There was a time when IT (Information Technology) was a naturally centralized function. Information technology experts made decisions about everything from the phone on your desk to the screensaver on your computer. They controlled budgets, conducted troubleshooting, and served as the “buck stops here” department for all things tech.
If you work at a modern business today, you know this is rarely the case anymore. Read on to learn about the best practices for Cloud-first IT in 2019.
The one thing that remains constant about SaaS apps is change. According to Blissfully’s 2019 SaaS Trends research, more than 40 percent of the average company’s SaaS stack has completely changed in the last two years. If that’s not complicated enough, the typical midsized company uses 120 apps overall, and sees an average of 2,700 app-to-people connections in their SaaS Graph. Companies need to master SaaS app onboarding to ensure that people know how to properly and securely use their applications, and are aware of their roles and responsibilities.
Here are some tips on where to start.
Knowing the ropes of a SaaS app can prove integral to a new hire’s success. Just because someone is a domain expert doesn’t mean they’re familiar with all of your organization’s dedicated SaaS tools. Mastering the art of training starts on a new hire’s first day. If team members are able to use the tools of the trade immediately, they’re more likely to be productive.
When onboarding a new hire, assign her app training to a team member who has become a power user. Have this power user onboard the new hire and give her a product tour, explaining how the tool is relevant to her job. Finally, have the new hire test her knowledge by completing a task under the supervision of the power user, and leave plenty of time to answer practical questions in the weeks to come. Likewise, if there’s an app change, have the account owner run a new app training for everyone in the group.
Remember the 2,700 app-to-people connections we mentioned? Each one of these connections represents a potential point of vulnerability or inefficiency for the organization. For example, people may have different levels of account access for very specific reasons, and these types of controls should remain in place regardless of how many new users are onboarded onto an app.
If there’s a sudden app change, make sure these roles are well documented and understood as a new app is adopted within the organization. No one loves change, but if they’re able to understand exactly how to use the new app, and the reasoning behind their level of access, the process will be much smoother for everyone involved.
There’s good news in the midst of all this change: Across every type of app, certain SaaS security best practices remain consistent. Adopting them should be a matter of policy within your organization, not a matter of individual user choice. For example, two-factor authentication should be required for every account across the board, to provide an extra layer of protection against hackers.
In addition, team members should adopt security practices that seem like second nature. Tools such as password management solutions can help users generate strong passwords without having to think about creating and tracking dedicated passwords. After all, who can keep up with the number of accounts and constant change happening within most organizations?
A SaaS system of record like Blissfully can help organizations manage change dynamics by tracking important data within a single destination. Most organizations don’t centrally manage IT anymore; everything’s distributed, and for good reason. With stakeholders throughout the organization, apps constantly in flux, and thousands of connections at stake, leaving SaaS management up to chance isn’t something most organizations can afford to do anymore.
The relationship between apps and people is far more complicated than most organizations realize. Much like Facebook’s “Social Graph” for people-to-people relationships, the SaaS Graph illustrates people-to-app relationships and the complexity they can introduce into the organization. Each SaaS Graph relationship could represent a potential point of security vulnerability or unnecessary efficiency. A new approach to SaaS management can minimize these risks and optimize once-cumbersome workflows. Let’s dive into how.
New data from Blissfully’s 2019 SaaS Trends report shows that the typical 200-500 person company uses 123 apps, which doesn’t sound too unmanageable. But, when you consider the SaaS Graph relationships, it gets much more complicated: the same sized company has an average of 2,700 SaaS Graph relationships. The number of relationships get deeper and more complex as the organization grows: companies with 500-1,000 employees have an astounding 5,671 app-to-people relationships!
The SaaS Graph spans five key dimensions, all of which represent new challenges to stakeholders across the organization. While SaaS has made it much easier for anyone to purchase and deploy new software across teams, these dimensions introduce new, potentially hidden problems and inefficiencies.
Not all SaaS users look alike. The role of each user can get complicated, especially as new team members are onboarded and offboarded throughout the course of a year. Without a clear understanding of these roles, organizations could be wasting time on inefficient processes, wasting money, or worse, granting permissions to the wrong people (which could be a big security concern).
