File Repository Management

Law firms have been steadily modernizing their technology stacks over the past several years and a major component of this modernization is moving toward cloud-based document management systems (DMS). Cloud-based DMS – like DropBox, Google Drive, and O365 – offer significant advantages for remote workers and bring new levels of efficiency and productivity to legal professionals. Data from the American Bar Association shows that legal teams are adopting consumer DMS solutions much faster than specialized legal-specific solutions that were relied on in the past.

With the advent of these new technologies comes an increase in the velocity of sensitive content – both in creation and dissemination – that makes it difficult for centralized IT teams to adapt. This is an acute pain felt during offboarding when a legal professional leaves the firm or is reassigned from a matter and visibility into files is lacking. This forces the IT team to be responsible for finding, managing, and retaining critical documents in systems they have little oversight of.

BetterCloud addresses these challenges by empowering IT to gain comprehensive insights into document stewardship across integrated systems among the top cloud DMS providers. It offers robust reporting capabilities, enabling accurate and efficient management of these systems. BetterCloud also facilitates batch operations such as file transfers and file unsharing, streamlining content management during offboarding.

User Lifecycle Management

Law firms are undergoing rapid digital transformation and adopting numerous cloud-based software solutions. This introduces complexity as users require immediate access to multiple SaaS applications and the existing processes may not be mature enough to meet these new business needs, causing inefficiencies and delays.

BetterCloud’s no-code solution empowers lean IT teams to develop automated workflows for onboarding and offboarding processes. By automating these processes, BetterCloud improves time to delivery for IT, enhances adherence to service level agreements (SLAs), and provides an improved – and secure – employee experience. 

BetterCloud’s platform was designed with the most common alerts and templated zero-touch workflows to enable automatic resolution for common IT issues, like password resets and app requests. Customers of BetterCloud have been able to reduce up to 78% of these common IT tasks and deliver real results for their stakeholders.

Application Discovery

Law firms often work with clients who require the use of specific tools that may not be officially supported by the firm’s IT department. This results in users creating accounts and storing sensitive data in disparate systems beyond IT’s control. These environments often surface late in the engagement lifecycle, leading to additional overhead during offboarding processes.

BetterCloud’s application discovery capabilities empower IT teams to proactively identify shadow IT and remediate the usage of unsanctioned systems across the enterprise. Quickly identifying such instances allows the IT team to mitigate security risks and align applications with the firm’s approved solutions. This capability becomes particularly valuable during initiatives like application consolidation, where BetterCloud’s insights facilitate the transition to a more streamlined and controlled IT environment.

Efficient file management and IT operations are critical for law firms to ensure data security, regulatory compliance, and streamlined processes. BetterCloud offers law firms the tools necessary to enhance file repository management, user lifecycle management, and application discovery. By leveraging BetterCloud, law firms can improve accuracy, efficiency, and visibility across their systems, ultimately leading to better file management and data security. Request a demo today to learn more about how BetterCloud can help address the unique needs of your IT team.

Gaining Executive Buy-In

In order to gain executive buy-in to bring BetterCloud into BARK, Grossman calculated how long it took to onboard or offboard an employee manually at the precise moment it needed to be done. In order to complete all these tasks, he would require an additional full time employee on his team. This calculation proved true. BARK saved 2,747 hours of IT time using BetterCloud workflows to automate manual tasks.

“If you’re going to hire more people, it’s going to be a strain on your budget. BetterCloud can make life easy for everybody.”

Elliott explained how streamlining manual tasks with BetterCloud didn’t just satisfy IT needs. The executive team was pleased with the financial savings and the compliance team was relieved to have confirmation that users were being deprovisioned appropriately and in an automated system that avoids human error. Finally, the IT team was building capacity, without building headcount and getting time back to work on strategic projects and improve their knowledge in new areas.

Focusing on Security

Beyond automating manual IT tasks, BARK’s IT organization was focused on security compliance and combating shadow IT within the company. During the webinar Grossman explained that shadow IT occurs when a department invests in an application and manages it themselves, without the approval or knowledge of IT. 

