So here, we’ll go over:

• The definition of time to value and why it’s crucial
• How to evaluate a SaaS management platform’s time to value
• What helps BetterCloud customers speed time to value to quickly achieve a positive return on investment.

Defining time to value and why it’s important in SaaS

Let’s start off with making sure we have a common understanding on this key metric.

Time to value is simply a measurement of the amount of time from purchase to when you start deriving value. The faster a SaaS management solution solves your problems, the sooner you realize value. 

It’s as easy as that. 

But it can be complicated. 

Why? 

The reason is because to develop time to value calculations, you need a definition of value. And value, of course, is usually unique to each organization. For example, some need a SaaS management platform for:

• Higher productivity
• Speed user lifecycle management
• Improved security
• Reduce operating costs

However, if you’re like most organizations looking to automate SaaS operations with a SaaS management platform, you’ll likely define value in terms of improved productivity.

Evaluating a SaaS management platform’s time to value

When it comes to using a SaaS management platform to increase productivity, there’s a lot that goes into making sure there’s a fast time to value. 

Specifically, there are two main components to time to value– one is related to the product itself, and the second component is around deployment.

Product-related time to value is its ease of use

And, of course, regarding a SaaS management platform’s ease of use, it breaks down into how easy it is to: 

• Navigate and operate, and 
• Create automations.

Deployment-related time to value is ease of setup process

In the world of SaaS management platforms, the ease of setup process breaks down into:

• Certification programs and training
• Knowledge base and active user community
• Professional services packages
• Customer success and support

Some SaaS management platform vendors are better than others. And, according to our customers, BetterCloud delivers on the time-to-value promise.

How BetterCloud brings fast time to value for customers

A few of the key findings from our May 2023 SaaS Management Impact Report was about this very subject. We found that nearly 90% of customers get BetterCloud up and running in less than 6 weeks, with 24% getting the job done in less than a week.

More than half, at 53%, get value from BetterCloud right away, in less than a month.

Fast and painless implementation. No-code workflow creation simplicity. Easy to learn and use. Together, these factors help BetterCloud customers accelerate time to value and grow productivity to achieve fast return on investment.

So now let’s look at each one.

An intuitive UI for great usability and visibility

As soon as you log in to the platform, the BetterCloud dashboard shows the overview of your domain across all connected applications. In a single view, you can quickly see a real-time view of your domain’s status including:

• Critical alerts
• Workflow executions
• File metrics
• User metrics

No code automations available for more than 70 common, market leading SaaS apps

BetterCloud is built to ensure your team has fast time to value. Our SaaS management platform includes: 

• Pre-built integrations for more than 70 of today’s market leading SaaS apps that many organizations use
• Pre-configured workflow templates that leverage best practices in automating activities and policies across the SaaS environment
• Access to 1000+ essential actions and alerts – out-of-the-box – to meet the unique needs of your business

“The Integration Center just happened to match so perfectly to our needs. It checked off all the boxes of the wide umbrella of SaaS applications Ibotta has, so it was an immediate winner off the bat.”

^{Jon Aviles, Senior IT Identity Management Engineer, Ibotta}

In addition, our platform is purpose-built to make creating workflows easy. You can speed development of workflows using BetterCloud’s easy-to-use workflow builder. This way, anyone on your team can create workflows without the need for complex context or coding.

Using a drag and drop approach, your team member uses simple IF/THEN logic to build the workflows that maximize operational efficiency, scale IT impact, and deliver a quick time to value.

Easy extensibility for unique automation needs

As your organization travels the SaaS automation journey, you’ll uncover some unique processes ripe for automation. 

For example, you’ve automated both onboarding and offboarding processes for user lifecycle management. You’ve already automated some SaaS-related help desk tickets, like password or MFA resets or app access requests.

Now you’re ready to automate a unique or custom need. BetterCloud supports flexible workflows with extended triggers and complex arrays using the Platform API.

As for learning to write even the most complex workflows, you’re never alone. 

BetterCloud offers a plethora of resources to help you grow in your automation skills, and assure a fast time to value and quick return on investment.

Abundant training for every skill and budget level

When you become a customer, you get free access to the BetterCloud Flight School. Want to attend live training? Bring your questions because we’ve got you covered with a free, 90-minute overview session led by BetterCloud experts. 

If you prefer to learn on your own time, there’s nearly 5 hours of on-demand video instruction where you can pause and replay and truly learn at your own pace. 

And finally, if you want an intensive online training workshop, we’ve got that too. In just two days, you’ll learn everything you need to know to become an extraordinary BetterCloud administrator. 

These sessions are generally held a few times per month. Then to ensure each attendee gets individual attention, class sizes are limited. 

Our paid training is a great investment. It assures that your company has a fast time to value with the BetterCloud platform. In addition, it’s a valuable course for preparing to become BetterCloud certified.

Find answers using an extensive knowledge base and from a large and loyal SaaSOps Community

And since learning is always a life-long experience, BetterCloud has your back. There’s a large and searchable knowledge base. To particularly ensure a fast time to value, there’s even a section that focuses on getting started on BetterCloud.

Additionally, there’s a large community of experienced BetterCloud users who are always willing to help. Simply join the BetterIT Slack channel and get answers from your peers at other companies, as well as BetterCloud team members.

Acclaimed professional services for successful implementation and configuration

In addition to extensive training options, a detailed knowledge base, and active BetterCloud community, BetterCloud also offers first-class professional services. 

Thanks to BetterCloud’s Executive Advisory Group (EAG) and their professional services offerings, companies get a quick setup for the fastest time to value. Depending on the size of the new BetterCloud user, implementation is done together with a BetterCloud Solutions Consultant. 

For larger companies or those with a more complex SaaS environment, there may be an implementation project manager to keep the deployment tempo up to meet time to value requirements.

