack is riddled with ballooning costs, overlapping tools, and significant security risks. 

This is more than a minor inconvenience. It’s a multi-million dollar business problem that creates real, tangible risk for your organization. And it can wreak havoc on budgets and anticipated costs. 

Add to this your organization’s political landscape, competing priorities, and no clear ownership of the technology strategy. That’s a confusing mess that’s difficult to untangle without a dedicated SaaS Operations professional.

What Is SaaS Operations?

SaaS Operations—or SaaS operations management—is responsible for building and running the day-to-day processes that turn SaaS Management from ad hoc tasks into a disciplined, repeatable, proactive practice. It serves as the bridge between IT, Procurement, Software Asset Management, and Security, ensuring your organization achieves the business outcomes of SaaS Management: inventory visibility, cost savings and avoidance, and compliance.

“Driving SaaS program value requires ownership and accountability. SaaS Operations delivers the structure and processes that make it possible.”

— Cory Wheeler, Co-founder and Chief Customer Officer, Zylo

SaaS Ops vs Traditional IT Ops

Traditional IT Operations (IT Ops) focuses on the day-to-day management of an organization’s on-premises hardware, software, and network infrastructure.

Key responsibilities include:

• Infrastructure Management: Maintaining servers, networks, and data centers.
• Software Deployment & Maintenance: Installing, patching, and upgrading applications.
• Help Desk Support: Resolving technical issues for end-users.
• Security & Compliance: Implementing security measures and ensuring regulatory adherence for on-premises assets.

While traditional IT Ops manages the entire IT environment, SaaS Ops specifically focuses on optimizing and governing cloud-based software applications. SaaS Ops differs in its scope, emphasizing financial optimization, license management, and vendor relationship management for SaaS applications, rather than the physical infrastructure.

What Does SaaS Operations Do?

Day to day, a SaaS Ops professional or team helps:

• Maintain a SaaS system of record, ensuring every contract, owner, and usage data point is captured in a central source of truth.
• Optimize licenses and spend, reclaiming unused licenses and preventing waste so spend stays aligned with actual needs.
• Manage renewals proactively, using structured preparation and data-driven recommendations to reduce surprises and maximize savings opportunities.
• Ensure compliance and governance, identifying shadow IT, enforcing purchasing policies, and reducing risk exposures.
• Enable stakeholders, providing cross-functional leaders with the insights they need to make informed decisions.

Why SaaS Operations Matters

SaaS is now the second-largest operating expense for most organizations. Large enterprises manage 519-812 applications and waste $127.3M on unused licenses annually, creating mounting costs and unaddressed risk. With SaaS Ops in place, SaaS Management provides structure, accountability, and measurable value to the business.

Most organizations understand the why of SaaS Management—cost savings, risk reduction, and better governance. What’s missing is the how. Teams see the opportunities but lack the time, expertise, and structure to act on them consistently.

A SaaS Ops professional fills that gap by providing that operational “how.” They connect processes, data, and stakeholders, and they operationalize the work so SaaS Management actually scales.

Without this role, SaaS Management stays fragmented, with different teams handling parts but no one driving the whole.

The Core Components of SaaS Operations

SaaS Ops encompasses the following components:

• Centralized data and dashboards
• Application ownership and prioritization
• New application management
• Application offboarding
• Shadow IT identification and remediation
• Structured renewal process
• License reclamation workflows
• Continuous value tracking

Centralized Data & Dashboards

Enabling visibility across a decentralized SaaS Management team requires centralized data. SaaS Operations ensures that contracts, ownership, and utilization data are ingested into a continuously updated SaaS system of record, with real-time dashboards providing a single source of truth for:

• Application inventory
• Savings
• Renewals
• Compliance posture
• Key risks

Application Ownership & Prioritization

Establishing clear ownership for each SaaS application is paramount. It ensures accountability and empowers individuals to make informed decisions regarding their assigned tools. SaaS Ops ensures:

• Clear ownership is assigned
• App Owners are equipped with the insights they need
• Upcoming renewals are prioritized by spend and importance to focus on the highest-impact applications

New Application Management

When new applications enter your environment, it’s SaaS Ops’ responsibility to know about them and onboard them into your system of record. They set up automated alerts to identify new applications as they appear, while streamlined onboarding captures app owner and contract data from the start.