As a public company with compliance top of mind, the IT team needs to ensure these applications are offboarded as well. However, IT often doesn’t have admin rights to these apps. With BetterCloud’s offboarding workflow, IT is able to automate an email that will get sent to the app admin saying that an employee has been terminated, and requests confirmation that access has been revoked. “We have passed compliance every single time on applications we don’t even have our hands in,” said Grossman.

Up-Leveling IT with Expanded Capacity

As an IT leader, Grossman takes on great responsibility for his team, ensuring they are building skills to advance in their career. So what did he have them do with all of their time saved? Gain knowledge in other areas of interest, participate in training, earn certifications, and become proficient through broader IT experiences.

“I want my team to succeed. Denying the opportunity for professional development hurts career growth and makes employees less valuable in the long-term,” Grossman said.

On a personal level, Grossman takes pride in making sure automations are compliant to pass audits, saving his team time, saving the company money, removing the need to hire additional headcount, and retaining the existing talent on his team of three by making sure they enjoy their work. 

“Right now BARK has over 800 employees. I’ve seen the company grow from 300 all the way up. Being able to keep the amazing people on my team around as we scale is key for me,” said Grossman.

Watch the webinar recording here to learn more about the BARK IT automation story.

Ready to learn more about BetterCloud? Request a demo with a BetterCloud product expert today.

A robust user life cycle management (ULM) strategy is essential for retailers to streamline this process and alleviate the burden on IT resources while enabling business productivity and a healthy HR-IT relationship. In this blog post, we will explore the benefits of automating ULM with BetterCloud for IT teams supporting retail seasonal staffing.

Five Benefits of Automated User Lifecycle Management for IT Teams Supporting Retail Seasonal Staffing

1. Streamlined Onboarding and Offboarding Processes: Automated ULM solutions simplify user account provisioning and deprovisioning, reducing administrative overhead and saving time during seasonal hiring in retail.
2. Enhanced Productivity and Reduced Friction: A well-implemented ULM strategy, supported by automation, improves seasonal worker productivity by ensuring seamless access to systems and applications in the retail industry.
3. Mitigated Security Risks: Automated ULM systems enforce consistent access controls and permissions, reducing the risk of unauthorized access and data breaches during retail seasonal staffing.
4. Optimized IT Resource Utilization: Automated ULM solutions optimize IT resource utilization by streamlining processes, allowing IT teams to focus on strategic initiatives and proactive security measures during retail seasonal staffing.
5. Improved Collaboration and Reputation: Efficient ULM strengthens collaboration between IT teams, human resources, and business leaders, building trust and credibility in retail seasonal staffing initiatives.

Streamline Seasonal Staffing with BetterCloud User Lifecycle Management

The rising importance of HRIS (Human Resource Information System) as the source of truth for employee data underscores the need for IT automation to align with the schedules of Human Resources (HR) and the broader business. By integrating systems, such as Workday and BambooHR, seamless connectivity is established between IT systems and the authoritative source of employee information. This integration ensures that IT automation operates on the schedule dictated by the business, creating a cohesive and efficient workflow ensuring business productivity.

BetterCloud not only eliminates manual errors and accelerates processes but also provides pre-built workflows and templates specifically tailored to retail use cases. This approach enables IT automation to onboard seasonal employees, address mid-lifecycle system changes and offboard seasonal employees, by seamlessly integrating into the schedule set by HR and the business.

In addition to aligning with schedules, BetterCloud prioritizes security and compliance, offering scalability, flexibility, and enhanced collaboration between IT teams and other departments, particularly during high-demand periods such as retail seasonal staffing. Leveraging their extensive expertise and experience in managing user lifecycles, BetterCloud has successfully identified 62 million content violations and discovered 883,000 applications while overseeing more than 3.8 billion assets.

Executing over 7 million actions and 3.4 million workflows monthly, BetterCloud consistently saves thousands of hours for its 1,000+ clients. By improving IT productivity and driving increased business value, BetterCloud exemplifies the value of IT automation operating in sync with the schedules and seasonal needs of retail businesses.