If your team has aggressive time to value requirements, BetterCloud professional services will quickly help get you up and running.

Fuel fast deployment with BetterCloud’s great customer success and support teams

Finally, to answer your questions and troubleshoot problems, you can rely on BetterCloud technical support. With an average chat response time of just 15 seconds, our extensive support team can quickly address your questions. Then to make sure you’re getting the most out of your BetterCloud investment, your BetterCloud Customer Success Team is dedicated to help you meet your goals.

Get Fast Time to Value with BetterCloud

At BetterCloud, achieving your maximum operational efficiency – as quickly as possible — is our highest priority. While the mission starts with BetterCloud’s ease of use, it continues by quickly helping your IT team to become BetterCloud experts. 

Take advantage of plentiful options that include:

• Free on-demand training videos
• Live free workshops
• Paid workshops
• Detailed and up-to-date knowledge base
• Active user community on Slack
• Top notch professional services
• Fantastic tech support
• Dedicated customer success teams

In no time, your IT team and entire organization will benefit from better productivity and a quick return on investment.

Do you need a SaaS management platform with a fast time to value? Reach out to get a demo now.

So here, we review:

• The role of the CFO when it comes to buying SaaS management platforms and IT products
• The five main questions a CFO will ask
• How to prepare for making the business case with a CFO advocacy kit

The changing role of financial executives in 2023 IT purchases

With recent shifts in the economic environment, CFOs are increasingly involved in purchases – even at lower value thresholds. For example, during the roaring 2021/2022 IT investment boom, IT has more latitude to invest without the strong involvement of finance leadership. 

Now, those days are gone. 

According to early 2023 CFO magazine research, 84% said they expect to be more involved in developing technology strategy than they were in 2022. In addition, more than a third of those are expected to be “significantly” more involved.

So, while IT might expect more scrutiny from the numbers team, that same research also had some good news for IT regarding budgets. Most finance leaders expect to increase IT budgets, and Gartner agrees. 

Even though Gartner revised their 2023 projection downward, they still expect the average company IT budget to grow in the 4.5% range. As for software budgets, they are expected to grow by about 9%.

Thus, it’s clear that your next task is to make your great business case to the CFO. Without it, you probably won’t get too far. 

So now, let’s talk about how to build a winning case for a SaaS management platform.

Selling a SaaS Management Platform Investment to the CFO

Before you schedule a meeting, you need to prepare your answers for some important questions. Specifically, you should come with answers for:

1. Is a SaaS management platform currently budgeted? Or is it an upcoming budget item for our next fiscal year?
2. Why does your organization need a SaaS management platform?
3. How does this software map, directly and/or indirectly, to the company’s strategic imperatives? 
4. Why should we get one now? 
5. What would happen if we did not invest in a SaaS management platform?

So now, let’s take these questions one by one.

1. Make the CFO aware that you have a SaaS management platform in the budget

No one likes surprises. Especially financial leadership.

With technology purchases under renewed scrutiny, make sure you know the total required investment (including deployment and your expected time-to-value) and that your IT team plans for it. 

A SaaS management platform is critical enterprise IT infrastructure, and its automation is a competitive necessity for efficient operations. Therefore, if you don’t have it in this quarter’s budget, you most certainly should include it in your next quarterly budget cycle.

2. Tie the need for a SaaS management platform to your enterprise IT priorities

Some organizations might choose a SaaS management platform to scale IT impact by automating day-to-day operations or user lifecycle management. Others deploy one to improve visibility of the more than 130 SaaS apps the average organization uses.

Some organizations implement a SaaS management platform to improve SaaS spend management, improve security, and apply security policy consistently across the SaaS environment. Meanwhile, some companies might need one to improve their ability to prove compliance.

Finally, some companies benefit from all the SaaS management platform use cases (and eliminate 78% of the work along the way). Thus, to make a winning business case to the CFO, be clear on how much this crucial technology will benefit your organization.

3. Show how a SaaS management platform aligns with corporate strategic imperatives

Nearly all organizations buy a new IT product to save money, become more efficient, or more secure. Perhaps your company needs all three?

Before you approach your CFO, it’s necessary to know the organization’s financial and strategic goals and determine how a SaaS management platform best supports those goals.

4. Communicate why you need a SaaS management platform now

New efficiency is a heightened need in today’s inflationary times. If your company is rapidly growing, then without a SaaS management platform, manual work multiplies with each new employee. 

To manage, you must hire more expensive, hard-to-find, and harder-to-keep IT talent.

And if you’re not quickly adding headcount, surfacing new operational efficiencies by automating day-to-day SaaS-related help desk operations and user lifecycle management can help keep costs in line, and profit margins stable. 

So, the key piece of advice here is to know and share the near-term and longer-term gains from deploying a SaaS management platform now.

5. Explain how delaying a SaaS management platform keeps IT less efficient, more expensive, and impedes overall competitiveness

Invariably, your finance executives will want to know the impact of postponing SaaS management platform implementation.

Automating the SaaS environment is a journey. It exponentially grows organizational efficiency the more you automate, and the better your orchestrated workflows become. 

Every day you put it off, is a day where your competitor accelerates its own operational efficiencies. In a matter of months, your company could be suffering a serious competitive disadvantage.

To be successful, be prepared to make sure the CFO understands that there’s a steep cost of inaction.

Getting started on your winning business case to the CFO

Here at BetterCloud, we know how hard it is to articulate your business case. 

That’s why we created the SaaS Management Impact Report and our CFO Advocacy Kit. To help you make a winning business case to finance executive leadership, we created a comprehensive playbook on how to build a business case.

Our playbook goes into detail in how you can prove operational efficiency and cost savings that results from using a SaaS management platform. In addition, it provides step-by-step guidance quantifying the unique value automation would provide to your company.

