Application Visibility: How Does CloudEagle.ai Help You Discover SaaS Apps?

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SaaS applications come with various functionalities to serve different purposes in an organization. Its ease of availability, use cases, and flexibility have made businesses purchase them in abundance without a proper SaaS management strategy.

It is reported that an enterprise-sized organization uses 200+ SaaS applications on average. Though users can get their work done quickly using these applications, managing 200+ apps manually can be cumbersome for your IT, finance, and procurement teams.

What your teams need is a SaaS application discovery tool like CloudEagle.ai to provide 100% visibility on your SaaS stack. With app visibility, your team can effectively manage the entire SaaS stack and make informed SaaS management decisions.

So, how can CloudEagle.ai help you discover SaaS apps?

Learn to get into it.

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What is SaaS Application Visibility?

SaaS application visibility is the ability to monitor and manage all SaaS apps used across your organization, including their usage, costs, contracts, and security. It’s essential for IT, finance, and procurement teams to reduce shadow IT, control spend and strengthen security.

A simple Google search will reveal that SaaS visibility is a management activity that reveals all the apps your teams are using to carry out their daily activities. The process of listing or finding those applications is called application discovery.

Getting 100% SaaS visibility is crucial, as it can help finance teams optimize SaaS spending, procurement teams streamline the buying process, and IT teams prevent maverick spending and shadow IT.

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Why Effective SaaS Discovery is Essential for Your Enterprise?

Effective SaaS discovery is essential for enterprises as it uncovers hidden tools, or "shadow IT," and brings clarity to the entire software stack. It enables better cost control, tighter security, and stronger compliance, ultimately helping optimize spending and reduce organizational risk.

As more departments independently subscribe to tools, SaaS visibility becomes fragmented. This is where SaaS discovery tools become critical. They automatically scan your environment, via SSO logs, finance integrations, or browser extensions, to detect and track all applications in use. 

By implementing smart SaaS discovery tools, enterprises can eliminate guesswork and bring shadow IT into the light.

With complete SaaS visibility, IT leaders can proactively manage access, ensure compliance, and optimize spend. This is why an effective SaaS discovery strategy, powered by advanced SaaS discovery tools, is no longer optional for growing organizations; it’s a necessity.

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What are the Causes of Poor SaaS Visibility?

Poor SaaS visibility typically arises from decentralized purchasing, lack of oversight, and weak SaaS discovery tools. These gaps lead to SaaS sprawl and shadow IT, making it difficult to control spending, secure data, and maintain compliance across the organization.

• Decentralized Procurement
  When departments purchase software independently, without involving IT, SaaS discovery becomes nearly impossible. These tools often bypass compliance checks and go unnoticed, forming what’s known as shadow IT.
• Lack of Robust SaaS Discovery Tools
  Many organizations rely on manual methods like spreadsheets or finance reports to track software usage. These outdated approaches don’t provide real-time data or detect unauthorized tools, which limits SaaS visibility.
• No Centralized Integration Across Systems
  Without integrating identity providers, Single Sign On, or expense platforms, organizations miss critical data points that enable accurate SaaS discovery. This results in incomplete or delayed insights into app usage.
• Limited IT Involvement in the SaaS Lifecycle
  When IT is not involved in onboarding, managing, or offboarding SaaS apps, visibility gaps widen. Without oversight and the right SaaS discovery tools, it’s easy for tools to slip through the cracks.
• Lack of Awareness About SaaS Discovery Importance
  Some teams underestimate the importance of real-time SaaS discovery, believing finance or procurement alone can handle it. But without dedicated SaaS discovery tools, these teams often miss out on crucial usage and risk data.

To overcome these challenges, organizations must implement intelligent SaaS discovery tools that offer real-time tracking and centralized SaaS visibility across the entire application landscape.

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What are the Consequences of Poor SaaS Discovery?

When your organization lacks proper SaaS discovery, the ripple effects impact your security, budget, and operational efficiency. Here are the most common consequences of poor SaaS visibility:

• Wasted SaaS Spend
  Without accurate SaaS discovery, you can’t identify duplicate subscriptions, unused tools, or unnecessary auto-renewals. This leads to bloated budgets and financial inefficiencies that could have been avoided with proper SaaS discovery tools.
• Shadow IT Risks
  Apps that aren’t visible to IT can bypass security policies. This creates hidden vulnerabilities where sensitive data may be stored in unsecured or non-compliant tools, undermining your overall SaaS visibility strategy.
• Increased Security Threats
  Without full SaaS discovery, offboarding becomes inconsistent. Former employees might retain access to applications, creating backdoors for data leaks or unauthorized use.
• Compliance Violations
  Poor SaaS visibility makes it hard to ensure all tools meet necessary SaaS compliance standards like GDPR, HIPAA, or SOC 2. Unvetted apps increase the risk of violations, audits, and fines. Strong SaaS compliance requires full visibility and vetted application use.
• Lack of Usage Optimization
  Without proper SaaS discovery tools, you won’t have visibility into usage metrics. This prevents IT or procurement from reallocating underutilized licenses or consolidating vendors, reducing your ability to optimize the SaaS stack.