Application Offboarding

Applications selected for deprecation must be offboarded. SaaS Ops professionals monitor cancellations and complete offboarding to maintain clean data and surface license reclamation opportunities.

Shadow IT Identification & Remediation

Shadow IT happens when you least expect it, so a dedicated SaaS Ops role is essential to identify and remediate it. They ensure all SaaS purchases are reviewed against policy, with out-of-compliance applications flagged and addressed through consolidation, offboarding, or formalization.

Structured Renewal Process

SaaS Operations is critical to proactively manage SaaS renewals. Leading SaaS Ops professionals adopt a 120/90/60/30-day workflow. They build the process with automated renewal alerts to ensure every renewal is prepared with license reclamation, utilization analysis, and fair pricing assessments.

License Reclamation Workflows

License waste is a ripe opportunity for optimization. It’s imperative for SaaS Ops to identify inactive licenses and ensure they are reclaimed through ongoing workflows. This waste reduction should occur regularly and, most importantly, before renewal.

Continuous Value Tracking

While all the previous components are essential to SaaS Ops, the most important one is giving your team clear visibility into value and financial accountability. SaaS Ops ensures that all savings and avoided costs are documented—which is made easy with tools like Zylo’s Savings Center.

Common Challenges in SaaS Operations

Without SaaS operations management, SaaS Management can remain fragmented:

• Poor inventory visibility
• Renewals sneak up without preparation
• Inactive licenses go unnoticed
• SaaS sprawl grows unhindered
• Shadow IT proliferates
• No single team owns the processes
• Manual processes create inefficiencies

Poor Inventory Visibility

Organizations often underestimate the number of applications in their inventory by nearly 2X, according to our data. Once they have that inventory, it’s challenging to keep the system of record up to date without a dedicated SaaS Ops role. This results in:

• New and existing applications aren’t enriched with owner and contract details
• Usage data isn’t connected
• Canceled apps aren’t offboarded

Renewals Sneak Up without Preparation

Our data shows that the average organization experiences 247 renewals annually—or one per business day. Without SaaS Ops, renewals catch Procurement unprepared, resulting in:

• Contracts automatically renewing
• Apps renewed without evaluating license needs or consolidation opportunities
• Higher costs
• Rushed or uninformed vendor negotiations

Inactive Licenses Go Unnoticed

According to the 2025 SaaS Management Index, an average of 53% of licenses are not used in a given month. Each year, that leads to millions in wasted spending. A SaaS Operations professional ensures licenses are regularly monitored and rightsized to prevent overages, reduce waste, and minimize risk.

SaaS Sprawl Grows Unhindered

For organizations not actively managing SaaS, their portfolios could grow as much as 33% annually. This results in greater financial risk and broader security surface areas. Regular monitoring and strategic optimization can combat this—but is most effective when SaaS Ops is involved and orchestrating this initiative.

Shadow IT Proliferates

With 45% of applications considered shadow IT, according to our 2025 data, a dedicated role is required to monitor and eliminate it. Otherwise, it continues to evade detection, increasing spending and creating compliance gaps and security risks.

No Single Team Owns the Processes

SaaS Management requires collaboration from IT, software asset management, procurement, and FinOps. But when everyone has a hand in it, there’s uncertainty on who actually owns the processes. The biggest risk here is that execution falters and the program stalls.

