SaaS Ops Management: Why Should You Prioritize It?

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Are you unhappy with your organization's decreased operational efficiency and productivity? If yes, it might be due to a lack of a centralized SaaS environment.

In most organizations, employees prefer using different SaaS tools for flexibility, user-friendly interfaces, and widespread accessibility. However, with so many SaaS tools available, it's easy for things to become disorganized.

If you don't manage your SaaS environment effectively, you might face these consequences:

• Inadequate SaaS management could lead to a slowdown or even a crash in operational efficiency, thereby hindering your team's productivity.
• Inadequate SaaS management leads to increased spending from shadow IT, the proliferation of duplicate and underutilized applications, and the waste of resources.
• Without clear guidelines and support, your team may become confused about how to use the software, resulting in frustration and wasted time.
• Data security and compliance risks from third-party apps, potentially exposing sensitive information to breaches and regulatory violations.
• Misplaced contracts and auto-renewals will lead to contract disputes, missed opportunities for negotiation, and cost optimization.
• You might end up paying for software you don't need or using it inefficiently, which can waste many IT resources.

So, how can you streamline the SaaS management in your organization? The best way is to enable SaaS ops management practices to structure and optimize the use of these SaaS tools effectively.

If you're unsure why managing your organization's SaaS operations is crucial and how to do so effectively, continue this article.

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What is SaaS ops management?

SaaS ops management is the process of overseeing the procurement, utilization, provisioning, and optimization of SaaS apps within an organization.

It ensures the effective functioning of SaaS portfolios to increase user productivity, minimize costs, and enhance security.

Effective SaaS ops management includes centralizing SaaS management, optimizing usage and costs, streamlining workflows, and ensuring security and compliance.

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The costly consequence of neglecting SaaS ops management

If you neglect SaaS ops management, it will lead to:

1. Increased Costs: Without proper management, your organization will incur unnecessary costs due to unused licenses, inefficient resource allocation, and lack of oversight on subscription costs.

2. Security Vulnerabilities: It can leave organizations vulnerable to security breaches and data leaks. These loopholes become the reason for potential financial losses, reputational damage, and legal liabilities.

3. Operational Inefficiencies: Inadequate SaaS ops management results in operational inefficiencies, such as manual errors, slow performance, and downtime. This inefficiency hinders productivity and impacts business operations.

4. Missed Opportunities: Failure to effectively manage SaaS operations results in missed opportunities for innovation, growth, competitive advantage, and cost optimization, which is crucial for any organization.

You might miss integrating new features or updates for your organization's SaaS stack, which could improve services or streamline processes.

5. Regulatory Consequences: If you don't follow the rules for protecting data because you're not managing SaaS operations properly, you could get fined or face legal trouble. It can also harm your reputation and make customers and others trust you less.

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What is the need for SaaS ops management?

SaaS ops management is essential for a few key reasons. First, it automates the SaaS app management process by eliminating the manual process to manage different SaaS apps using spreadsheets. If your IT teams manually handle this process, it's time-consuming and prone to errors.

Secondly, proper SaaS ops management saves money by ensuring resources are used efficiently, and nothing goes to waste. It means that organizations can make the most of what they spend on SaaS.

Additionally, SaaS ops management streamlines tasks, enhances efficiency, supports growth with scalable solutions, and ensures compliance with data protection laws and industry standards. This process is essential for organizations that aim to maximize SaaS benefits while maintaining safety and efficiency.

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What are the challenges of SaaS ops management?

1. Complexity: Managing many SaaS apps simultaneously is hard because each app works differently. They have unique functionality, rules, and ways of connecting with other apps. You must create an advanced business-aligned plan for the IT team to handle them all.

2. Cost Control: Keeping track of spending on SaaS apps can be tricky. Sometimes, you might end up paying for things your organizations don't even use or need. With good SaaS ops management, you can use resources wisely, get better deals, and avoid wasting money.

3. Security Risks: SaaS apps handle critical data like customer information and financial transactions. If not managed properly, it can pose risks. You must ensure the data is secure from hackers and comply with regulations to maintain safety.

4. Operational Efficiency: Making everything run smoothly is tough without good SaaS management. It's like keeping all the moving parts of a machine working together. Having a clear plan and seeing how things are going helps a lot.

5. Scalability: When a business grows, it needs software to grow with it. SaaS management makes adding more software licenses or users easy without causing problems. It keeps everything flexible so the business can keep growing smoothly.

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What are the 4 key elements of SaaS ops management?

1. Provisioning and Deployment: Effective SaaS ops management involves setting up new software and working with what's already there. It includes making accounts for users, setting up how things should work, and making sure it all fits together.