To prevent these issues, organizations must invest in robust SaaS discovery tools that deliver real-time SaaS visibility and enable proactive management across departments.

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Why Do You Need Application Discovery Tools?

Application discovery tools are key to gaining full visibility into your IT and SaaS environment. They identify and map all applications, their usage, and interdependencies, helping improve security, streamline migrations, support compliance, and boost operational efficiency.

We have talked a lot about SaaS management tools; now, let’s focus on app discovery and why you need tools for it.

Visibility

It gives a bird’s-eye view of your SaaS stack; you can see which departments are using it, provisioned and de-provisioned user details, and activity status.

App usage details

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“We didn’t know how much we were spending and on what. "My team and I had no information on how the licenses were being used, and we didn’t know if we were paying the right price,” says Iffi Wahla, co-founder and CEO of Edge.

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The truth is that businesses cannot optimize SaaS spending if they don’t know how their teams utilize it. SaaS discovery tools provide accurate app usage insights and spending data.

You can use this data for vendor re-negotiation and get the best pricing deals based on your usage.

Single dashboard

You have to log in to every application to retrieve the app usage data. But an app discovery tool will provide a consolidated list of all applications and their insights in one dashboard, thus saving you time.

Underused, hidden, and duplicate apps

Most SaaS wastage occurs due to duplicate apps. Two departments will use various apps to perform the same tasks; you can discover duplicate apps and eliminate them.

Get visibility into the underused and hidden apps, optimize them, or cancel the subscriptions.

Security

SaaS discovery tools can automatically detect if your SaaS applications follow the right security and compliance standards. Customer data is vital; ensure that sensitive information is secured using these tools.

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How Do You Get 100% Application Visibility Into Your SaaS Stack?

To achieve 100% application visibility into your SaaS stack, you need a combination of discovery, tracking, and analysis tools, coupled with a centralized approach to SaaS management. 

This involves identifying all SaaS applications used, understanding their usage, and optimizing their utilization, ultimately leading to better cost management and security.

But it's not the same in most businesses that use 100+ SaaS applications; tracking using spreadsheets will be time-consuming and unscalable.

In these cases, you need the best application discovery tools to integrate with your system and reveal the list of applications and accurate usage and optimization insights.

But this is where things have changed.

Application discovery - The Start of SaaS management

SaaS management is the process of discovering, tracking, managing, controlling, and optimizing the SaaS stack used within a business.

Businesses use SaaS portfolio management apps to keep their SaaS portfolios under control, and SaaS discovery is the table stakes of these apps.

Years before, SaaS app management tools served just two purposes: SaaS app discovery and app usage insights.

Now, the apps have evolved with more detailed functionalities and use cases that can manage the entire SaaS lifecycle; CloudEagle.ai is a prime example. It allows you to do much more than just increase the visibility of your SaaS stack.

Here’s how the lifecycle works:

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It is a continuous process from procurement to compliance, with discoverability being the crux of it.

Why is simply having application discoverability insufficient?

1. Once you know the apps you’re using and how much you’re using them, you must use the data to renegotiate with the vendors to change your pricing plans during renewals. Without a streamlined procurement process, you won’t be able to negotiate the plans.

2. SaaS visibility doesn’t stop shadow IT; you need a streamlined procurement process to limit unverified purchases and keep your spending under control.

3. SaaS contracts hold potential information that you cannot keep in your emails or spreadsheets; you need a centralized inventory to manage it effectively. This can make it easy during re-negotiations and auditing.

4. Once you discover how much you’re spending, you have to get on top of the renewals, and to do that, you need a robust renewal workflow to renew on time.

5. Because visibility will reveal unused, hidden, and duplicate apps, you can quickly eliminate them, but you have to ensure that your apps follow compliance and security guidelines which can be verified using a SaaS management system.

All SMPs started as application discovery tools, but they soon realized that businesses needed more than just discovery for effective SaaS application management. Hence, these tools evolved into the SMPs of today.

CloudEagle.ai is one of the few SaaS application management tools that lets you manage your entire SaaS lifecycle.

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How Does CloudEagle.ai Help You Discover SaaS Apps?

CloudEagle.ai is a comprehensive SaaS management and procurement platform designed for effective SaaS Spend Optimization.