Finally, The CFO Advocacy Kit also includes a short business case template that you can complete and present to your CFO, as well as a sample email to get the conversation on automating SaaS management off to a great start. Download yours now.

Read on to learn:

• Overall productivity improvements your IT team gets from using a SaaS management platform
• How adding automation muscle becomes a true force multiplier in user lifecycle management
• How starting now pays off fast 

Take productivity to new heights

With an average of 130 SaaS apps, effective SaaS management is more important now than ever. 

Thanks to countless, never-ending user lifecycle tasks needed for protecting the ever-growing expanse of sensitive data, the effort for managing it all is accelerating.

With proper user lifecycle management and security controls in place, organizations can then:

• Maximize operational efficiency 
• Accelerate employee productivity 
• Scale IT impact

To achieve these benefits, organizations across all industries and sizes now rely on SaaS management platforms – capable of automation and purpose-built for IT, of course.

But just how much does this crucial technology benefit?

Let’s first consider two important data points:

1. 93% of BetterCloud customers say the primary business benefit of a SaaS management platform is improved operational productivity
2. By adopting a SaaS management platform, on average, customers experience a 49% increase in overall IT productivity

Such improvement results from getting the most out of a SaaS management platform. In fact, organizations that enjoy the highest levels of improved productivity automate routine tasks like user lifecycle management, as well as day-to-day operational tasks like app access requests or password/MFA resets to essentially create self-service portals for end users.

If your IT team faces these challenges, then, the sooner you adopt a SaaS management platform, the faster you benefit. 

To convince you, we’ll go into how a SaaS management platform impacts user lifecycle management, a key SaaS management task.

Improve productivity with automated user lifecycle management – while boosting security

Of course, boosting productivity means saving time, which then translates to saving money. 

Let’s look at how.

In BetterCloud research conducted in spring 2023, SaaS management platform users with a few hundred employees save about 1,700 hours – about 82% of a full-time team member – by automating user lifecycle management alone. 

Of course, it’s important to remember that time spent for onboarding and offboarding varies based on the actual numbers of employees added and removed from corporate resources. 

Thus, for a big company with thousands of employees, automating user lifecycle management will save that company many, many thousands of hours.

So now, time to examine the broader business case for a SaaS management platform.

Automating user lifecycle management delivers significant IT productivity gains

Let’s revisit the scenario of a company with approximately 300 employees. Specifically focusing on the offboarding process, let’s examine organizations that have already completed nearly all of it.

With 18% turnover, we assume that it takes 3 hours to offboard one employee, and over the course of a year, it requires 162 hours to complete the same, error-prone, boring tasks to offboard all departing users.

In conservative estimates of dollars and cents, an organization loses $10,000 worth of time in offboarding tasks that could be automated.

And that’s not all. 

In many cases, IT must onboard every replacement for departed users. And that’s another $10,000 of valuable time lost to the same old, error-prone manual tasks. 

Now, we’re up to a conservative estimate of $20,000 in time spent on onboarding and offboarding tasks that could be automated.

So, if your company struggles to provide Day 1 onboarding, find the right IT skills, or wants to provide a better IT employee experience, then automating using a SaaS management platform will provide big productivity gains. 

How, then, does the business case change when adding other benefits?

SaaS license reclamation and security strengthens the business case

As part of performing the actual lifecycle management tasks, IT must reclaim and redeploy all SaaS licenses. After all, an asset is only productive when it’s in use. 

In addition,  in order to ensure maximum security, IT must perfectly perform all manual steps. However, nothing, except automation, guarantees a mistake-free offboarding.

SaaS license waste is too high.

By failing to completely offboard a former user, SaaS license waste is bound to occur. 

Unused, unproductive licenses are an enormous cost, and we’ll illustrate it with an example.

If you pay $40 per month of 162 dormant licenses, then in just two months, you’re losing nearly $13,000. Over the course of a year, left untouched, those license fees mount, needlessly costing you almost $80,000.

Once again, unproductive SaaS licenses highlight the need for a SaaS management platform.

Security risk reduction makes the business case a slam dunk. 

One more cost heightens the need for a SaaS management platform now – security. 

After all, despite the best intentions, manual offboarding is a haphazard process and mistakes are easily made. And when they happen, former users can retain access to your apps and data, introducing enormous risk until the mistake is uncovered and corrected. 

Too many times, manual offboarding mistakes don’t surface until there’s a breach, and breaches are very, very expensive.

Using the 2019 Verizon Data Breach Investigation Report data, the average cost per breach per employee is $3,553. 

To be conservative, let’s estimate that it’s only $353 in per employee breach costs. A single breach from erroneous manual offboarding will cost that company of 300 employees more than $100,000.  

If we take that initial Verizon estimate of $3,553 into consideration, then a single breach could cost more than a million dollars. 

Thus, for risk reduction alone, your company needs a SaaS management platform now.

But for user lifecycle management alone, total up the potential:

• IT productivity boost
• Elimination of unproductive SaaS licenses
• Risk reduction

You can’t help but conclude that the costs of delaying automating with a SaaS management platform are simply too high and impede productivity.

You Need a SaaS Management Platform Now, Not Later

The costs of inaction are steep, particularly considering that a SaaS management platform is quickly operational. In fact, about 90% of customers are operational in less than 6 weeks. 

In addition, more than half of SaaS management platform users start seeing value in less than one month. 

The secret behind the speedy deployment and time-to-value is BetterCloud. 

BetterCloud’s easy-use, no-code workflow engine offers IT teams a quick way to start automating processes. To get your workflows off and running, there’s also: 

• An award-winning professional services team 
• Free on-demand training videos
• Live training and workshops

For initial deployment, a dedicated team of implementation specialists provide hands-on, tailored services and best practices from hundreds of successful engagements.