Starting and Maturing User Lifecycle Management

BetterCloud User Lifecycle Management is the optimal choice for retail organizations preparing for seasonal staffing. Leveraging BetterCloud’s retail-friendly features, automation capabilities, robust security measures, scalability, and enhanced collaboration, IT teams can efficiently manage the user lifecycle of temporary workers during periods of seasonal staffing, significantly reducing – and in some cases eliminating – the burden of repetitive, low value work on IT organizations. BetterCloud streamlines processes, maximizes productivity, and ensures seamless integration of seasonal staff into the digital infrastructure. BetterCloud has enabled thousands of customers to automate user lifecycle management tasks. As the leading SaaS Management Platform (SMP), BetterCloud has built a path to operational excellence and agility that helps organizations accelerate their IT automation maturity for the greatest operational efficiency and IT agility. Get started by assessing your own User Lifecycle Management maturity today.

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.

Further complicated by the ever-changing business landscape, characterized by diverse economic pressures and the likelihood of an atypical recession deviating from the usual 6-18 month duration, it is crucial to adapt and rethink traditional cost-saving approaches. Two key factors make the situation exceptionally unique: the accelerating adoption of Software as a Service (SaaS) amidst declining spend, and the likelihood of sustained high interest rates and increasing labor costs for years to come. Consequently, organizations must shift their focus from one-time cost-cutting measures to structurally transforming their approach to managing expenses. 

The conventional strategy of negotiating with vendors and renegotiating contracts, only to witness costs gradually rise again, is no longer effective. It is time to recognize that SaaS spend management alone is a temporary fix. To truly address the challenges ahead, organizations should embrace a holistic approach to SaaS management that begins with User Lifecycle Management. By prioritizing this approach, businesses can optimize productivity through innovative and sustainable methods that go beyond short-term savings and instead provide a foundation for lasting cost management strategies.

By acknowledging the unique characteristics of the current macro environment and the changing dynamics of the business landscape, organizations can navigate the challenges ahead with confidence. Rather than viewing SaaS spend management as a mere product or service to be outsourced, it is essential to recognize it as a comprehensive program that is built in partnership with a mature approach to User Lifecycle Management. This programmatic approach enables organizations to proactively adapt to the evolving economic conditions, ensuring long-term financial stability and sustained growth. In a world where traditional methods no longer suffice, it is time to embrace a new paradigm of SaaS spend management and seize the opportunities it presents.

The Prominence of SaaS Spend Management

In today’s rapidly evolving business landscape, widespread adoption of SaaS applications has driven a surge in spending, prompting organizations to pursue the evaluation and effective management of these costs.

1. Rapid Growth of SaaS Adoption Drove Spending: There has been a significant increase in the adoption of SaaS applications across organizations of all sizes and industries for the last decade. This widespread adoption has led to a surge in SaaS spending, making it necessary for businesses, facing a changing macroeconomic environment, to move quickly to evaluate and effectively manage and optimize these costs.
2. Expansion of the SaaS Marketplace: The SaaS marketplace has become more diverse, offering a wide array of options for various business functions. While this provides organizations with flexibility and choice, it also introduces complexity in managing multiple applications, each with its own licensing model, subscription fees, and renewal cycles.
3. Cost Optimization Imperatives: Businesses are actively seeking ways to optimize their IT budgets and maximize the value derived from technology investments. SaaS spend management has emerged as a critical area of focus for cost reduction and resource optimization, as organizations aim to control and optimize their spending on SaaS applications.
4. Need for Visibility and Governance: The decentralized nature of SaaS adoption often leads to shadow IT, where different departments or teams independently procure and manage their SaaS applications. This lack of centralized oversight makes it challenging for organizations, and IT organizations specifically, to gain a holistic view of SaaS spending and enforce governance policies effectively.
5. Security and Compliance Concerns: As businesses rely more on SaaS applications, ensuring data security and compliance with regulations has become a top priority. SaaS spend management, especially as part of a more comprehensive approach to SaaS management, helps organizations monitor and control access to SaaS applications, improving adherence to security and compliance requirements.
6. Focus on ROI and Value Optimization: Organizations are shifting their focus beyond initial cost savings and aiming to maximize their return on investment. They want to ensure that the SaaS applications they invest in deliver the expected value and drive business outcomes. SaaS spend management allows organizations to evaluate the usage, value, and impact of their SaaS applications, enabling them to optimize their spending to achieve the desired ROI.

