SaaS Management Best Practices To Follow in 2024

Have you ever felt overwhelmed by the sheer volume of SaaS apps that your business utilizes? Do you find it challenging to maintain visibility and control over your SaaS stack?

As businesses increasingly use more SaaS apps, managing and safeguarding them becomes more challenging. This gets worse with the rise of shadow IT, where employees purchase and use SaaS apps without the knowledge of IT, posing compliance problems and potential security breaches.

Effective management of these cloud-based solutions is crucial for streamlining operations and boosting productivity. In 2024, organizations need solid strategies to optimize SaaS benefits while ensuring security, compliance, and cost-efficiency amidst rapid technological advances and evolving cybersecurity threats.

In this article, we'll walk you through the SaaS management best practices to follow in 2024, providing practical solutions to keep your SaaS stack optimized and under control.

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TL;DR

• Effective SaaS management is essential for optimizing the use, security, and cost of cloud applications, helping organizations streamline operations and enhance productivity in 2024.
• Key best practices include preventing shadow IT, ensuring broader visibility into SaaS portfolios, and implementing good licensing management to maximize software value and minimize risks.
• Monitoring application and license usage can help businesses negotiate better vendor contracts and eliminate redundant or underutilized applications, leading to cost savings.
• Centralizing software assets and using dedicated SaaS management software are crucial for improving visibility, control, and security across the organization’s SaaS stack.
• Tools like CloudEagle provide comprehensive features for app discovery, contract management, automated workflows, and license harvesting to optimize SaaS management and reduce costs effectively.

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What is SaaS management?

SaaS management is a business process that enables organizations to track and manage a business's IT portfolio. Through this process, organizations track and oversee their SaaS stack, which involves onboarding, offboarding, renewals, and purchases. This process ensures organizations optimize SaaS apps' usage, security, performance, and costs.

Effective SaaS management handles tasks such as user access, monitors performance, and ensures compliance with security policies and licensing agreements. This helps businesses maximize the advantages of cloud-based software while reducing risks and expenses.

Organizations that follow effective SaaS management strategies can gain better visibility into their SaaS usage, boost efficiency, minimize human errors, and prevent potential risks associated with unmanaged apps.

SaaS management is now essential for IT, finance, and procurement professionals, as it helps them optimize SaaS use and comply with procurement regulations and guidelines.

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Do businesses need SaaS management?

Building a SaaS-dependent platform necessitates careful consideration of numerous factors, irrespective of whether your business is new, small, or enterprise-scale.

Implementing enterprise SaaS management strategies can provide various advantages to businesses.

1. Prevent shadow IT and purchases

To begin with, it can help minimize shadow IT, which implies apps and products purchased within an organization without the knowledge of the IT, finance, or procurement departments. If not properly handled, shadow IT can pose significant risks, including security vulnerabilities, compliance issues, and increased costs.

Eliminating shadow IT ensures all applications adhere to organizational security standards and compliance requirements. It reduces the risk of data breaches and ensures that resources are utilized efficiently.

A SaaS management platform tracks software usage and spending across the organization, helping to identify unauthorized applications or subscriptions used by employees. This allows the IT department to eliminate these apps and ensure smooth and secure operations.

By monitoring usage patterns and spend, IT departments can proactively integrate shadow IT applications into the approved stack or replace them with sanctioned alternatives.

2. Broader Visibility

SaaS management provides comprehensive visibility into the organization’s SaaS portfolio. This visibility extends to understanding which applications provide a good ROI and where redundancies exist.

By integrating with various systems and directly accessing usage data, SMPs enable IT and procurement teams to analyze the entire SaaS portfolio. They can determine which applications are essential, underutilized, and which may be redundant.

SaaS management apps streamline renewing subscriptions, enabling teams to focus on finding fast solutions to hassles. It can automate repetitive tasks and enhance the productivity of the team.

With insights gained from SaaS management tools, teams can streamline subscription renewals. Automated processes help negotiate better terms with vendors and avoid unnecessary renewals for unused applications.

Automating repetitive tasks such as license renewals and compliance checks frees IT resources to focus on strategic initiatives. It improves team productivity by reducing manual workload and effectively allocating resources.

3. Good licensing management

Third, good license management is vital for scaling SaaS businesses that necessitate managing licenses for multiple versions of the same software. Mismanaged licensing can result in the rise of unused or underutilized licenses that can impact your bottom line.