Operating without a SaaS management platform has a high cost, and with BetterCloud’s quick deployment and time-to-value, waiting doesn’t make sense. 

You need, and should, implement a SaaS management platform. Now. Request a demo.

By maximizing agility and efficiency through effective SaaS management, IT can unlock untapped potential and create new opportunities for value creation.

But how exactly does SaaS management impact IT departments? And how does it benefit the business, more broadly speaking?

Using customer data, we set out to answer those questions. Our new report reveals the measurable efficiencies, ROI, and impacts of SaaS management—so join us as we dive into some of the biggest takeaways and findings. 

Effective SaaS management eliminates thousands of hours of manual IT work

Effective SaaS management starts with automation.

To do so, IT teams rely on SaaS management platforms to automate user lifecycle management and day-to-day operations, as well as enforce security policies in a multi-SaaS environment.

Our report found that automating with BetterCloud’s SaaS management platform eliminates thousands of hours of manual IT work. On average:  

All told, between on- and offboarding alone, the total average IT time savings is about 1,700 extra hours per year. 

What kinds of strategic, innovative IT projects could you work on with 1,700 extra hours?

Quick time to value: ROI from effective SaaS management in less than a month

Ease of use. Quick implementation. No-code workflow creation simplicity. 

All of these factors help customers accelerate time to value and achieve fast ROI: 

Ensuring that company investments are actually driving value has become increasingly critical, especially in times of economic uncertainty.

SaaS management accelerates productivity for the entire organization

Eliminating manual SaaS management work means accelerated productivity (for everyone!). By using a SaaS management platform like BetterCloud, customers estimated: 

While effective SaaS management results in substantial productivity gains for IT, end users also reap the benefits by getting what they need more quickly and easily.

Download the full report to learn:

• How SaaS management platforms impact security and compliance
• How much productivity improvement an organization can expect from a SaaS management platform
• The strategic projects your peers are working on now by automating more

Grab the full report right here.

To learn more about how BetterCloud can help you eliminate up to 78% of your SaaS management work, request a demo.

In our 2023 State of SaaSOps survey, we interviewed 700 IT practitioners of all levels about their challenges, how they measured their work, and their plans for the coming year. You can read many of our findings and download the report at stateofsaasops.bettercloud.com.

In this blog post, we take a closer look at the data to get a sense of the “state of the help desk” in 2023. SaaS management and user lifecycle management present a number of challenges, and many are shared by senior IT management (CIOs and VPs), mid-level managers, and individual contributors. But when it comes to measurement and metrics, there were some clear differences in the priorities of each.

Consistently managing app configurations throughout the user lifecycle is a top challenge for everyone

No matter what their job title was, the top challenge respondents needed to solve was being able to consistently manage app configurations. It makes a lot of sense, as SaaS stacks just keep getting larger—up to an average of 130 apps in 2022. Provisioning numerous accounts and ensuring sure employees have the right level of access can be extremely time consuming and error prone with all those open tabs.

File-sharing apps are a particular headache, as they have so many different file, user, and group settings. Getting them right for every new employee (or employee who is moving internally) can lead to endless open tabs and numerous tickets when configurations and permissions need to change. 

This is why it’s so important to equip your IT team with a SaaS management platform like BetterCloud. Deep integrations with the apps in your stack enable you to use one central location to update configurations across numerous accounts. You can also create automated workflows to make changes and updates automatically, such as when a new employee joins the company.

Senior IT leaders need visibility; other IT team members want to automate more tickets

After managing app configurations, the next most important challenges senior IT leaders needed to solve were related to visibility. The second-highest ranked challenge senior IT leaders faced was getting visibility into all user activity, data files, and folders, and a very close third was knowing all SaaS apps in use. 

When a SaaS stack grows large enough, visibility becomes a major problem. Shadow IT usage proliferates for many reasons, including well-intentioned employees just trying to be more productive. However, this leads to company data being left in multiple locations, especially if several different file-sharing apps are in use. It’s no surprise that senior leaders continue to struggle to get a complete picture of their environment.

The second-most important challenge to solve for IT individual contributors and mid-level IT managers was more closely related to their day-to-day operations: they want to automate more SaaS management tasks and help desk ticket resolutions. This makes sense, as the rise of remote work and increase in app usage has led some help desks to the point of meltdown.

A SaaS management platform like BetterCloud offers several ways for IT teams to solve their challenges with visibility and automation. An SMP’s no-code workflow builder can create zero-touch automations with ease, providing a way to reduce the number of tickets that need a manual response by 50% or more. The centralized visibility offered by an SMP also gives IT a more complete picture of their environment, including apps being accessed by OAuth.

Senior IT cares about customer satisfaction, but other IT staff just want to reduce the number of tickets

When it came to the most important measurements and metrics, there were clear differences between senior IT leaders and the rest of their IT teams. In many ways, their priorities reflect how their roles are evolving to meet today’s challenges.

In our survey, we found that senior IT leaders found that customer satisfaction as shown by their Net Promoter Score was their first most important metric. The second-most important metric was mean time to resolution (MTTR), or how fast a ticket was resolved. In today’s help desk, leaders are placing a priority on resolving issues quickly to accelerate employee productivity. 

For the other levels of IT, their #1 metric was reducing the number of help or service desk tickets. Today’s IT teams are very focused on “getting to zero” in the ticket queue. With tools like SMPs, the perennially elusive zero ticket queue has gotten much closer in reach, with its ability to automatically resolve incoming help desk tickets.

Conclusion

During these lean economic times, IT is being pushed to be more efficient in an attempt to save costs and boost bottom lines. Shadow IT, endless ticket queues, and consistently configuring an ever-increasing tech stack have become top of mind challenges for today’s help desks. It’s now more critical than ever to equip your IT team with the platform they need to address and overcome these challenges— without adding headcount.