The platform uses five methods to discover SaaS apps,

• SSO and HRIS integration
• Finance integration
• Direct integration
• Browser extension
• Desktop agents

Let’s discuss those in detail,

SSO and HRIS Integration

Single sign-on is an authentication system where you can access multiple platforms and services using the same credentials. It combines various applications' logins into one, so you only need to enter your credentials once, and you’ll be able to access multiple applications.

• Application and its category
• Vendor details
• Provisioned users
• The department that uses it
• Application business owner
• Licenses bought
• And more

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"Now I just log in to CloudEagle.ai to see all the applications used by the team." I can see who is provisioned or not who is accessing the applications and how well are the licenses being utilized," says Paul Lanzi, COO and Co-founder of Remediant.

Here's how CloudEagle.ai provided complete SaaS visibility for Remediant.

Finance Systems Integration

Integrating with your financial systems will reveal app spending data, usage-based spending, and other financial details. CloudEagle.ai has an extensive list of financial system integrations available for easy connection.

To successfully eliminate shadow IT and get complete control over who is purchasing the apps, you need financial system integrations and spending details from CloudEagle.ai’s dashboard, which will show,

• Vendor spend (Year wise and month-wise)
• Billing frequency
• Payment terms
• Payment method
• License per cost
• Discount per license
• Usage model

CloudEagle.ai provides a plethora of spending data by integrating it with your financial system. You can use the data to make necessary spend management decisions to save on SaaS spend.

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Here's the exciting story of how Wefunder saved 50% of spend using CloudEagle.ai.

Direct Integrations

CloudEagle.ai has 600+ out-of-the-box integrations to help you connect with any SaaS applications in your stack using API connectors and SSO, and finance system integrations.

Also, it comes with custom API connectors to integrate with applications that are not on the list.

You can get activity status and usage insights more accurately using direct integration; combine it with SSO and Finance, and you’ll have up-to-date app usage insights and visibility. Leverage this data to renegotiate with the vendors and get the best pricing deals on applications.

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“I’m a big fan of CloudEagle.ai, and I strongly recommend them for any teams looking to get visibility into their SaaS applications, provision users, and financial spend data," says Alice Park from Remediant.

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Alice Park was able to easily provision and deprovision users in a few clicks using CloudEagle.ai.

Browser Extensions

CloudEagle.ai has a browser extension for popular web browsers like Chrome, Safari, and Firefox. Use the extensions to get a 360-degree view of your SaaS stack and what your employees are searching for and logging into.

CloudEagle.ai will not track all the websites that your users access. Options are available to enable and disable tracking, so users can manually choose which websites to track and which not to track.

Desktop Agent

How to track and manage desktop applications?

CloudEagle.ai has desktop agents in place that perform a similar task to browser extensions. It tracks login times and the amount of time spent in the application.

Unverified spending and shadow IT can be significantly eliminated using the desktop agents of CloudEagle.ai.

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‍‍Final Words 

‍As your SaaS stack grows, managing it without visibility leads to shadow IT, compliance risks, and wasted spend. Without proper SaaS discovery, your teams are essentially working in the dark. Real-time visibility isn’t just helpful, it’s foundational to effective SaaS management.

Relying on manual tracking or disconnected tools no longer works in today's fast-paced SaaS environment. You need automated SaaS discovery tools to uncover usage, reduce duplication, and protect sensitive data. Visibility enables smarter decisions across procurement, finance, and IT.

That’s where CloudEagle.ai  comes in. It’s more than a SaaS discovery tool; it’s a full-stack platform offering SSO, finance integrations, browser extensions, and direct app connections to give you 100% SaaS visibility. From discovery to optimization, CloudEagle.ai helps you control your stack and cut unnecessary spending.

Book a free demo with CloudEagle.ai today and optimize SaaS faster.

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Frequently asked questions

1. What is the SaaS discovery process?
   It's the process of identifying and tracking all SaaS applications used across your organization to improve visibility, control shadow IT, and optimize spend.
2. What are SaaS-based tools?
   SaaS-based tools are cloud-hosted software applications delivered via the internet, often on a subscription basis, like Slack, Google Workspace, or Zoom.
3. What is SaaS visibility?
   SaaS visibility means having real-time insight into all the SaaS apps your organization uses, including usage, spending, access, and compliance data.
4. What is the 3 3 2 2 2 rule of SaaS?
   It’s a SaaS budgeting guideline: 3x your spend in tools, 3x in people, 2x in processes, 2x in training, and 2x in governance, for balanced SaaS management.
5. What does SaaS stand for?
   SaaS stands for Software as a Service, a cloud-based delivery model where applications are accessed online without on-premise installations.

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