IT Executives Council recently held a discussion entitled, SaaS Management Best Practices, sponsored by Productiv.

Productiv is the only SaaS Management Platform that is integrated into your IT operating systems, bringing you data infused with AI that empowers collaboration, and helps you take action with no-code workflows that scale. Govern with confidence with the answers you need to make smart decisions about how you spend. Founded in 2018 and backed by Accel, IVP, and Norwest Venture Partners, Productiv helps IT, finance, procurement, and business leaders to align around trusted data, get AI powered insights, collaborate, make smarter decisions, and have confidence in every investment, at scale.

Our expert panelist is Josh Mullis. Josh is Head of Information Security at PRODUCTIV, and a Certified Information Security Systems Professional (CISSP).  Prior roles included Director of Cybersecurity at PwC. Josh earned BBA Management Information Systems from the  University of Georgia, where Josh was on the UGA Rugby/Football Club.

Following are key takeaways to this discussion. If you are interested in learning more, view the full webinar archive video here.

What is SaaS management and how has it changed over the last few years?

SaaS management, it’s around visibility and governance. It’s being able to understand what your portfolio is, which applications are you leveraging, which features are you leveraging, how are you assigning licenses, and it’s really getting that governance around your footprint.

It’s also about risk management and all its various capacities. Are we overspending? That is a financial risk. Are we assigning licenses to the right people? That’s an access management governance risk. Do we know which systems are in use? So that’s sort of our footprint risk. Or is there shadow IT that’s out there? Are there potentially insecure systems that our users are leveraging? And it always anchors back to that governance piece.

How has it changed over the last few years?

It’s obviously been heavily influenced by the pandemic. So, I kind of think about it in three phases or timelines, if you will. There’s the pre-pandemic world, where you’re still seeing a lot of on-prem. Really, the only place you’re starting to see rapid SAS adoption at that point is thinking back to like 2018, 2019 period, is if you’re a younger sort of technology enabled, technology driven company, you haven’t brought a lot of tech that along with you. You may not have as deep of a bench to be able to throw at standing up servers and finding either a data center. And so, you are starting to look at some of those SAS providers to be able to augment your capabilities and your staff, or if you’re a heavy adopter of cloud, you’ve gone through a major transformation.

2020, the pandemic hits. Everybody’s trying to figure out how do we enable our employees to continue to be effective during a very uncertain timeline. And so you start to see this rapid adoption of SaaS. We have to enable people to work from home. We’re shipping monitors, we’re shipping laptops, we’re shipping all these things. And we don’t have a staff on-prem that can manage a data center or something to the light to implement new tools, maintain your server space. And so you see this rapid adoption of SaaS. I did pull up an interesting data point in preparation for this because I knew it was going to be a spike.

We’re all having to jump on Zoom for work. And I am a very big proponent of Zoom. We use it internally as well. But you obviously, everybody was just trying to stay connected and figure out how to work. What that meant was you see a whole lot of adoption of new tools. The SaaS portfolio peaks out kind of where we are in today, so sort of that third phase of the timeline, at over 300 SaaS providers on average across companies. If you’re a smaller company, may have a smaller footprint, even a company of our size, we have over 100 SaaS providers internally. If you’re a larger organization, it’s going to be even higher than that.

We’re starting to get into this phase of where things are having to be a lot more intentional. You’re starting to see more governance applied to your portfolio. The answer isn’t any more like, yes, at all costs because we can’t be seen as restricting productivity for the organization. It’s now getting into, okay, are we right sized? Are we using the right portfolio? Are we using the right tools? Do we need to consolidate on tools? And it’s obviously been kind of a tough market the last couple of years. And so, are we being good stewards of our resources, are we spending money where we should? And so, you’re starting to see organizations try to get better visibility into their tech stack and answer questions to their board, to their executives. Do we have the right tool set and are we spending money in an effective way?

What are the benefits of SaaS management?  Why now?

The benefits of SaaS management really throughout the life cycle of a vendor. It’s making sure that you have the right set of tools internally, getting visibility into places where you may have redundancy. Do we have six, seven, eight digital whiteboarding tools that are all doing kind of the same thing? Better management around your license allocation.

It shouldn’t be a set it and forget it and come back and say, yeah, we have a thousand employees, we bought a thousand Zoom licenses, and I go look at the admin console and yep, they’re all assigned and so you don’t really rein that back in. And then next year your provider comes back, your account manager says, hey, your company’s doing great, you should add 10 % for growth. And you’re like, yeah, no, that totally makes sense. But is that backed by any real data? So having better governance and control around your license management, having fast access to the information to inform those decisions. Should we renew with this provider? Are we still getting the value out of it? What does the adoption look like? And another aspect, you know, the last couple years, everybody thinks about cost savings. You’re hearing a lot from various boards of directors and the things and pressures where we need to cut 10 % of our costs. We need to cut 10 % of our vendor space. But one thing that isn’t really thought about a lot of times is team enablement.

What are some of the tools and techniques that help manage IT decisions, control and compliance?

I have certain guiding principles that I implement in any program that I come into. One of them is standardization. It is so painful to manage an organization in an ad hoc way. You’re constantly having to reinvent. Things are constantly being missed. If you’re reliant on manual or human intervention, it’s very hard to be consistent. Sometimes a security group gets completely messed and security doesn’t get a seat at the table.

A benefit you can get with Productiv is we’ve built in a no-code workflow editor to be able to standardize and automate the workflow process for things like intake of new providers, renewals of your SaaS portfolio applications. And so, some of the tools that you can do is even without us. Obviously, I’m here as a big supporter of productive. We use it internally as well. But even before that, if you don’t have a defined process in place, bring in your various leaders, bring in your head of finance, bring in your head of IT, bring in your head of information security, get a whiteboard. I’m a big proponent of whiteboarding and markers, to break out the markers and just start documenting what you think your process is or what you think it should be.

Who should be involved in renewal agreements? Who should have a seat at the table to inform? Does this align with our technology strategy? Do we understand what our financial position is? What can and can’t we sign up for? Who are we empowering to make those decisions? Does your head of finance have to sign off on every expense that comes through? Every vendor that you’re going to renew with, or if it’s under a certain dollar amount, is it up to the functional lead within an organization? Map all those things out, and then see how frequently you’re able to consistently apply and follow that process, or if it is time, if your organization’s grown to the size where it makes sense to bring in a provider to help do those things.

Change management is always hard, people management is always hard. But if you’ve at least sort of mapped out what your ideal process looks like, and then you bring in a tool like Productive, we can do it together, then you can base that process in. It’s repeatable, it’s automated, I get brought to the table every renewal from a security perspective, I get brought to the table every time from an IT perspective. It brings our finance person to the table; we’re having informed decisions and discussions. And then sort of we build process on top of the tool.

Want to learn more about SaaS Management? View the complete webinar here.

Download the State of SaaS Whitepaper here.

ABOUT THE SPONSOR:

Productiv is the only SaaS Management Platform that is integrated into your IT operating systems, bringing you data infused with AI that empowers collaboration, and helps you take action with no-code workflows that scale. Govern with confidence with the answers you need to make smart decisions about how you spend. Founded in 2018 and backed by Accel, IVP, and Norwest Venture Partners, Productiv helps IT, finance, procurement, and business leaders to align around trusted data, get AI powered insights, collaborate, make smarter decisions, and have confidence in every investment, at scale. Visit www.productiv.com to learn more.