SaaS management platforms, with their robust, easy-to-use automation engines can be a force multiplier for IT. They enable IT to automate up to 78% of their SaaS management tasks, including user lifecycle management and help desk ticket resolution. To learn more about how an SMP like BetterCloud can transform your help desk, schedule a demo today.

Over the last year we’ve had our leadership on G2’s quarterly grids confirmed quarter after quarter, and we are excited that this recognition has put us on G2’s annual “best-of” list. What makes this recognition so unique is that it’s based on feedback we received from actual IT professionals who have used the platform, engaged with our team, and seen the value that we can deliver. 

Amid economic uncertainty over the last year, one thing has remained clear: the investment in a SaaS management platform remains key to IT success. Our platform eliminates up to 78% of manual SaaS management work by automating user lifecycle processes and day-to-day operations. This remains a game changer for IT teams as they look to optimize their operations by reducing manual ULM work and helpdesk tickets.

How BetterCloud stacks up

G2 uses a combination of Satisfaction and Market Presence scores to rank software companies on its platform. From there, the top 100 companies are ranked based on reviews they received across all categories they’re a part of. 

Last year, an overwhelming number of verified BetterCloud customers left us reviews on G2’s platform and named us a leader across eight product categories. As a result, we received recognition in three categories of G2’s Best Software lists, including:

• BetterCloud voted #15 on G2’s list of Best Security Products
• BetterCloud voted #21 on G2’s list of Best Products for the Enterprise
• BetterCloud voted #46 on G2’s list of Best ​​IT Management Products

We want to express a huge thank you to our customer reviewers. You provide the validation that BetterCloud is a leader in the SMP space (and beyond!), and we would not be included in this prestigious list without all of your feedback.

We were floored by some of our recent G2 reviews, especially at the ways customers consistently received value from BetterCloud.

Phrases like “giving time back to our IT team,” “integrate a large majority of our systems into one,” and “makes onboarding and offboarding that much easier” appear often. This latest award from G2 confirms that BetterCloud is helping IT pros automate, secure, and eliminate manual work that can block bigger priorities.

If you left us a review over the last twelve months, thank you again for sharing your thoughts about BetterCloud with G2’s community. If you haven’t, it’s not too late. We’d love to hear from you. If you can spare just a couple of minutes, please leave us a review here.

Want to learn more about why BetterCloud ranks so highly on G2’s Best Software 2023 List? Click here to schedule a demo.

Lately, it seems like the only constant for IT is change. From the pandemic, to labor market shifts, to inflation and fears of a recession, the last few years have been a wild ride for everyone. A recent Gartner survey shows that despite the current economic turmoil, 69% of CEOs are still planning to increase spending on digital technologies. However, this comes with high expectations for IT. CIOs are being asked to accelerate time to value on these new investments, which include SaaS and other cloud-based services. 

While spending may be projected to increase, no one is immune from the ongoing mandate of operational efficiency. While IT has long been pushed to be as lean and cost-efficient as possible, other departments and processes are now being asked to improve operational efficiency as well. 

IT is still primarily responsible for a SaaS tech stack that just keeps getting larger, but they are now also increasingly responsible for business-critical digital transformation initiatives. This places a big burden on IT teams, who almost never get headcount even as expectations increase.

IT leaders must find a way to keep up ongoing, day-to-day IT tasks and tickets while implementing new tools and solutions that drive greater business value. 

This is why strategies and tools that improve operational efficiency have become more important than ever. A SaaS management platform like BetterCloud gives your team multiple ways to save time with quick insights, intelligent alerting, and easy-to-build automated workflows. With 70+ out of the box integrations and 1,000+ actions to automate, you can keep building more efficiency over time. 

In our latest guide, we discuss the four key ways to drive your IT operational efficiency that don’t take months to implement. We’ll take you through the biggest time-savers, so you can focus on the strategic, business-critical technology projects that boost productivity and improve bottom lines. 

Download the guide to learn how to:

1. Gain real-time visibility and control with centralized management
2. Automate user lifecycle management for the biggest, fastest time savings
3. Automate SaaS security to create a self-healing environment
4. Create self-service forms to reduce the number of incoming tickets
5. Metrics for measuring operational efficiency

SaaS usage has exploded since the beginning of 2020, but with all the collaborative benefits software-as-a-service (SaaS) and cloud services present, new challenges abound. IT professionals must adapt to threats like unsanctioned apps, data loss, and insider threats. 

In today’s cloud-first, work-from-anywhere environment, employees are increasingly likely to access sensitive materials outside company headquarters—which means that SaaS data security is one of the top priorities for IT teams of all sizes. While this is a daunting challenge, a zero-touch IT mindset can ensure SaaS security while also freeing up IT to become a strategic part of the business. 

I know what you’re thinking. What is zero-touch IT? As we recently wrote, a zero-touch approach aims to remove every manual touchpoint to orchestrate entire IT processes. SaaS enables seamless collaboration between users, both within and outside the organization, and this modern IT approach assures granular access can be secured without sacrificing productivity or security.

This guide contains an exhaustive overview of some of the best SaaS security best practices, and how a zero-touch IT mindset can enable them.

The Unique Challenges of SaaS Security

The four biggest security challenges created by SaaS are:

• File security
• Insider threats
• Gaining visibility into your SaaS environment
• Enforcing least privilege access policies

Let’s explore each in further detail.

1. File security

Before we dig into the long-term benefits of automated IT, the foundations of SaaS security bear repeating.

SaaS is here to stay. We’re all working in the cloud, and that means our sensitive data is everywhere. Credit card numbers, passwords, intellectual property, confidential customer data…the list goes on and on. 