Organizations recognize the significant impact of SaaS spending on their overall IT budgets and strategic objectives, leading them to actively seek effective strategies and solutions to manage and optimize their SaaS expenditure. 

SaaS Spend Management Requires a Program and Process, not just a SaaS product

This multitude of pressures causes many organizations to look for a solution in the form of a product or application to manage costs and spending. However, relying solely on a SaaS software product or application to handle SaaS spend management is not a viable approach, and here’s why:

1. Limited Availability of Spend Data: Decentralized software procurement and limited APIs obstruct IT’s ability to implement a solely software-based solution that monitors and manages spending. Business units frequently procure SaaS applications independently, which leads to a lack of governance and limited IT understanding of each tool’s purpose. Moreover, many SaaS products lack APIs for automated spend data extraction, which leads organizations to typically rely on stale, outdated data that is painstakingly entered manually.
2. Unique Contract Negotiations: Each organization negotiates SaaS contracts individually, with different bundles, terms, and pricing structures. Direct engagement between the organization and the vendor is necessary to negotiate and reduce costs effectively. While some powerful insights exist in the market to support teams to negotiate better, on the whole software products cannot replace the human interaction and negotiation skills required to achieve favorable contract terms based on unique business needs and conditions.
3. Complexity of the SaaS Landscape: Managing SaaS spending becomes increasingly complex as organizations adopt numerous applications. On average, companies use around 130 SaaS applications, each with its own contract duration and pricing model. 
4. The Role of Services: Existing players in the SaaS spend management space have recognized the limitations of software solutions and have expanded their offerings to include services. These services act as outsourced procurement departments, combining technology with human expertise to effectively manage SaaS spend. This demonstrates that software alone is insufficient to address the complexities of SaaS spend management.
5. Limited Cost Savings by Third-Party Vendors: Even when organizations engage procurement services, the potential cost savings may not surpass what organizations could achieve on their own. These services, which come at a cost, are a complement to the work often being done by internal teams.

Given these challenges, organizations must take ownership of SaaS spend. The most effective approach involves manually gathering spend data, identifying cost reduction opportunities, negotiating contracts directly with vendors, and implementing automated User Lifecycle Management (ULM) practices. By focusing on hygiene, such as automating ULM processes to allocate licenses based on need and removing them when employees leave the organization, organizations can make significant progress in controlling costs.

Relying solely on a SaaS software product or application for SaaS spend management is inadequate due to the limitations in obtaining spend data, the need for direct contract negotiations, the complexity of the SaaS landscape, the involvement of services for comprehensive management, and the limited cost savings achieved by third-party vendors. Organizations must adopt a hands-on approach, leveraging their own resources and implementing processes that align with their specific SaaS spend management goals.

User Lifecycle Management as the Foundation

User Lifecycle Management (ULM) is a critical component in effectively managing SaaS software spending and optimizing SaaS software usage within organizations. ULM encompasses various stages, including onboarding, mid-lifecycle management, self-service, and offboarding, each playing a vital role in controlling costs and ensuring efficient SaaS utilization. Here’s how ULM serves as a foundation for effective SaaS management and SaaS spending:

1. Ensuring Proper Entitlements: ULM ensures that users have the necessary access to SaaS applications based on their roles and responsibilities. This includes assigning licenses to new users and reassigning licenses when users change teams or leave the organization. By actively managing entitlements, organizations can prevent unnecessary spending on licenses for unused applications and promote cost optimization.
2. Mid-Lifecycle Management and Self-Service: SaaS usage fluctuates regularly due to factors such as temporary leaves, promotions, or shifting projects. In a mature mid-lifecycle environment, licenses for these applications can be reclaimed and reissued based on changes in organizational attributes – such as status, department, or title. Automated mid-lifecycle management drives reductions in total seat counts and increases overall spend efficiency. Empowering employees with self-service license requests allows end-users to access the right applications for the right length of time, without the headache of paying for license overages in the future.
3. Offboarding: When an employee leaves the organization, ULM ensures that their access to SaaS applications is promptly disabled or removed. This involves making API calls to the providers to disable/delete/remove licenses associated with the departing user. By effectively managing offboarding processes, organizations can eliminate the costs of licenses for inactive workers, minimizing wasteful spending.