Effective SaaS license management ensures cost efficiency, compliance, and optimal resource allocation within organizations. It also enhances accountability by tracking which teams or employees can access specific software versions.

SaaS licensing optimization assists in maintaining value by guaranteeing that the number of licenses corresponds to the number of users. To effectively manage and optimize your licenses, you must follow some license management best practices.

• Inventory and auditing: Maintain a comprehensive inventory of all software licenses. Conduct regular audits to track usage and ensure compliance with vendor agreements.
• Usage monitoring: Monitor software usage to identify underutilized licenses. This data-driven approach helps reallocate licenses to teams or individuals who need them most.
• Optimization strategies: Implement license pooling or scalable subscription models to optimize license usage according to organizational needs.
• Automation and integration: Use SaaS management platforms with automation capabilities to track and renew licenses. Integration with IT systems provides real-time insights into usage and expenditure.
• Vendor negotiation: Use usage data during vendor negotiations to secure favorable terms and pricing based on actual usage rather than estimates.

4.‍ Maintains Security and reduces risk

Finally, SaaS management enhances security and mitigates risks by offering insight into the business's SaaS apps. This makes it easier to manage the many nodes in your network and account for every risk element that could jeopardize your business.

This is increasingly important as more businesses migrate from on-premise software to SaaS, raising the risk of data breaches and other cybersecurity events.

IT and procurement managers can use enterprise SaaS management software to ensure that their IT department correctly monitors and controls the security of any app.

IAM helps keep applications secure and manage user permissions effectively. By using IAM features, organizations can enhance app security and better control user access, reducing the risk of data breaches. It helps with:

• Authentication: IAM verifies user identities using single sign-on (SSO) and multi-factor authentication (MFA) to prevent unauthorized access.
• Role-based access control (RBAC): This allows organizations to assign permissions based on user roles, ensuring users only access what they need.
• Audit trails: IAM systems track user activity, helping organizations spot any unauthorized access attempts.
• User provisioning: IAM automates adding and removing access for users, making it easier to manage permissions.

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Enterprise SaaS Management Best Practices in 2024

Your organization's SaaS management should encompass strategic approaches to optimize the utilization, security, and cost-effectiveness of SaaS applications within organizational frameworks.

1. Surface your SaaS stack

Managing SaaS applications can be difficult, especially if you don't have access to your team's applications. As a result, the first step toward effective SaaS management is to get visibility into your SaaS stack by bringing it to light.

Once you get complete visibility of your stack, you must categorize all of the applications used by your team. This will give you a clear picture of which apps are used, who uses them, and how often they are used.

You can also identify the resource gap, communicate with your team members to understand their requirements, and provide them with the needed apps.

This will prevent employees from involving themselves in shadow purchases.

Steps to Surface Your SaaS Stack

• Inventory and categorization: Create a comprehensive list of all SaaS applications used, including details like application name, vendor, department or team using it, and its primary functions.
• Usage analysis: Analyze how often and by whom each SaaS application is accessed. This helps identify critical apps, underutilized ones, and potential redundancies.
• Identifying resource gaps: Identify resource gaps or functionalities that prompt employees to use unauthorized SaaS solutions (shadow IT). Address these gaps by providing suitable applications or integrating existing ones more effectively.
• Communication and requirements gathering: Engage with teams to understand their specific needs and preferences for SaaS applications. Align provided applications with workflows to reduce unauthorized purchases.
• Preventing shadow IT: Maintain visibility and actively manage the SaaS stack to prevent unauthorized software purchases and potential security risks associated with shadow IT.

2. Monitor application and license usage

Monitoring the usage of each app and license is another essential practice. Tracking usage data can help you determine how frequently each app is used, who uses it, and how much it costs the company.

This information can be extremely useful during contract negotiations with vendors because it allows you to negotiate based on real consumption rather than estimates.

Negotiating based on consumption ensures that you only shell out for what you utilize, which can help you save funds and optimize your SaaS stack. Integrations will enable you to analyze user activity and usage insights in real time, helping you to make informed decisions.

3. Identify duplicate and redundant applications

Identifying duplicate and redundant apps is an important step in SaaS management. It allows organizations to save money and minimize potential security threats.

Without centralized visibility and control, employees are prone to buy and use apps without IT's knowledge or consent, resulting in several apps with similar capabilities.

Duplicate and redundant applications can result in the waste of resources, resulting in poor ROI. Furthermore, using different apps with similar functionality can create security lapses and increase redundancies within your SaaS stack.