SaaS apps are empowering to users because they make it easy to share files with collaborators within the company, and more worrying, outside your organization. Users can configure file-sharing permissions on their own. Unsurprisingly, this can lead to unwanted issues like compliance violations and data breaches. A user might share a file publicly because it makes collaboration easier, not realizing that the file may now be indexed by Google in real-time, and therefore available to the public. Keeping track of these sensitive file exchanges is not easy, at least not with traditional IT security methods. 

No one wants to send out press releases about data breaches that happened under their watch. Huge SaaS vendors like Microsoft, HubSpot, and Okta have all been victimized by SaaS cyber attacks in 2022. All this goes to show how important it is to be aware of what choices your users are making within apps. This necessitates automated alerts to risky configurations and automated remedies.

2. The risk of insider threats to your SaaS security

According to BetterCloud’s 2021 State of SaaSOps study, an overwhelming 72% of IT professionals believe that well-meaning, yet negligent employees pose the biggest data loss threats. In contrast, far fewer people feel the biggest threat is from malicious employees (20%) or hackers (8%). Maybe it’s allowing an outside contractor onto the company Slack account. Maybe it’s sharing something via Dropbox over an unsecured network. Employees should be schooled in SaaS security best practices – that much is clear – but it’s at the IT level where these measures need to take root.

3. Gaining visibility into your SaaS environment

Once you take a peek under the hood of your company’s SaaS engine, there’s a good chance you’ll be shocked by what you find. When the pandemic hit during the first quarter of 2020, companies quickly amassed SaaS apps for remote work, thinking they’d only need them for a few weeks. As we all know, that “few weeks” evolved into a lasting reality, and those SaaS applications – even the forgotten ones! – are most likely still there, and perhaps compromised over time. More than half (55%) of respondents in BetterCloud’s 2021 State of SaaSOps study said their biggest challenge was a lack of visibility into user activity and data.

Since these unsanctioned apps can’t be seen by IT teams, it’s virtually impossible to secure and manage them properly. This can make them quite risky. Proper SaaSOps process and solutions can keep track of how these apps are being used, their permissions, and their data read/write authorizations.

4. The challenge of enforcing least privilege access policies

The more access an admin has within your infrastructure, the more they put you at risk if their account becomes compromised. Hence, the importance of least privilege access, or in layman’s terms, granting users the minimum permissions needed to perform their roles. 

It sounds simple, but the terms for certain admin roles and distribution lists often vary from app to app, making least privilege access difficult to discern. Some apps simply don’t allow a great deal of variation from admin to admin. However, better SaaS management platforms (SMPs) allow IT teams to be much more exact with the access they grant. Using BetterCloud as an SMP, a typical customer in 2021 was able to implement a least privilege access model that reduced the number of users with super admin access from 15 to 3.

Why do all these SaaS security challenges exist?

It has a lot to do with that paradigm shift that occurred in early 2020. The old IT model employed the so-called “castle and moat” approach – the “moat” protecting company infrastructure from outside unknowns. But with the advent of SaaS, that moat disappeared, since employees had the ability to easily share sensitive data outside the company, often over unsecured networks such as home Wi-Fi. Today, effective IT can’t just control the perimeter; its watchful eye must permeate all apps and interactions within the public cloud.

Related: A Zero Trust security model can help protect your SaaS environment. 

To learn more, download our whitepaper: A Guide to Effective SaaS Management Using a Zero Trust Security Model

Now, let’s examine some other kinds of SaaSOps tools and best practices for SaaS security. 

Understanding the types of SaaS security software options available to you:

1. Identity and access management (IAM)

As the expectations of a good IT department shifted post-2020, Identity and Access Management (IAM) emerged as a strong option for automating security in cloud-based work settings. IAM allows IT to control user access to sensitive information within a company on a fully automated basis. The automation factor is a key difference from manual, mistake-prone legacy options; IAM is more secure and allows admins to fine-tune those all-important privilege settings on who gets access to what.

With IAM, companies can use authentication methods such as:

• Unique passwords: lengthy passwords that include randomized letters, symbols, and numbers
• Pre-shared key: passwords shared among users with access to the same materials (not as secure as individual, unique passwords)
• Behavioral identification: artificial intelligence that analyzes a user’s human idiosyncrasies, such as typing and mouse-use habits
• Biometrics: fingerprints, faces, voices, etc. are used to authenticate users (given the highly personal nature of this data, an implementation should be considered very carefully)

2. What is a CASB?

CASBs (short for cloud access security brokers) are another SaaS security software option. According to Gartner, CASBs are on-premises, or cloud-based security policy enforcement points. They stand between cloud service consumers and cloud service providers to combine and add enterprise security policies as cloud-based resources are accessed.

CASBs are employed in a wide range of cloud computing services, including PaaS, IaaS, and of course, SaaS, where they’re used for data security, asset encryption, inline blocking of shared assets, and network security.

3. What role does a CASB play in SaaS security?

It’s useful to compare CASBs to SMPs since they both enforce SaaS security in different ways. The role of CASBs extends well beyond SaaS, and unlike SaaS-focused SMPs, their response to a security threat tends to be less nuanced. Admins using CASBs can set triggers (such as when a new user appears on the network), but lacking the granularity of SMPs, CASBs are prone to over-enforcing these triggers and bringing workflow to a halt. SMPs, however, offer smarter, workflow-friendly solutions without sacrificing security measures.

The need for a flexible SaaS security solution

Every company is different, so it’s up to IT and security teams to implement a SaaS security program that makes sense for the company’s day-to-day needs. What triggers should your security platforms be on alert for? What actions will those triggers activate, and how will relevant team members be notified? Zero-touch IT and automation have facilitated all this immensely, but it’s up to IT to use those tools to build a security threat game plan. Additionally, data encryption and two-factor authentication (e.g., entering your password and then receiving an additional access code via your mobile device) are increasingly common methods to protect data. And all employees should be trained in the basics of data encryption and data security, such as how to recognize a phishing email.