Implementing ULM automation significantly contributes to managing SaaS spending. It reduces IT ticket volumes by streamlining user onboarding, offboarding, and access management processes, freeing up IT resources for more strategic initiatives. Additionally, ULM brings high visibility and accountability to the organization, demonstrating a commitment to data security, compliance, and operational efficiency.

ULM’s impact extends beyond cost savings, providing scalability for global expansion by enabling seamless onboarding processes without heavy IT involvement. By automating ULM, organizations unlock operational efficiencies, improve employee experiences, and focus on strategic initiatives, leading to broader returns on investment.

ULM serves as the foundational pillar for effective SaaS management. By implementing ULM automation, organizations can ensure proper entitlements, reduce IT ticket volumes, enhance visibility and accountability, enable scalability, and realize a broader return on investment beyond cost savings. Prioritizing ULM sets the stage for comprehensive SaaS management, optimizing usage, and achieving long-term success in controlling SaaS software spending.

How BetterCloud Can Help

When it comes to SaaS Management, BetterCloud is the most qualified and trusted vendor, offering comprehensive solutions that address the critical aspects of SaaS Management and beyond. By starting with the strong foundation of ULM, BetterCloud enables organizations to effectively manage SaaS application access and entitlements, maximizing business productivity, and eliminating low value tactical work that saves IT organizations thousands of hours every year.

1. Expertise in ULM: BetterCloud has extensive expertise in ULM based on over a decade of innovation and work in this space, recognizing its pivotal and foundational role in SaaS management and SaaS operations. With BetterCloud, organizations can automate and streamline the user onboarding, mid-lifecycle and offboarding processes, ensuring that employees have the right access to the right applications throughout their lifecycle. BetterCloud has over 3.8 billion assets under management and over the course of their work, has found over 62 million content violations through scanning and discovered over 883,000 applications. The company runs over seven million actions and over 3.4 million workflows on a monthly basis for over 1,000 clients saving thousands of hours annually and improving security posture. This experience and expertise allows organizations to maintain strict security protocols, comply with regulations, and eliminate the risk of unauthorized and unnecessary access. 
2. Holistic SaaS Management Platform: Beyond ULM, BetterCloud offers a comprehensive SaaS management platform that addresses the diverse needs of organizations. From granular visibility into application usage and permissions to automated security and compliance workflows, BetterCloud provides a centralized hub for managing the complete SaaS ecosystem. This holistic approach allows organizations to gain control, optimize costs, and ensure the seamless functioning of their SaaS applications.
3. Advanced Security Capabilities: BetterCloud’s robust security features are designed to protect sensitive data and mitigate risks associated with SaaS applications. With real-time monitoring, automated security policies, and incident response capabilities, BetterCloud empowers organizations to proactively identify and address potential security vulnerabilities, ensuring a secure SaaS environment.
4. Vendor-agnostic Approach: BetterCloud understands that organizations often utilize a variety of SaaS applications from different vendors. As a vendor-agnostic solution, BetterCloud supports a wide range of popular SaaS applications, allowing organizations to effectively manage and govern their entire SaaS ecosystem from a single platform. This flexibility ensures seamless integration and interoperability across different SaaS applications, eliminating silos and optimizing workflows.
5. Thought Leadership and Continuous Innovation: BetterCloud is not just a vendor but also a thought leader and innovator in the SaaS management space. With a finger on the pulse of emerging trends and challenges, BetterCloud continuously partners with customers and the market to  evolve the platform and address the evolving needs of organizations. By partnering with BetterCloud, organizations can leverage the latest advancements in SaaS management, mature their practices over time and embrace the discipline of SaaS Operations to keep pace with changing business priorities.
6. Proven Track Record: BetterCloud has a proven track record of success, serving a wide range of organizations across various industries. By helping organizations achieve tangible results in cost savings, productivity improvement, and security enhancement, BetterCloud has built a strong reputation as a trusted partner in SaaS management.