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2. Monitoring and Performance Optimization: It is crucial to keep an eye on how well the software is doing and make it work better. It means checking how long it's up and running, how fast it responds, and how much it uses resources like memory and space. Making sure everything runs smoothly and doesn't waste anything.

3. Security and Compliance: Ensure the software is safe and adheres to your organization's policies. It involves ensuring only the right people can use it, keeping data secret with passwords and encryption, and checking regularly for any problems.

4. Cost Management and Optimization: Keeping track of how much resources are spent on the SaaS and ensuring it's worth it. It means watching spending, ensuring nothing is wasted, and talking with the people who make the software to get the best deal.

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What are the key strategies for effective SaaS ops Management?

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Some specific strategies for effective SaaS Ops Management include:

1. Centralized Visibility and Assessment: The first strategy for effective SaaS ops management for your organization is to gain complete visibility into your SaaS stack. You cannot rely on spreadsheets anymore; you must adopt an automated SaaS management platform to get a bird's-eye view of your SaaS stack.

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When you integrate the SMP with your organization's existing SSO, HRIS, or financial systems, the tool extracts the app usage data and provides complete SaaS visibility.

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You can monitor shadow IT and configure alerts to prevent unsanctioned purchases in early stages. Proactive shadow IT prevention will help you avoid the risk of SaaS sprawl.

2. Usage Monitoring and Optimization: If you have real-time SaaS usage data, you can easily optimize licenses based on actual needs. By analyzing usage data, you can identify opportunities to reduce costs, improve efficiency, and allocate resources effectively.

3. Application Rationalization: Rationalizing your organization's tech stack is a good practice to undertake periodically to keep your SaaS applications rationalized. Application rationalization involves evaluating and improving an organization's software applications.

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It's like cleaning out your SaaS stack to keep only what you need and eliminate what you don't. This helps save money, reduce complexity, and make things run smoothly.

4. License Harvesting: To avoid wasting all the SaaS licenses in your organization, the best practice is to opt for license harvesting. It helps you identify all the unused licenses and the underutilized ones.

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Thus, you can automate the process and reclaim the unused licenses, reallocating them to others when needed. By reclaiming unused licenses and putting them to good use, you save money and ensure you're not paying for things you don't need.

5. Enabling Security and Compliance: You should implement robust security measures and ensure compliance with data protection regulations for effective SaaS Ops Management.

It includes enforcing access controls, encrypting sensitive data, and conducting regular security audits to mitigate risks and protect against unauthorized access or data breaches.

6. Cost Management: To effectively manage SaaS costs, optimize usage, and negotiate pricing with vendors, it's crucial to eliminate unused licenses, consolidate subscriptions, and explore alternative pricing plans.

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Cost optimization begins with smart negotiations. You must employ the right negotiation strategies to prevent overspending. Leverage price benchmarks to ensure you pay the right price for the applications.

7. Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity: To uphold business continuity, create contingency plans to address SaaS application outages or service disruptions. You can implement data backup and recovery strategies to ensure critical application data can be restored quickly during a disaster.

8. Employee Training and Awareness: You must train and raise employee awareness about SaaS best practices, security protocols, and compliance requirements. Educating employees helps reduce security risks, maximize productivity, and ensure proper usage of SaaS applications.

7. Using a Centralized Management Platform: Leveraging a centralized SaaS management platform streamlines SaaS Ops Management processes by providing a single dashboard for monitoring usage, managing costs, and enforcing security policies.

The platform extracts app usage data when integrated with your organization's existing SSO, HRIS, or financial systems, providing complete SaaS visibility.

Additionally, these tools facilitate better collaboration across teams. With centralized management enabled, administrative tasks are simplified, improving efficiency in managing SaaS applications.

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Benefits of SaaS ops management

Cost Savings: Effective SaaS ops management will enable you to identify duplicate, redundant, and free apps in your system. You can even dive deeper into individual app usage, identify unused licenses, and optimize them. You can also effectively track renewals and renew your contract on time, leading to significant savings.

Stronger Security: With SaaS ops management, you can keep your business's data safe from hackers and other cyber threats. It does this by setting up strong passwords, ensuring only the right people can access your data, and regularly checking for any problems.

Work Faster: SaaS ops management streamlines your team's most used workflow and saves valuable time. It automates repetitive tasks like user provisioning, deprovisioning, procurement, renewals, and license harvesting. Automating these repetitive tasks with workflows ensures that teams complete their tasks faster.

Grow Easily: You can add more software or users as your business grows. It can quickly set up accounts for new employees and add them to the right software tools. Plus, it helps you choose new software that fits your business needs and integrates smoothly with your existing tools.

