As SMPs have grown in functionality and extensibility, so too has the power of the automated workflows you can orchestrate. IT leaders can now leverage an SMP to create zero-touch automation that removes every manual touchpoint in an IT process.

Each manual task you automate makes a positive impact on your IT department—and the company as a whole. IT workers no longer have to spend their time on tedious, repetitive work with thousands of open tabs. Employees get fast access to the tools they need to do their jobs. Your IT environment becomes more secure, and sensitive data is proactively kept safe.

In this article, we’ll answer the following questions to help you learn everything you need to know about zero-touch automation.

• What is zero-touch automation?
• How do I resolve help desk tickets with zero-touch automation?
• How do I improve data security with zero-touch automation?
• How do I use zero-touch automation to protect my IT environment?

What is zero-touch automation?

Zero-touch automation is the process of orchestrating automated workflows with a SaaS management platform like BetterCloud in order to replace all manual IT touchpoints.

Once in place, a zero-touch workflow can execute hours of IT work in just minutes, error-free.  

To get started with zero-touch automation, you need two key pieces in place: a fully featured SaaS management platform and an automation-first strategy. Without an SMP that does everything Gartner says it should, you won’t have the operational power within the platform to build end-to-end zero-touch workflows. An automation-first mindset helps you visualize which IT processes could and should be automated. 

You can learn how to create and implement an automation-first strategy in your IT department with our Strategic CIO Manifesto.

There are many processes that can benefit from zero-touch automation, depending on what tasks are costing your IT department the most time and resources. In this article, we will review three use cases:

1. Self-resolving tickets that automatically provision app access
2. Automatically detecting and unsharing files that contain sensitive data 
3. Automatically revoking access to unauthorized third-party apps

Other common use cases for zero-touch (or near zero-touch) automation include onboarding, offboarding, and mid-lifecycle changes. Check out the resources below to learn more about how to save time and money by automating user lifecycle management.

How do I resolve help desk tickets with zero-touch automation?

For both IT staff and the employees they support, dealing with tickets can be a huge source of frustration. The SaaS explosion in recent years is filling up ticket queues with requests to create new accounts. As requests pile up, employees must wait for access to the tools they need to be productive. IT team members can easily end up spending all of their time as ticket-takers, without any time to focus on strategic work.

With an SMP like BetterCloud, you can orchestrate a zero-touch workflow that resolves these requests automatically—no IT involvement needed. The illustration below shows the six-step process for automatically fulfilling a SaaS access request.

1. The employee opens a ticket in an ITSM like Jira or ServiceNow, requesting access to a SaaS application.
2. BetterCloud immediately receives the ticket data and kicks off a workflow.
3. The workflow sends a pre-configured email to the employee’s manager.
4. The manager opens the email, clicks a button to approve the request, and the workflow continues.
5. Once approval is granted, the workflow provisions the new account.
6. The workflow then sends a pre-configured email (or Slack message, or both) with the login instructions to the user, and closes the ticket.

For just one application, it is easy to see how this zero-touch workflow can save IT a ton of time. Employees working remotely in different time zones can get much faster access to the apps they need—without waiting for IT to start their day. The more apps you can create these self-service portals for, the more time you save for IT, and the more productive employees across your company can be.

How do I improve data security with zero-touch automation?

There are lots of security solutions out there that provide IT with a long list of alerts and notifications when potentially risky activity occurs in their environment. But in order to remediate anything, IT team members must step in and get involved. 

With an SMP like BetterCloud, you can remediate some threats automatically. Zero-touch automations that take actions based on security alerts allow your SaaS environment to “self-heal.” You no longer have to wait for an IT staff member to review each alert, decide if action is needed, and then remediate manually. 

In the illustration below, we show one of the ways you can use zero-touch automation to create a self-healing security workflow.

In the example above, we see the following happen:

1. An employee creates a share file, such as a Google Doc, and adds in sensitive information.
2. The employee then shares the file with someone outside of the company.
3. A BetterCloud alert is triggered, which sets off a remediation workflow.
4. The workflow immediately unshares the file.
5. The workflow also sends the user an email that lets them know that their actions violated company policy. This way they learn about the security risks of sharing sensitive data with those outside the company.

These types of zero-touch remediation workflows can be customized for different types of PII and proprietary information. The workflow above could also be modified to include an approval step before unsharing the file. This way, your IT team could check in with the user or their manager to make sure the document isn’t violating policy before taking any actions that might hamper productivity.

How do I use zero-touch automation to protect my IT environment?

In a perfect world, employees only ever use approved IT apps, on approved devices, through a VPN. The reality of today’s modern workplace is far more chaotic and susceptible to human error. The actions of well-meaning but negligent employees remain one of IT’s biggest security concerns.

In an effort to boost productivity, many well-meaning employees use their work credentials to grant OAuth access to unsanctioned apps. While some apps may be harmless, many more are not. By logging into apps that haven’t been reviewed by IT, negligent employees can put your company at risk of data theft, phishing, and more. 

An alert-based, zero-touch workflow can address this risk. The illustration below shows you can automatically remediate shadow IT usage with an SMP like BetterCloud.

1. An employee uses their work credentials grant OAuth access to a risky third-party app.
2. A BetterCloud alert is triggered, which notifies IT.
3. The alert also kicks off an automated workflow.
4. The workflow immediately revokes access to the app, logging the employee out.
5. The workflow also emails the user to let them know their actions violated company policy, so they learn about the security risks of logging into shadow IT.