Potential roles within any app include:
Usually teams have either free or paid licenses, which on the surface seems pretty clear-cut. However, paid licenses typically have different tiers, which companies need to track when employees join or leave. Issues also arise when team leaders purchase licenses for software that has redundancy across subscriptions in other teams or departments, or if there’s a good, free alternative.
The frequency of app usage can vary drastically across individuals and teams. Often, apps can go underused or unused for months without anyone in the organization knowing about it. These inefficiencies can add up to major wasted spend.
From a security and compliance perspective, data is the most important dimension of the SaaS graph. Without the proper protections in place, sensitive data could be at risk. For example, each user’s connection presents a possible security vulnerability, in the absence of strong passwords and/or multi-factor authentication.
Typically, data within apps exists in three different states:
Without knowing vendor status, teams could be at risk of wasted spend, or potential security vulnerability (if accounts are left open to unauthorized users or unattended altogether).
A selected vendor might be in any of the following phases within an organization:
Managing the SaaS Graph gets a lot more complicated when you examine the rapid rate of change at most organizations. Our 2019 SaaS Trends report found that 43 percent of the average company’s application stack changed in the last two years. According to data from LinkedIn, that’s more than three times the average employee turnover rate in the tech industry. These two factors taken together mean that the average SaaS Graph relationship changes on a dime, which demands an entirely new approach to SaaS Management.
Since there’s typically no longer a “command-and-control” approach of a centralized IT manager provisioning apps across the company, each dimension in the SaaS Graph needs to be periodically examined. There’s a new set of stakeholders in town, and they each need a seat at the table.
By taking a Collaborative IT approach, organizations can bring all of the key stakeholders into the process of SaaS management. Unlike in the command-and-control days, team leaders, finance, HR, operations, security and IT must all be involved in the process to ensure that each SaaS Graph relationship is valid and up-to-date.
While this approach may sound more complex, in reality, it’s a cultural shift that feels natural to most organizations, and is much simpler to maintain in the long run. Each group has a vested interest in sharing responsibility for SaaS apps: whether it’s to gain access to the right apps, balance the budget, or ensure security and compliance. Gathering these teams around a single system of record can ensure that everyone’s getting what they need out of technology in a fast-growing organization.
There’s a good chance that at least one of those hot new SaaS apps you’re about to implement organization-wide is going to be replaced in a year.
Whether due to acquisition, funding woes, or a well-publicized security breach, some apps simply don’t stand the test of time. Others will serve their purpose for a while but then you need new features, so you make a switch. In still other cases, a product already in use at your organization will expand its feature set to cover the territory of another app; it can be wise at that point to consolidate.
Regardless of the reason, the reality for modern businesses is that app turnover is very common. In fact, the typical mid-sized company saw 39% of their SaaS stack change in 2018. According to our research, it’s safe to assume that within two years, roughly half of your tech stack will be different than it is today. While it’s easy to interpret this as bad news and look for strategies to avoid app turnover as much as possible, we argue a better approach is to embrace change and build your business for SaaS flexibility.
The ease with which your organization can adopt new apps, and switch out old ones, is critical to maintaining a strong technology stack. The rapid pace of change in SaaS feature sets makes it nearly impossible to predict which apps you will keep for the long term, which will disappear, and which ones you’ll want to replace with a better, more innovative option.
Rather than trying to predict the future, focus on optimizing for flexibility and process. This will empower your team leaders to experiment and give your organization leverage to adopt the best tools at any given point in time.
Here’s a look at how to prioritize a flexible SaaS stack at your organization.
Of course, you don’t want to invest in apps that are likely to disappear or become obsolete, so it is worth spending time evaluating whether an app is built for longevity in your organization. The good news is that you can combine this research with other key analyses: security features, compliance compatibility, and availability of integrations. Vendors who check these boxes are more likely to be thinking long-term, and thus more likely to stick around. Ideally, when your SaaS stack changes, it should be on your terms. Doing the upfront homework will increase the odds that an app switch is a proactive choice, not a reactive leap.
In particular, look for apps that integrate with the ones you already use, since this will ensure that your SaaS stack can be connected for maximum productivity, rather than siloed and walled off. Your team will be able to get the most value out of apps that can share data and piggyback off of each other’s features. This common ground will reduce unnecessary turnover while making it easier to swap apps out when it is truly in the best interest of the organization.