Regardless of where you’re at, adopting zero-touch IT will optimize reaching the goals we’ve outlined in this guide. Start by keeping track of what issues are most frequently leading to tickets – these are the issues you’ll want to prioritize automating once you’ve got the hang of things. In the meantime, tools like BetterCloud Manage – with no advanced scripting or programming required – can make tasks like employee onboarding/offboarding zero-touch right away for IT and security teams. From there, you can move to automate additional SaaS priorities, which we’ll reiterate below.

Best practices: SaaS security checklist

Maintain a secure infrastructure:

• Establish your organization’s culture and risk tolerance
• Implement IAM/IDaaS to facilitate access and authentication to all SaaS apps and minimize friction for end users
• Ensure your data is always encrypted
• Implement two-factor identification (2FA)
• Train users on SaaS security, including identifying phishing attacks and the importance of 2FA
• Create an incident response plan
• Implement SaaS management in conjunction with traditional security services
• Build dynamic Data Loss Prevention (DLP) policies to protect sensitive data from being lost, misused, or accessed by unauthorized users
• Build customizable workflows so responses are in accordance with your security policies and guidelines

Proactively secure data by monitoring for:

• Exposure of sensitive information such as PII, PHI, passwords, and encryption keys (either publicly or externally shared)
• Corporate emails that are automatically forwarded to a personal email account (e.g., Gmail, Yahoo)
• Users who should no longer have access to specific files, folders, calendars, etc. (e.g., consultants, interns, or employees who’ve switched teams)
• Suspicious activity related to data theft, like unusually large file downloads within a short time period
• Sensitive files being shared with a competitor
• Email forwarding from specific users to email addresses outside your domain
• Specific file types being publicly or externally shared (e.g., spreadsheets and PDFs are more likely to contain sensitive information)
• Sensitive folder paths, like accounting or finance, being publicly or externally shared
• Choices users are making in apps, such as making public cloud databases

Gain visibility and control:

• Enforce least privilege with granular access control
• Remain aware of all apps running on the corporate network, sanctioned or unsanctioned, and eliminate blind spots
• Identify tools that authenticate using your domain
• Audit permissions that employees grant to unauthorized SaaS
• Compare permissions to your established data governance that defines who within an organization has authority and control over data assets and how those data assets may be used
• Secure user interactions inside of SaaS apps
• Continuously monitor for policy violations and remediate them if any are detected

A few final thoughts

SaaS data security is a tricky challenge for even the most experienced IT professionals – just look at how much has changed in the past two years! But by using the SaaS security best practices in this guide, coupled with an SMP/zero-touch IT approach, you can secure your organization for years to come. Now is the time to transform your technology team from ticket-takers to strategic leaders of your business! 

The pandemic forever changed the modern workplace. Throughout 2019, SaaS adoption was already exploding. Managing all that SaaS left IT with endless open tabs, growing ticket queues, and a whole new set of security challenges. 

But in early 2020, “shelter in place” orders required offices to close. In just a matter of days, IT had to enable remote work for entire workforces. New tools were frantically put in place. Everyone suddenly needed Zoom, a laptop, and a secure, reliable internet connection just to have a meeting. IT had to hustle, scramble, and work overtime to support remote workers—all while working remotely themselves.

Getting through the pandemic required a heroic effort from IT. However, much of the extra effort had to continue after offices reopened, because not everyone came back. To retain workers and attract new talent, many companies permanently chose to become hybrid or even go fully remote. 

This “new normal” is a double whammy for IT. Managing a large SaaS portfolio was already straining lean IT teams. Supporting a permanently remote workforce added a whole new set of demands—from shipping laptops to answering tickets coming in across time zones and continents. 

While SaaS management platforms (SMPs) have been around for several years, IT has never needed one more than now. With an SMP:

• IT can get back desperately-needed time by automating onboarding, offboarding, app access request tickets, and more.
• Environments can be kept safe from the actions of negligent employees (and even malicious actors) with alert-based workflows that revoke OAuth access, unshare files, and block the creation of super admin accounts.
• Remote employees stay productive with immediate access to shared resources and new apps.

When fully implemented, an SMP can make life better for IT in weeks—not months. Over time, more processes are automated, security posture improves, ticket queues become manageable, and app visibility enables smart purchasing.

Every year, the ROI of an SMP continues to grow. To keep up with the new demands of “remote-first” workplaces, an SMP has now become a foundational tool for IT.

With the need for an SMP becoming more urgent as workplaces evolve, you need to make sure you select the right one for your IT team. The market for SMPs (and other point solutions) has grown crowded, with lots of tools claiming to offer the same capabilities. 

To make sure you get the right solution for your environment, we created this helpful, comprehensive checklist to make sure the tool you choose:

• Is purpose-built for IT (not finance, procurement, or engineering)
• Includes a workflow builder your team can actually use
• Will deliver benefits across your company (not just for IT)
• Doesn’t cost more time than it saves

A disgruntled employee can cause major damage if their access isn’t completely revoked immediately after they are terminated.

What can happen when employees aren’t offboarded fast enough

Five months after he was terminated, a former Cisco employee accessed a critical AWS-hosted system. While inside, he deleted 456 virtual machines, shutting down more than 16,000 WebEx Teams accounts for nearly two weeks. The shutdown cost Cisco roughly $1.4 million in employee time for remediation and over $1 million in customer refunds.

A credit union fired a part-time employee, and two days later she remotely accessed a file server. She deleted more than 20,000 files and almost 3,500 directories—a whopping 21.3 gigabytes of data that included mortgage applications and anti-ransomware software. The credit union has since spent approximately $10,000 in remediation.