Manual Processes Create Inefficiencies

Manual SaaS Management with insufficient tools, reliant on disconnected spreadsheets and ad hoc communication, creates inefficiencies. This makes accurate inventory, usage tracking, and proactive renewal management nearly impossible, leading to:

• Increased operational burden
• Missed savings
• Higher security and compliance risks

How to Build a Successful SaaS Operations Strategy

A successful SaaS operations strategy ensures cost efficiency, risk reduction, and employee productivity. The four essential components are:

• Centralize data visibility
• Automate processes
• Prioritize applications
• Define governance guardrails

Centralize Data Visibility

You can’t manage what you can’t see. The first step in SaaS operations is centralizing visibility of all your apps, spend, usage, and contracts. To do that:

• Build a centralized SaaS system of record via a SaaS Management Platform (SMP)
• Track ownership, spend, usage, and risk
• Identify redundant or unknown applications
• Share insights across IT, procurement, and finance

Centralizing this data:

• Prevents blind spots that drive waste and risk
• Enables data-driven decision making
• Remove silos that hinder collaboration across teams

Automate Processes: License Workflows and Proactive Alerts

Automation reduces waste, enforces compliance, and prevents costly surprises. SaaS Ops should establish automations for:

• License workflows to reclaim unused or inactive licenses
• Alerts for renewal milestones and usage thresholds
• Notifications for new app detection and shadow IT
• Flags for unowned apps or apps tied to former employees

When these processes are on autopilot, you can:

• Ensure licenses are right-sized in real time
• Stay proactive about renewals and usage anomalies
• Remove repetitive tasks
• Reduce human error
• Empower IT and Procurement to focus on higher-value, strategic work

Prioritize Applications

Focus resources on the applications with the greatest impact to maximize early wins. At Zylo, we recommend prioritizing your applications into tiers.

• Tier 1: Core, enterprise-wide apps (e.g., Salesforce, Microsoft 365)
• Tier 2: Large departmental tools integrated with Tier 1 apps
• Tier 3: Long-tail, niche, or employee-purchased apps

Not all applications deserve equal attention. Tiering enables IT and Procurement to address the biggest opportunities first—typically high-cost, high-use tools managed by IT. 

By optimizing license allocation and contract terms for Tier 1 apps, teams generate immediate savings and risk reduction. Once these core apps are under control, organizations can expand efforts to departmental and long-tail tools, ensuring the program scales without overwhelming resources.

Define Governance Guardrails

Governance establishes accountability and ensures SaaS growth is controlled. Include key guardrails, such as:

• Require every app to have an owner and contract
• Enforce SSO integration and access controls
• Set policies for new app requests and renewals
• Conduct regular reviews of usage, spend, and risk

SaaS governance should strike a balance between innovation and control. Employees get the tools they need within a process that protects the business. Strong governance:

• Improves audit readiness
• Ensures regulatory compliance
• Positions IT and Procurement as strategic enablers instead of bottlenecks

SaaS Operations Software & Services

Unlike consultants that lack SaaS focus—or platforms that leave everything up to you—Zylo pairs SaaS-specific technology with embedded experts to deliver measurable business impact.

A Purpose-Built Platform for SaaS Operations

A dedicated SaaS Management Platform like Zylo is essential to implement your SaaS Operations strategy.

• Always-on discovery
• Centralized SaaS system of record
• Usage and license data insights
• Renewal calendar and alerts
• Workflow automation

Need SaaS Ops in Practice? Zylo Can Deliver It

With Zylo’s SaaS Operations Services, our experts handle the day-to-day work for you, while you get the business outcomes.

SaaS Operations: Cost Savings & Avoidance

Cut SaaS waste and build a repeatable savings pipeline.

• Turn renewals into savings
• Eliminate waste across your stack
• Operationalize renewal management
• See every dollar you save

SaaS Operations: Inventory Visibility & Compliance

Get a complete SaaS inventory and stay audit-ready.

• A complete, always-current system of record
• Catch shadow IT before it catches you
• Accurate data across the app lifecycle
• Stay compliant year round

Contact us to see how Zylo can serve as your SaaS Operations partner.

“[Our Services Manager] has been a key member, adding both experience and best practices to take us farther than we would have by ourselves. Six months in, Techstars is consistently saving more money and providing a better experience for our internal teams and financial leadership.” 

— David Cano, Director IT and Security, Techstars

FAQs about SaaS Operations