BetterCloud’s deep expertise in ULM, comprehensive SaaS management platform, advanced security capabilities, vendor-agnostic approach, thought leadership, and proven track record position them as the most qualified vendor to help organizations with their SaaS management needs, which includes offering guidance about emerging trends like the topic of SaaS spend management. By starting with the foundation of ULM and leveraging BetterCloud’s SaaS Management Platform, organizations can optimize utilization of SaaS applications, enhance security, and unlock the full potential of their SaaS ecosystem while managing SaaS spend. 

We talked to Wolf about the challenges the Gainsight IT team experienced, the value the team has realized since implementing BetterCloud, and advice he would give others looking to automate routine tasks.

What challenges were you facing that led you to explore a SaaS management platform?

Nearly everything in IT was a manual process. I saw a demo of BetterCloud and thought this is what we need to manage our core applications and remove a lot of the manual labor.

What goals were you trying to achieve with a new solution?

Consistency and long-term stability.

What are the main use cases you’re solving with BetterCloud?

User lifecycle management (ULM). The most noticeable use case is offboarding. Each exit was very time consuming. You have to be methodical. You have to make sure you’re doing everything right and completing certain steps. There is great value in being able to not just cut access to apps, but to automate the migration of data from a departed employee to their manager.

As we continue to grow, we needed to onboard employees in a way that they were ready to go on day one. Going from office based to remote-first, we’ve had to figure out how to reconfigure and refocus. BetterCloud allows us to be nimble. It helps us in keeping things organized.

How has automation provided value to you and your team?

Automation really frees you up in a lot of different ways that are appreciated. You sleep a little better at night knowing that when the offboarding workflow is kicked off, all the things that need to happen have happened. I used to spend a lot of time going back through our spreadsheet and double checking to make sure that things that were checked off as completed actually happened. Sometimes you’d find they didn’t because someone wasn’t really paying attention to what they were doing.

BetterCloud eliminates a lot of the errors that are bound to happen with humans doing the work and has saved us tons and tons of time.

Which blind spots in your processes has BetterCloud uncovered for you?

There were BetterCloud best practices we weren’t doing. There were certain steps that you miss sometimes because it wasn’t part of your main checklist, like transferring group ownership or secondary calendars. There’s tons of details that BetterCloud recommends because they help other companies set up automations so frequently. There are a lot of things they could streamline for us that we had overlooked.

How has BetterCloud helped your SaaS environment remain secure?

One of the nice things with BetterCloud is the visibility to see how many files are shared publicly and who owns these files. What we discovered was that a lot of people who had left the company had their files transferred to employees who had no idea they were shared publicly. Being able to recognize the risk, communicate what’s happening, and remediate the issue provides security.

What advice would you give others looking for a similar solution?

Look at your IT stack and if you are using SaaS apps, then BetterCloud is a no-brainer.

You can read the case study here.

If your business is still onboarding new hires the analog way, your IT staffers are likely dreading the onslaught of data they’ll be manually adding to your system. An average company’s SaaS stack these days is about 130 apps; even for a handful of new hires, that’s a tremendous amount of work for IT. You didn’t hire them to do data input! They’d be a lot happier (and useful to your company) if they could be deployed as strategic problem-solvers instead. 

Happy employees tend to stick around. When employees stick around, they’re likely to move within the company, needing to request access to new logins and clearances since IT first onboarded them. This could mean a lot more work for IT. Same goes for when a staffer finally leaves, when identity and access must be terminated or passed on to whoever’s taking over. But all this could be handled by IT in just a few clicks, with virtually zero chance of error. 

Below, we’ll explain how this process of user lifecycle management can be optimized into an automated process… and a huge win for your IT department. 

What exactly is user lifecycle management?

All the IT processes involved with an employee joining, moving within, or leaving your organization fall under the umbrella of user lifecycle management. To onboard and offboard users, or to apply mid-lifecycle changes—promotions, for instance—that’s the basis of ULM. 