“Her petty revenge not only created a huge security risk for the bank, but customers also depending on paperwork and approvals to pay for their homes were left scrambling,” stated FBI Assistant Director-in-Charge Michael J. Driscoll.  “An insider threat can wreak just as much havoc, if not more, than an external criminal.”

An HR manager was fired from a professional services company in Manhattan. Just hours after she was escorted off the premises, she logged into a company system remotely and deleted over 17,000 job applications and resumes—all of the data in the system. Her employer had to spend over $100,000 to investigate, respond publicly, and rebuild its system. The company will never recover all the data it lost.

No one ever wants anything like this to happen at their company, let alone be the IT person responsible for offboarding and revoking access. The good news: You can prevent these types of incidents by automating your employee offboarding process.

With automated employee offboarding, you can revoke access to apps, devices, and shared resources in minutes. To avoid any type of delay, you can even start the process instantly by completing a form or submitting a ticket. That way, no time is spent waiting for IT to start the offboarding process when access needs to be revoked fast.

In this article, we’ll discuss everything you need to know to start automating your offboarding process. We’ll answer the following questions for you:

• What tool should I use to automate the offboarding process?
• How do I build an automated workflow for offboarding employees?
• How do I create a zero-touch workflow to offboard a departing employee as quickly as possible?

What tool should I use to automate my offboarding process?

There are more tools in the market every day that claim to offer “easy-to-use” automation functionality. Because the benefits of automating HR processes are so numerous, more and more providers are seeking to offer those capabilities.

From iPaaS to IDaaS with automation add-ons, wading through the options for automation can seem like a daunting prospect. However, if you want to make sure anyone on your IT team is able to create and manage workflows with minimal ramp time, a SaaS management platform (SMP) is an optimal choice. 

An SMP like BetterCloud ingests and analyzes metadata from all the apps it is connected to. BetterCloud can then use this operational intelligence to make workflows simpler and easier to manage—even for long, complex processes like offboarding an employee. 

Once an automated workflow is created to offboard an employee, it is critical to keep it up to date. You don’t want to leave any departing employees access to any company app or shared resource, even if it was recently rolled out. 

An overly complex automation tool can introduce costly delays if updating an offboarding workflow takes a long time or requires specialized, outside help. Choosing an SMP like BetterCloud ensures that anyone on your IT team can update critical workflows with a minimum of effort. When a workflow can be updated in minutes, you can be sure departing employees won’t retain access to newly-adopted apps, systems, and resources.

How do I build an automated workflow for offboarding employees?

Now that we’ve discussed what tool to use, the next step is to take a closer look at your current offboarding process to get it ready for automation. We recommend spending some time to answer the following questions: 

1. Where are all the possible places that users might store data? You might assume that most employees rely on Google Drive, but you might also discover that they’re keeping documents in applications such as Dropbox, Office 365, or even Zoom for recordings. 
2. What is your source of truth? Is it an HRIS or an IdP like Okta, OneLogin, or Azure AD? Knowing your source of truth will enable you to create a consistent and repeatable trigger to start your offboarding process. 
3. How do HR and the manager want to handle things like delegation, auto-replies, and email forwarding? Do managers need to be granted email access to their departing employees? Documents? What other gaps need to be considered? 
4. What’s the time period for deprovisioning licenses? Do you want to keep email access for 30 days? What are the retention requirements?

Once you have these answers, you are ready to start creating your offboarding workflow in BetterCloud. Our eBook, “Death by 1,000 Tabs: How IT Can Optimize the Offboarding Process in a SaaS Management Platform,” includes a deep dive into the anatomy of a complete offboarding workflow. To get a closer look at how to build an offboarding workflow in BetterCloud, complete with screenshots and step-by-step instructions, download the eBook.

To take a closer look at how an IT team at a company that uses a lot of SaaS automates offboarding, watch episode six of the SaaSOps show: “Supercharged Offboarding with BetterCloud and an IDP.” In this video, three IT team members, including an automation engineer, discuss how they approach offboarding, and demonstrate how they’ve built their offboarding workflow in BetterCloud.

With an SMP like BetterCloud, you save even more time by building your offboarding workflow with a pre-built workflow template. With BetterCloud’s offboarding template, you can simply modify the workflow to meet your needs—while making sure you are following current best practices. This way, you won’t have to create your workflow from scratch, especially if your IT environment uses a lot of “best in breed” SaaS, such as Google Workspace, Slack, and Zoom.

How do I create a zero-touch workflow to offboard a departing employee as quickly as possible?

As the “nightmare scenarios” we discussed above have shown, you can’t waste any time when offboarding employees. With so much sensitive company data at their fingertips, you want to revoke access as soon as possible after an employee’s departure.

With BetterCloud, you can set up your workflow to “kick off” from a ticket or form submission, removing the need for any manual work by IT. This way, someone in HR, or even the departing employee’s manager, can simply fill out a form or complete a ticket to immediately begin the offboarding process. Watch the video below to learn how to set this up with Jira and BetterCloud.

For additional details on how to optimize offboarding and other workflows, check out our recent ebook, “Cheat Your Way to IT Success with Zero Touch Automation.” In it, you will find everything you need to create offboarding workflows that can be started quickly and easily—and outside of IT.

It is true that automating your offboarding process can be a huge time-saver for your IT department—especially if they are currently performing all the steps manually. Automated offboarding also prevents an unhappy departing employee from destroying data, stealing customer lists, or causing other costly problems. This makes a fully featured SMP a critical tool for both IT and security teams.

To learn more about how an SMP can not only save time through automation, but also keep files secure and your IT environment safe, check out a wealth of security-related resources in our content library.

If you want to see how BetterCloud can keep former employees from accessing sensitive company data with automated offboarding, schedule a demo.