If the apps you choose include common security features (like SSO or 2FA), meet or exceed compliance standards (like GDPR and SOC 2), and integrate nicely with adjacent technologies, the odds are good that your choice will stick around long enough to be worth the time and effort of starting up with it.
Another good way to test the water is to look at the size of the community around a given app. While it can be exciting to be on the cutting edge of trying out a brand new SaaS app, you may not want to be the very first organization (or one of the first organizations) to adopt it, simply because there won’t be a community of folks who have used it enough to develop best practices, or adequate support around the tool.
To evaluate where a product stands in terms of the community around it, you can check out whether they have built a robust and thriving community on their own accord—many apps do. Or, check out their presence on existing communities. If it is a development-related tool, you can also check out developer communities like Stack Overflow, Github, and Reddit to see how active the communities around the app are.
Doing your homework is a good first step, but then it’s time to let go and embrace change. To prepare for the inevitable reality of app turnover, it’s a good idea to streamline your app approval, implementation, and removal processes to make them as efficient as possible. This way, when the time comes to make a change, it’s not a massive headache to do so.
To improve your processes, we recommend instituting a decentralized IT management paradigm—what we like to call Collaborative IT. This means that apps can be chosen, purchased, and implemented by team leaders—rather than having every single technology decision carried out by a central IT function. As you can imagine, this dramatically speeds up both implementation and removal of apps, since it removes unnecessary gatekeepers and hurdles. To balance this freedom with security and budgetary controls, seek out a single SaaS system of record that provides visibility into the entire stack for management purposes.
Next, automate as much of the onboarding and offboarding processes as possible, so that new team members can quickly get up and running with every app they need to do their jobs (an average of eight apps per employee), and can be quickly removed if and when they depart the organization to avoid security holes. Automating onboarding and offboarding has the added benefit of making it easier to replace software down the road as needed.
Finally, with the visibility into your SaaS stack we recommend above, you can quickly see exactly who is using an app. This way, you can make sure the entire team understands why you are removing or replacing an app long before it actually goes away. This gives them time to adjust, whether that means porting data and key processes to a new tool or simply wrapping their heads around a new way of working.
Apps will come and go, for a whole variety of reasons. The agility with which you can replace apps or add new ones should ultimately propel the pace of innovation at your organization. With the right balance of agility and risk-mitigating controls in place, there’s no real reason to stress out over the reality that half of your tech stack will be different within a couple of years. Of course it will! Out with the old, in with the new, and on with the pace of business.
Team leaders throughout the years have relied on technology systems of record to keep their data organized. A system of record is the authoritative data source for a given type of information, and the software that maintains this data becomes the organizational foundation for certain business processes. While many options exist for systems of record for single-lane disciplines like sales, HR and finance, there’s one area of business operations that many organizations have not systematized: SaaS.
Part of the challenge around adopting a SaaS system of record is that no single department “owns” SaaS anymore. This challenge is also the single biggest reason to evolve from ad-hoc processes to a system of record. In the past, a command-and-control approach to IT management meant that the IT leader owned the procurement process for all hardware and software. Rarely were employees empowered to make their own purchasing decisions.
Today, that reality is much different. Team leaders often select the tools they need for their direct reports to be productive. While this level of autonomy is great for business, it can also get messy when it comes to budgeting, security, compliance, and common business processes, such as onboarding and offboarding. Many employees today, regardless of their level of technical knowledge, spend the majority of their time at work using SaaS apps. Their reliance on these apps leaves little room for error for organizations to get SaaS management right.
Instead of a department-specific system of record, SaaS requires a shared, collaborative approach among teams, who often have very different priorities. For example, IT and security teams care about whether apps are being used properly, and whether the organization’s sensitive data is at risk. Finance teams are all about keeping budgeting in check. HR or people ops want the right people to have access to the right apps on their first day. Team leaders need more apps, and they need them now. With so many different priorities, how can a single system of record serve them all?
Without a command-and-control model of IT (which isn’t practical for a modern way of working), a system of record is the best way to meet each of these needs. While each stakeholder may have a different level of permission, or access a different portion of the system, data on the entire organization’s SaaS stack is stored in a single place, and the company can start to recognize important patterns.