During these procedures, IT has to create user accounts, and assure the staffers associated with those accounts have proper role based access until the day they leave the company. Managing user lifecycle is an ongoing process further complicated by the past several years in workplace trends. 

How a SaaS-filled workplace makes user lifecycle management so complex

Back when SaaS usage was still in its infancy, it was plausible to tackle user lifecycle management the old-fashioned way, without any automation. But SaaS workplace usage has exploded over the past several years. Worth repeating: the average SaaS stack contains about 130 apps, and there’s a good chance that number increases in coming years. The more apps in play, the more users IT has to create, the more access management for IT to handle. More tickets, more open tabs… you get the picture. 

We wish we could say IT departments are growing at the same rate, but that’s just not the case. These days, IT is being asked to be as lean and economical as possible. Fortunately, resources exist that can give IT departments of all sizes a huge leg up in access control.

Why automation is so important in modern user lifecycle management

The key to empowering your IT department is automation. User provisioning is a huge time sink for IT when done the analog way, and automation will also eliminate the costly human errors that come from tasking your team with data input all day. 

It’s a win-win, not to mention the benefits that will spread to the rest of your staff. Employees will appreciate not having to worry about their logins and app access, and they’ll get used to doing their jobs alongside an IT staff that’s freed up to help them perform better, rather than one that’s always bogged down with tickets and wait times. 

The benefits of automating onboarding, offboarding, and mid-lifecycle changes

For a company with over 200 employees, manual user onboarding takes an average of six hours per new hire, and seven for offboarding a departing worker. The benefits of allowing a high-profile new hire to hit the ground running on their first day are obvious. No IT company wants to be known for how long everyone is always waiting around for their logins or laptops. Unsurprisingly, there’s a major correlation between automated onboarding and employee retention. 

Here’s an example of how the onboarding process can be automated, kicked off by a Google Form submission:

Offboarding presents another set of challenges. IT must assure that any crucial data accrued by the outgoing staffer, as well as any logins or key responsibilities, are passed along to their manager and not lost in the shuffle. Security risk is another concern. Whether an employee left on good terms or not, you can’t leave any loopholes allowing them to still have access to your tech stack. Automated workflows can offboard an employee in one fell swoop, revoking their access and redistributing all relevant data immediately. (For a deeper dive on data breaches during offboarding and how automation can help, click here.)

Here’s a look at how the entire offboarding process can be automated, triggered by a ticket request in Jira:

Mid-lifecycle changes can even be done in bulk. Aside from your typical promotions and team transfers, automation is particularly valuable during mergers and acquisitions. Let’s say a smaller company that uses WebEx is acquired by a larger company that uses Zoom. Using automated user lifecycle management, IT could quickly assemble an automated workflow that creates Zoom accounts based off the existing WebEx accounts, then deletes those WebEx accounts to cut costs. 

Why you should automate user lifecycle management in a SaaS management platform

For setting all this automation into motion, several options exist, including SaaS management platforms (SMPs), information platform as a service (iPaaS), and identity as a service (IDaaS). However, options like iPaaS and IDaaS are best suited to automating much more basic tasks, like sending a Slack message. 

SMPs—like BetterCloud—on the other hand, were purpose-built to ingest metadata to make each action within a complex workflow extremely simple. For IT teams that manage multi-SaaS environments, BetterCloud user lifecycle management streamlines and automates the process of onboarding, mid-lifecycle, and offboarding SaaS application access and entitlements. Unlike identity and access management solutions that require manual intervention and custom scripting, or IT service solutions that generate tickets to be manually worked, BetterCloud’s granular, powerful automation and unlimited customizable workflows complement your IAM and help desk automation to improve IT efficiency by reducing up to 78% of SaaS management work.

For onboarding and offboarding—and everything in between—BetterCloud can help your company reap major dividends right away. Seismic, a San Diego-based sales enablement company with over 1,500 employees, reported saving 860 hours in one year after implementing BetterCloud to automate its ULM workflows. Regardless of your company’s size, the benefits are there for the taking.

To see BetterCloud in action, schedule a demo today.