By identifying each application's usage, businesses can make informed choices about which to delete, resulting in cost savings and improved workflows.

4. Analyze the spending on each application and vendor

Another important practice of enterprise SaaS management is analyzing expenses for each app and vendor. To properly manage SaaS apps, businesses must first evaluate how much they spend on each app.

This analysis can reveal where they've spent the most and where they've spent the least, assisting the team in making the required optimization decisions.

This will help the finance team plan the budget meticulously for the future. And also, it’ll show how much each department is spending on applications, which will help the team allocate resources accordingly.

5. Centralize software assets

Centralizing software assets is critical for easy SaaS management. Keeping all apps, licenses, contracts, and other application assets in one location improves visibility and control while reducing duplication and unnecessary spending.

Decentralized assets can cause confusion and a lack of responsibility, resulting in extra costs and higher risks. Sometimes, they might also get lost in the shuffle. However, they also make license management easier and ensure the effective utilization of assets across the organization.

6. Use a SaaS management software

Finally, in our SaaS management best practices, let’s talk about the obvious practice of using SaaS application management software.

Organizations require enterprise SaaS management software (SMP) to manage SaaS applications successfully. While it is possible to handle SaaS apps without software, the procedure can be time-consuming, error-prone, and confusing.

SaaS management platforms provide different features for organizations, including;

• Centralized visibility: Gain a comprehensive view of all SaaS applications across the organization.
• Automated workflows: Streamline processes such as onboarding/offboarding and license management.
• Usage insights: Analyze data to understand application usage patterns and optimize usage.
• Cost optimization: Identify cost-saving opportunities by eliminating unused or redundant applications.
• Enhanced security: Implement consistent security measures and ensure compliance with policies.
• License management: Effective license management allows organizations to track and manage their software licenses efficiently, ensuring compliance and avoiding penalties.
• Renewal management: It involves monitoring and handling software renewals to prevent service interruptions and maintain continuous access.
• Provisioning: Automating user provisioning ensures that new employees receive the appropriate access and permissions quickly and accurately.
• Deprovisioning: Efficient deprovisioning processes remove access for departing employees, maintain security, and reduce the risk of unauthorized access.

If they do not use SaaS management software, organizations risk overspending on apps and licensing, a lack of control over SaaS applications, and increased security threats. Eliminate spreadsheet-based tracking methods and simplify SaaS management using software.

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CloudEagle: The comprehensive SaaS management software

CloudEagle is a comprehensive SaaS management and procurement platform with spend management capabilities.

The tool helps businesses control and optimize SaaS costs and applications. With the tool, you can discover, optimize, govern, and renew SaaS applications within your organization from one unified platform.

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CloudEagle's key features

The tool has various features to manage your organization's SaaS assets effectively. It helps you with:

1. Complete app discovery

CloudEagle has an extensive catalog of 150,000 applications to suit your demands quickly. Through over 500 integrations, including browser extensions, single sign-on (SSO), and finance integrations, CloudEagle provides a holistic view of your entire SaaS ecosystem.

This visibility allows you to optimize SaaS costs effectively by understanding usage patterns and identifying consolidation or cost reduction opportunities.

2. SaaS Contract management

CloudEagle lets you maintain all your contracts and invoices in one location, retrieving them quickly during vendor negotiations, audits, and other activities.

The tool utilizes AI-powered metadata extraction capabilities. It can automatically analyze documents (contracts and invoices) to extract key metadata such as dates, amounts, parties involved, and contract terms.

AI-powered extraction is both fast and highly accurate. This reduces the manual effort needed for data entry, ensuring that the information extracted is reliable and minimizing errors that can occur with manual processing.

With CloudEagle, you can streamline administrative tasks associated with contract management, reduce operational complexity, and maintain clarity and control over your SaaS subscriptions and agreements.

SaaS contract management modules can facilitate your organization's asset centralization. Check out Aira's inspiring success story and how they centralized their SaaS contracts.

3. Automated Workflows

CloudEagle is equipped with SaaS buying workflows to help the procurement team automate SaaS purchasing. Why waste time chasing behind approvals when you can automate repetitive tasks and focus on your tasks?

These automated workflows facilitate efficient SaaS purchasing by routing requests through predefined approval channels, ensuring compliance and transparency at every step.

Additionally, CloudEagle integrates seamlessly with Slack, enabling requesters to initiate intake requests directly from Slack. Once a request is generated, it is automatically routed to the appropriate person for approval within Slack.