Systems theory dates back to ancient societies, who performed feats of engineering without any modern tools. Instead of each person viewing their role in a silo, societies like the ancient Egyptians and Mayans created systems to build amazing, intricate structures. Today, the concept of systems thinking has become more widely adopted in the workplace. Rather than observing individual events and data, teams attempt to surface structures that drive patterns within those individual events or data points. Once organizations can get a handle on their systems, work becomes more strategic, and less ad-hoc.
From a technology perspective, systems of record can drive systems thinking in an organization that’s traditionally been siloed. Nowhere is this idea more true than SaaS management. Right now, so much time is wasted on creating one-off spreadsheets or workflows that aren’t regularly used across the entire organization. For example, when a new employee joins the organization, the onboarding process for their first day could be determined by an out-of-date spreadsheet that stakeholders aren’t necessarily updating or following by rote. Unfortunately, in these cases, the first impression employees get is chaotic at best.
The consequences of ignoring systems thinking in SaaS management could be severe. Recent research from Blissfully shows that the average 200-500 person company uses 123 apps, and has more than 2,700 app-to-people relationships. These relationships could span from billing owners, to admins, to day-to-day users. For example, if someone with admin status leaves an organization and isn’t properly offboarded from an app, the organization could risk critical data loss and reputational damages.
Each part of the system, no matter how minor it seems, leads to a more holistic picture of what’s happening in technology operations at a macro level within a company. Embracing a system of record approach could save serious time and money, and help the organization avoid potentially damaging long-term risks.
The task of SaaS vendor management has become a lot more challenging over the last few years, since the CIO and IT team don’t always have direct visibility into the apps employees are using across the organization. A variety of trends — including team members directly testing and purchasing new apps themselves — have made the “Command and Control” (or highly centralized and restrictive) role of IT management virtually impossible. The following SaaS vendor management best practices can help CIOs and their teams get a handle on the growing SaaS boom, while giving team members the freedom and flexibility to choose the tools they want and need.
One reality of modern SaaS vendor management is that vendor agreements and contracts may be owned by multiple team leaders across the organization. This distribution of ownership may result in unnecessary spending from unused, redundant, or underused apps.
Finance and IT teams (who were once responsible for vendor procurement and subsequent management) may find it difficult to rein in these contracts. On a regular basis, take an inventory of who owns what vendor relationships, and try to consolidate these touchpoints to as few owners as possible.
Renewals are one of the trickier parts of SaaS vendor management, simply because the account owners don’t necessarily always know when these renewals are coming. One common scenario is that an account may be set to an auto-renewal status, and the owner may not even realize they’re being billed annually for an app they aren’t using. In other cases, the team has chosen to use a free software product and continues to be billed annually for a redundant paid product.
Either scenario can add up to a lot of wasted budget!
Managing all of your renewals and contracts with one system of record can alleviate some of the stress behind trying to remember when renewals will come along, or being caught off guard by an unexpected bill.
Collaborating with team leaders whose direct reports use SaaS applications on a daily basis is the only way to really know if an app is working well for the team. A quarterly or twice yearly review of your app inventory — completed with the help of team leaders — can provide a wealth of information for the IT team, including:
In cases where the current tools are underutilized, there may be a case for selecting a new app that meets more of the team’s requirements. Taking the time to understand these requirements will pay dividends when end-of-year budget talks come along, since teams can request more budget.
One of the most surprising data points in our 2019 SaaS Trends was that 71% of companies have at least one SaaS subscription with no billing owner. You don’t want to be paying for subscriptions indefinitely. Make sure to include a step in your offboarding process to check for and reassign any billing relationships (and licenses) a departing employee may own.
A complete SaaS management platform like Blissfully can automate many of the tasks and workflow management recommendations described above. Rather than tracking SaaS vendors in a spreadsheet, Blissfully provides a constantly updated system of record that gives CIOs and IT leadership visibility into every app across the entire organization. From SaaS spending, to onboarding and offboarding, to security visibility, having a SaaS management platform can save time and frustration, so IT teams can focus on more strategic work.