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CloudEagle - A comprehensive SaaS ops management platform

CloudEagle, an advanced SaaS management and procurement platform, can be your go-to solution for optimizing your organization's SaaS ops management.

With its advanced features and automated workflows, you can streamline and centralize your organization's SaaS management and take complete control of your SaaS stack.

Complete SaaS Discovery: If your company doesn't track all its software applications, your IT team can struggle to manage their app data properly. You can use CloudEagle to ensure seamless productivity for your IT and finance teams.

It can integrate with your internal systems (SSO, HRIS, and finance systems) and applications through direct API connectors and provide a bird's eye view of your SaaS stack. Also, you can access every detail about SaaS apps usage, spending, vendors, users, and licenses from a single dashboard.

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This tool provides complete visibility into your organization’s SaaS usage, apps, licenses, contracts, spend, and vendors. By analyzing this data, you can make better decisions, such as determining which SaaS apps are necessary and which need to be optimized, consolidated, right-sized, or abandoned.

For example:

• If multiple applications are used for the same task, you can decide to eliminate redundant apps (Shadow IT).
• If an application hasn't been logged into for a long time, you can alert the app owners and revoke or confirm access based on your requirements.
• Additionally, if there are SaaS applications that are low in usage, you can decide to revoke their licenses.

Cost optimization: By seamlessly integrating CloudEagle with your internal systems, you gain insights into SaaS usage and spending. It provides precise spending breakdowns across departments and accurate user activity analyses.

CloudEagle continuously monitors cloud costs in real-time, pinpointing areas for optimization without disruptions. With this data, you can make informed decisions to achieve cost efficiency.

It also tracks renewals to ensure contracts are renewed on time. Using CloudEagle you can identify duplicate, free, and redundant apps, and decide whether to keep, retire, or renew apps licenses based on their effectiveness and relevance.

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Also, you can set proactive alerts to get reminders before the SaaS contract renewal date, ensuring you don't miss out on important deadlines.

Assisted Buying: If your team doesn't have the time and bandwidth to do negotiations, use CloudEagle's assisted buying services.

CloudEagle's team of SaaS experts will thoroughly analyze your requirements, conduct extensive market research, and utilize pricing benchmarks to facilitate successful negotiations.

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Further, you can use CloudEagle's automated workflows to simplify your SaaS procurement process. You can automatically assign tasks, notify stakeholders through Slack, Email, and in-app notifications, and ensure timely approvals.

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Also, you can access the "Slack for Procurement" bot that promotes collaboration and streamlines the entire procurement process. With immediate team connectivity, communication accelerates, reducing coordination time by up to 25%. Slackbot will speed up workflows, slash turnaround times, and improve SaaS procurement efficiency.

License management: CloudEagle's direct integrations will enable you to see purchased licenses for each application and their individual usage.

Instances of underutilization can impact your ROI. Fortunately, you can leverage CloudEagle's license reclamation workflows to deprovision users for low usage and harvest those licenses.

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With CloudEagle's license harvesting workflows, you can ensure that the purchase licenses are optimized and utilized properly.

User provisioning and deprovisioing: Use CloudEagle's auto-provisioning workflows to automate user provisioning within your organization.

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These workflows will enable your IT team to reduce reliance on time-consuming manual processes and save over 500 hours annually.

With 300+ integrations, you can create rules for provisioning, modifications, and deprovisioning, streamlining user lifecycle management. CloudEagle will seamlessly integrate with your SSO and HRIS, consolidating all user data into a centralized location.

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You can optimize the SaaS access granting process using CloudEagle. CloudEagle not only helps you provide SaaS access during employee onboarding, but also lets you create one-click deprovisioning workflows for revoking SaaS access from employees during offboarding.

Check out a testimonial where a company found CloudEagle effective in the employee onboarding and offboarding processes.

Alice Park from Remediant spent most of her time manually visiting each application to provision and deprovision users. However, after integrating with their HRIS systems, CloudEagle organized all users in one location.

This integration allowed Alice Park to streamline provisioning and deprovisioning processes, saving her valuable time.

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Conclusion

You must prioritize SaaS ops management for the success and security of your organization. You can effectively manage your organization's SaaS operations, mitigate risks, streamline processes, and optimize resource utilization.

But, if you neglect to prioritize SaaS ops management, it will result in increased costs, security vulnerabilities, operational inefficiencies, and missed opportunities for growth.

To make your organization's SaaS ops management seamless, book a demo with CloudEagle, and understand the best practices to fit your SaaS operations management needs.

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