SaaS has matured dramatically over the last 5-10 years, to the point where teams are directly adopting the software they need to do their jobs without any oversight. The sheer number of high quality products solving all sorts of business needs has driven the fast rise of SaaS. In fact, our own data across 500+ customers shows this proliferation in SaaS is dominating across all business functions.
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SaaS adoption has dramatically transformed the workplace. The apps we use have become one of the most personal parts of our jobs. This trend might have started with marketing teams pulling away from IT to make their own software decisions, but It turns out every team wants the freedom to choose the SaaS tools that work best for them. While SaaS has been growing at an insane rate over the last decade, our latest analysis predicts that SaaS growth is still a rocket ship.
As a SaaS management platform, Blissfully provides real-time visibility into SaaS app usage and spend across the entire organization. This gives us an incredible perspective on the impact of SaaS proliferation on organizations of all sizes and on a quarterly basis we analyze more than eight years of data across a sample of hundreds of companies of all sizes. In our latest report – Blissfully Q1 2018 SaaS Trends – we came away with three incredible key take-aways:
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By: Aaron White
Employees used to just fall in line with whatever technology the IT department told them to use. But now, SaaS apps have made it much easier to choose the technology that works best for their jobs, with little to no oversight. The explosion of SaaS apps has also created an invisible issue of SaaS sprawl, opening companies up to a lot of chaos and unintended consequences.
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By: Ariel Diaz
The widespread use of SaaS software is a good thing for organizations. People feel empowered to buy and use the tools they need to do their jobs effectively. On the other hand, SaaS usage can quickly get out of control from a workflow, spend, visibility, and security perspective if left unchecked. If there’s no dedicated IT person in an organization, it can be tough to even know where to start.
No need to stress; we’ve pulled together the three key questions to ask yourself to keep SaaS sprawl in check. Hint: it’s all about the relationship between people and apps.
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The New IT: From Helpdesk to Business Operations
May 24, 2018 in SaaS Management, Security, Shadow ITBy: Matt Tharp
A recent study from Cisco showed that the average organization has 15 to 22 times more cloud applications running than have been authorized by the IT department. The question is, if everyone’s installing their own SaaS apps, who’s responsible for the role of IT at an organization? This question challenges every business, from startups to enterprises, and can serve as a major point of frustration for those assigned the role of IT management. Let’s take a look at why the problem of IT ownership exists, and how smart organizations should be handling it today.
At Blissfully, we went through the SOC 2 compliance process just a few months after raising our first round of funding. We want to help other organizations manage IT successfully, which requires trust. Being SOC 2 compliant was about giving our customers and prospects peace of mind when it came to working with us.
Recently, we created The Blissfully SOC 2 Compliance Playbook, showing you some of our favorite tools that helped us pass our audit painlessly. We asked Kisi, a building access management platform, to author a guest post about physical security in the workplace, why it matters to SOC 2 compliance, and how Kisi can help.
Guest post by: Bernard Mehl, CEO and Cofounder, Kisi
SOC 2 and Data Access Controls: What You Need to Know
March 29, 2018 in Compliance, SaaS Stack, Security
Guest post by Schuyler Brown, co-founder strongDM
As a part of our Blissfully SOC 2 compliance series, we invited strongDM to write a guest blog post about the challenges of data access controls, and why database management is important in the scheme of completing a SOC 2 audit. Blissfully used strongDM in our SOC 2 technology stack, mapped to the audit requirement of logical and physical access controls. Read more in our recently published SOC 2 Compliance Playbook.
Most companies wait until their B or C round (or later) to start tackling key industry security audits and compliance certifications.
I think that’s a mistake.
In fact, we started our SOC 2 Type II process just a month after closing our Seed round.
How to Build a People-Centric Employee Onboarding Process
January 25, 2018 in Employee Lifecycle, HR, SaaS Stack
Employee onboarding is one of the most important experiences in someone’s time at your organization. Onboarding is when they not only receive the tools they need to do the job they’ve been hired for, but also form their first impressions of what it’s like to work with you and begin acclimating to your organizational culture.
In fact, a strong employee onboarding program can increase retention by 25% and performance by 11%.
So while it’s easy to oversimplify employee onboarding as a technical process that involves things like email setup and benefits enrollment, it has much bigger implications from a culture and productivity standpoint. Therefore, it not only makes sense, but is imperative to your and your employees’ success to take a people-first approach as you bring new hires into the fold.