Hopefully these SaaS vendor management best practices help your team get organized in 2019. For more details and useful tips, check out The Blissfully Guide to SaaS Management, Blissfully’s 2019 SaaS Trends Report, and The Blissfully Guide to Employee Offboarding.
Guest post by: Jaren Nichols, Chief Operating Officer at Zipbooks
Keeping accurate books may seem sleep-inducing, but it’s actually a fundamental that can keep your business growing. Accurate books lead to accurate reports that lead to smart business decisions. You simply can’t grow your business without minding your chart of accounts.
One account (or category) that has grown 20x within the last five years is SaaS spending. This represents an amazing improvement for businesses who have been able to increase productivity, innovation and even revenue by taking advantage of SaaS applications. However, these spending trends also have the potential to wreak havoc on your books.
Businesses can better categorize their accounts and use that data to manage the money they spend on SaaS apps through careful bookkeeping.
If you can thoughtfully determine where to categorize your SaaS spending, you will have a cleaner picture of your business. Most businesses who take advantage of SaaS applications will categorize their spending in either Cost of Goods Sold (abbreviated COGS, and frequently called Cost of Services) or Operating Expenses.
In order to determine how to best categorize your books, take a look at all of your SaaS spend.
If a particular SaaS that you’re paying for is integral to providing your revenue-generating product, then it will be a COGS expense. For example, at my company, ZipBooks, we’ve built an alternative to QuickBooks that is enhanced by digital bank connections. We pay third-party SaaS providers to provide bank connections for our users. The more users we have on our product, the more bank connections we have to pay for. Because this expense is a critical part of the product we deliver, it falls under COGS in our books.
If a SaaS application you’re paying for is not an integral part of your revenue-generating product, it will be categorized as an Operating Expense. These expenses don’t necessarily scale as you increase your own revenue. Though they may be correlated (e.g., as you grow, you increase headcount, and therefore have to pay more for HR software), they are not a key part of delivering your own product or service.
The way you categorize your SaaS spending will impact the numbers you see on your Income Statement, particularly your Gross Profit.
SaaS expenses that are categorized as COGS expenses will directly impact your gross profit; operating expenses do not.
Because gross margin says so much about the quality and scalability of your business, it is important to identify which SaaS products that fall under COGS expenses are actually integral. Companies should optimize their SaaS spending as often as possible in order to improve these numbers. Any SaaS spending that falls under COGS expenses will typically scale along with your revenue as you grow. On a percentage basis, this means that you have a lower gross margin, and potentially, a less exciting business—because it simply costs more to generate more revenue.
It’s important to note, however, that not all COGS expenses will scale at the same rate of your revenue—services with a flat fee or resource costs, etc.—so don’t write off all COGS expenses as bad. They help you create a valuable, revenue-generating product. And besides, gross margins can get better over time as you start to recognize volume discounts and other economies of scale.
Operating expenses, on the other hand, do not affect your Gross Margins, nor do they have to scale with your revenue. Operating expenses, instead, affect only your operating income and net income. When you can categorize SaaS spending as some type of operating expense, your gross margin will remain higher, potentially giving you a more “exciting” business. This is because, in the case of operating expenses, you can grow revenue without necessarily incurring additional direct costs.
Yes, being an “exciting” business is great and there is some real flexibility in categorization. That being said, there’s an important caveat: don’t just categorize SaaS spend as operating expenses purely to look better on financial reports. Correctly categorizing SaaS spend will help you more accurately grow your business—by identifying areas of wasteful spending and targeting the integral parts of your business that provide true value.
There’s an ethical and legal question here as well: when you’re raising money from equity investors or increasing debt, your gross margins will be evaluated. You need to be honest—both to accurately present the strength of your business, and to avoid potential fraud.
The strength and scalability of your business is reflected in your books, and those numbers matter. But remember, SaaS applications aren’t the only thing affecting your COGS or Operating Expenses and there are many other ways to grow or optimize.
SaaS spending will continue to grow, which is why it’s so important to be deliberate, thoughtful, and accurate in your use of and categorization of SaaS spend.
Jaren Nichols is Chief Operating Officer at ZipBooks, free accounting software for small businesses. Jaren was previously a Product Manager at Google and holds an MBA from Harvard Business School.