4. Assisted Buyers

CloudEagle will assign specialist SaaS buyers to assist you in finding the best SaaS software. These specialists conduct thorough vendor research on your behalf, leveraging price benchmarking data to negotiate effectively on your behalf.

By understanding your specific needs and requirements, CloudEagle's assisted buyers ensure that you acquire the necessary apps on the best possible terms.

Their expertise and proactive approach streamline the procurement process and help you get the best vendor-negotiated deals.

It saves you time and resources while securing cost-effective solutions tailored to your business needs. Additionally, if you prefer to lead your negotiations, they can act as an extended team member, assisting you in selecting the best deals.

Nowports exemplifies how CloudEagle helped them achieve 34% savings by streamlining SaaS procurement, centralizing contracts, and ensuring timely renewals.

Here’s the inspiring success story.

5. Renewal management

CloudEagle’s renewal workflows will make it easier for you to stay ahead of renewals. Starting 90 days before the renewal date, the tool sends timely reminders and escalates notifications to relevant stakeholders within your team.

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It’ll automatically escalate to various team stakeholders until one acts on it and renews the contract.

Check out how Falkonry streamlined SaaS renewals using CloudEagle, here's Pratibha Mehta from Falkonry recalling her experience of streamlining renewals with CloudEagle.

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6. License Harvesting

CloudEagle offers license harvesting features, which automate the management of software licenses within an organization. This helps companies optimize their software usage by efficiently tracking and managing licenses.

The tool monitors license usage across different applications and systems, identifying underutilized licenses that can be reclaimed and redistributed where needed.

By automating this process, organizations can reduce costs associated with over-licensing and ensure compliance with software vendor agreements.

7. Provisioning and Deprovisioning

CloudEagle automates the provisioning of new user accounts and access permissions, saving IT administrators time and effort. It also simplifies the process of granting and revoking access to applications based on individuals' roles within the organization.

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Similarly, when employees leave or change roles, CloudEagle securely removes their access, reducing security risks associated with unauthorized access to sensitive data and resources.

8. Identity and Access Management

CloudEagle ensures accuracy and efficiency across the identity and access lifecycle with real-time monitoring, strong authentication, and seamless integration of SSO and HR systems.

Its automation features, tailored workflows, and intuitive interfaces empower IT and HR teams, simplifying operations and boosting productivity.

9. Self-Service App Catalog and App Access Requests

CloudEagle features a self-service app catalog where users can independently discover and request access to approved applications and services. This lets employees quickly find and use necessary SaaS tools, enhancing productivity.

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Users can browse pre-approved apps, submit requests tailored to their roles, and track approvals in real-time, all managed securely and compliantly through automated processes.

10. Cost Optimization

CloudEagle helps organizations manage and optimize their IT spending by providing visibility into resource usage and costs. IT teams can identify savings opportunities by right-sizing SaaS licenses, effectively using reserved instances, and optimizing software license usage.

This feature enables organizations to monitor and control spending across cloud services, infrastructure, and software licenses, ultimately improving financial efficiency.

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Conclusion

Enterprise SaaS management is vital for companies that rely substantially on SaaS apps for day-to-day operations. It lets businesses function seamlessly by simplifying complex business processes.

Efficient SaaS management solutions can assist firms in optimizing their SaaS usage, streamlining procurement, and simplifying software asset management.

So, enterprises should adhere to the best SaaS management practices mentioned in this article to optimize their SaaS stack.

Thinking about how to manage SaaS applications? Looking for a top-ranked SaaS management software?

Schedule a demo with CloudEagle to learn how this tool can transform your organization's processes and increase efficiency.

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‍Frequently asked questions

1. What are the objectives of SaaS management?

SaaS Management best practices aim to reduce the risk associated with unmanaged apps, raise the value of bought software, and improve the efficacy of people who install SaaS applications. Businesses also use SaaS management to reduce the cost of SaaS applications.

2. How do I select a SaaS management platform?

Here are four steps to choose the ideal SaaS management platform;

Step 1: Evaluate the SaaS Discovery Capability.

Step 2: Assess the Capabilities for Cost Optimization.

Step 3: Determine the risk management and compliance capabilities.

Step 4: Assess Automation Capabilities.

3. What are some of the common challenges businesses face when managing SaaS applications?

Shadow IT, data security threats, subscription management, compliance issues, lack of visibility and control, and integration issues are some of the most typical challenges businesses face when managing SaaS applications.

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