Did you know that the average mid-size business has 100+ SaaS apps in place? Even with numbers that high, the majority of businesses still track their SaaS apps with an Excel or Google spreadsheet. If you’re one of them, then you probably know first-hand how unwieldy and inefficient managing a SaaS program manually with a spreadsheet can be.
In this post, we take a deeper look at why tracking internal SaaS usage with a spreadsheet has become increasingly difficult, and offer a more effective approach going forward.
First off, it’s worth stating: A spreadsheet is better than nothing. An imperfect organizational system is much better than none at all, so if that’s where you are today, know that you are still moving in the right direction.
Now, let’s take a look at why this approach can be so challenging, and where many organizations need to make improvements.
If you’re already using spreadsheets, you know it can be really tough to stay on top of them. For one, SaaS apps are constantly rotating in and out of organizations. This is normal; part of the value of apps delivered via the cloud is that it’s easy to spin them up and down based on what your team needs at any given moment.
But this also means a manual spreadsheet requires you to continually check in with your team about whether they have added or subtracted apps from the roster. Inevitably, something falls through the cracks and doesn’t make it to the spreadsheet. It’s hard — if not impossible — to stay on top of the ever-changing rotation of SaaS subscriptions in any given organization, at least if you’re trying to do it manually.
The task of keeping an internal SaaS spreadsheet up-to-date is a massive one. It could easily take up the majority of one team member’s time to update things like:
Number of subscriptions or apps from each vendor
And lots more!
It’s almost certainly too much for one person. Yet if updating the spreadsheet is delegated across multiple team members, responsibility can become confusing and, again, items may fall through the cracks.
As far as the mechanics of remembering to update the spreadsheet, teams could set calendar reminders to do this, but at what frequency? It’s not a rote or predictable task, since (as we mentioned earlier), subscriptions change all the time.
For these reasons, even the most organized person or company will struggle to keep manual spreadsheets completely up to date.
Finally, spreadsheets—because they are maintained manually—are naturally error-prone. Whether it’s a mistyped line item or a small change that happened without notification (like a seat being added or a price increase from the vendor), these documents quickly become full of small mistakes that add up to an inaccurate picture of your SaaS landscape.
Rather than manually maintaining a spreadsheet of your SaaS subscriptions, we recommend you invest in a SaaS management platform. This way, you can use a single platform to view invoices, manage renewals, create approval workflows, and track compliance. In one pane of glass, you can view all of your SaaS apps, who is using them, and how much you’re spending on them.
Here’s what that looks like with Blissfully:
As you can see, a SaaS management platform allows you to automatically track all of the vendors your organization is using, as well as the number of subscriptions from each (since you may have different apps or multiple of the same app for different teams.) It will let you see at a glance how much you are spending annually and when subscriptions are set to renew.
Additionally, responsibility is clear because you can assign an owner to each vendor. If HR or finance has a question about how a particular program is being used, what it takes to onboard a new team member, or why the bill for AdWords is so high this month, they will know exactly who to go to for answers.
If your organization follows compliance or legal frameworks like GDPR or SOC 2, a SaaS management tool will also let you verify at a glance that you have only invested in tools that are also compliant with those regulations and requirements. This reduces your organizational risk and saves time and headaches when you have audits.
Replace your dreaded SaaS spreadsheet. Use one platform to view invoices, manage renewals, create approval workflows, and track compliance. See all of your SaaS apps, who’s using them, and how much you’re spending on them.
Get the visibility and tools you need to take control of SaaS across your organization.
Managing IT in the era of SaaS proliferation can be difficult, especially since the command-and-control model of old no longer works for most companies. A Collaborative IT approach, to contrast, involves team leaders, employees, finance, HR and IT in collectively solving SaaS management challenges. Here are six of the challenges high growth companies most commonly face, and how Collaborative IT can help address them.
In the earliest stages of a company, it can be relatively easy to achieve visibility into SaaS usage and spend across the organization. However, once an organization enters the “growth stage,” it tends to become inherently less sensitive to cost. In many cases, this is a point in the business’s maturity when leaders are willing to do whatever it takes to drive aggressive growth goals around revenue, user acquisition, or other benchmarks. Visibility tends to start to get lost, and spending on SaaS can grow exponentially without any real strategy behind why or how.
How to Address With Collaborative IT: When your business begins to grow aggressively, it’s a good idea to introduce a SaaS management system that provides visibility into app spend and usage. It’s simply too much for a human being to track via Excel spreadsheet, and should be monitored in an automatic and continuous fashion. This allows team members flexibility while still providing oversight.
At many young companies, SaaS spending runs rampant until a finance hire is made, or someone at the executive or management level discovers a trend of inefficiency. This can take the form of overlapping subscriptions, paying for more features than are being used, or buying apps before they are truly necessary.
How to Address With Collaborative IT: When the SaaS budget starts to get out of control, an honest evaluation of SaaS usage relative to need is required. In addition, SaaS vendor contracts and licenses need to be reviewed regularly to ensure there is not overlap and waste.
The reality is that most onboarding and offboarding is done on an ad hoc basis today. You might even be surprised how common this is at larger, more established organizations. Employees request access to services or credentials when they need them, rather than receiving all of the appropriate onboarding materials up-front, which slows down productivity. On the other end, the lack of a clear offboarding process increases an organization’s risk of a costly insider threat. What’s more, onboarding/offboarding responsibilities might not even be assigned to a specific person or department, so there is often not sufficient accountability.
How to Address With Collaborative IT: This is one case where a formalized approach is very helpful. You should come up with a list of activities that need to take place every time a team member joins and a separate list of offboarding action items for when employees leave. A centralized SaaS management platform can help you automate much of these processes, with the end result of decreased risk and increased employee productivity.
Often, it’s not until a real-world security incident takes place that teams realize they need to improve their internal practices to decrease risk. Both ad hoc and nonexistent security policies can open organizations up to a whole world of vulnerabilities. On the other side of the spectrum, some organizations employ arcane security practices (like forcing users to change their passwords at regular intervals for no real reason) that are not user-friendly and are thus often skirted by employees.
How to Address With Collaborative IT: As much as possible, security should be automated. You should put guardrails in place that make it very difficult for employees to make mistakes or engage in risky behavior. This includes enforcing secure authentication and the principle of least privilege across all SaaS applications, in addition to the secure on and offboarding practices we outlined above. (Take a deeper dive into security best practices with the Blissfully Guide to SaaS Security.)
Often, when organizations sell to large enterprises or businesses within highly regulated industries, they need to complete a compliance audit such as SOC 2, or adhere to privacy regulations like GDPR. This can require a complete overhaul of how IT is handled, and often it’s difficult to do it on a dime, which means either shelling out the big bucks for outside help or losing out on the business.
How to Address With Collaborative IT: As soon as you identify prospects that are likely to have major compliance requirements, it’s time to evaluate which compliance mandates you need to meet and budget (both financially and time-wise) to meet those mandates. If you undertake this process proactively, it will minimize disruption to your business and increase your odds of winning the new customer. As far as how to check all those compliance boxes, implementing a SaaS management platform can help you verify that you are meeting requirements, provide proof to regulatory bodies and auditors, and ensure that controls are upheld on a continuous basis.
Sometimes, teams wind up using multiple paid apps that have overlapping functionality. In other cases, teams are using both free, unsanctioned apps and paid, sanctioned apps that accomplish the exact same purpose. For example, a sales manager purchases videoconferencing licenses, but the individual reps are using free apps because they’re simpler or better. In some cases, paid apps can be eliminated altogether in favor of free, allowing budget to be reallocated elsewhere.
How to Address With Collaborative IT: When a successful Collaborative IT program is implemented, it means that teams choose the apps they truly want and need, while IT and finance have oversight into what is in use. It’s a good idea to plan a quarterly review meeting where team leaders walk through which apps are being used and what team members have to say about them. Look at functionality in use as well to ensure that there is not significant feature overlap, and determine if there are areas where the fat can be trimmed, either by cutting tools or downgrading functionality to decrease overlap.
For more information on Collaborative IT, check out our comprehensive Guide to Collaborative IT.
When it comes to security, people can be your best line of defense, or your biggest weakness. Here’s a G Suite Security checklist and best practices to ensure that your team is protected, and that security policies are people-friendly (read: not overly strict). For more information on these best practices, download The Blissfully G Suite Admin Guide.
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