The alert-based workflows shown above are just two of many ways you can automate zero-touch remediation in your IT environment. Other workflows can notify IT when super admin accounts are created or remove a departing employee’s app access immediately. Purpose-built to address the risks of SaaS sprawl, an SMP can be a powerful tool to help improve IT’s overall security posture. 

Reduce risk and work smarter with zero-touch automation

The three examples above are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to what an SMP can automate for IT. This is why an SMP’s ROI often improves over time, even after delivering value within a few months. 

With an automation-first strategy and a fully featured SMP, IT leaders can deliver big results with zero-touch automation. They can:

• Pivot IT teams from reactive ticket-takers to strategic business partners, collaborating with other departments to optimize their use of SaaS.
• Keep IT environments safe from the actions of well-meaning, but negligent employees.
• Deliver a frictionless experience for remote employees, ensuring timely access to apps no matter what time zone they are in.

To learn more about how BetterCloud can help you transform your IT department with zero-touch automation, schedule a demo.

We’re back this year with our tenth annual exploration of trends in SaaS operations (SaaSOps). 

Earlier this year, we surveyed 700+ IT and security professionals to uncover the trends, challenges, and priorities defining SaaSOps. After a burst in pandemic-driven SaaS app growth, IT is facing more challenges (and opportunities) than ever. And our data shows that IT teams are doubling down on automation to manage it all. But what does this look like in practice? And what will it mean for IT in the future?

Grab your popcorn, and let’s take a look at some of the key trends from this year’s State of SaaSOps report. 

Organizations are still using more SaaS apps than ever, but growth has slowed a bit 

This year, 40% of IT professionals said they consolidated redundant/duplicate SaaS apps, in part prompting a slower growth rate this year. After rapid acceleration of SaaS adoption in the beginning of the decade, the yearly growth pace has finally slowed down a bit for the first time. 

Despite that, the net growth of SaaS apps used is still up 18% this year, with organizations now using 130 apps on average. 

SaaS security is increasingly IT’s responsibility, and it’s not going away anytime soon

The line between security and IT is blurring. A whopping 81% of IT professionals say they are responsible for protecting sensitive data within SaaS apps. 

And the amount of sensitive data is rising too, which makes security even more challenging. 43% say they’ve added a new SaaS app that stores sensitive data in the last 12 months. Another 42% say they have difficulties securing users’ activities within SaaS apps.

Nearly everyone finds automation critical to overcoming today’s SaaSOps challenges

An overwhelming 86% of IT professionals believe automation is important to effectively managing SaaS operations, but nearly two-thirds (64%) lack insight and visibility to automate effectively.

For many enterprises, the automation journey is underway—bringing new automated processes, skill specialization, and the right tools to get the job done

71% of respondents have already automated at least one help desk process, like onboarding or password resets. Carving out specialized automation teams is on IT’s roadmap too. 43% already have a dedicated SaaSOps automation role or team where they only develop and manage automated workflows, and another 23% plan to. 

As for automation tools? Insights are key. 75% prefer SaaS management solutions that enable insights-driven automation.

Download the full report to learn: 

• IT’s top priorities in 2023
• Why SaaS security continues to be a major concern
• The operational challenges most crucial to solve in SaaS environments
• Which types of tickets your peers are currently automating (and planning to automate in the upcoming year)
• The strategic projects your peers are working on by automating more

To learn more about how BetterCloud can help you discover, manage, and secure your SaaS environment, request a demo.

Need to order the whole company swag? Send out a form. Need to collect quick feedback on how to improve something? Out goes another form. Need a standardized way to get required new hire information from HR to IT? You guessed it: Do it with a form. 

While the dream state is a zero-touch integration between your HRIS and identity provider, perhaps sometimes the integration you need doesn’t exist. In other cases, the project might be large or expensive and all you have access to is your collaboration suite and SaaSOps tool of choice? To Google Forms we go!

When I was a product manager, I learned that the key to building tools and processes is to start small. You can (and should) aspire and diagram for the best solution, but you’ll probably need to build the smallest piece of it today in order to see if you can solve a problem tomorrow, fully knowing you will be getting user feedback and data to improve it later. 

Achieving zero-touch automation between the HR team and the IT’s onboarding process using a Google Form to trigger a BetterCloud onboarding workflow is exactly that: A lightweight but powerful way to realize all of that sweet time savings and get your team’s time back to do more strategic work (or chill on a beach)!

The challenge

Before we get into the mechanics of how BetterCloud and Google Forms work together, we should talk about why it matters.

IT teams are losing hours every week to what can be considered very manual onboarding tasks clicking around the admin panels of SaaS applications. One of BetterCloud’s biggest customers reported they would spend approximately 2,678 hours on SaaS onboarding alone. Having automated workflows to create users, assign to groups and roles, provision licenses, and grant access to assets, projects, drives, calendars, and more show a clear path to time savings.

For those who are having HR and/or hiring managers filling out Google Forms upon hiring a new teammate, their process looks like the diagram below.

Why does the help desk need to read a form and click into admin consoles to provision these accounts? All team members would agree that time can be put towards more meaningful activities like deciding which margarita flavor to get at the beach.

The solution

BetterCloud’s Extended Triggers can read an incoming Google Form’s data and map its fields to an automated onboarding workflow. From email addresses, organizational fields, names, addresses, phone numbers, to all other required people data to create and organize SaaS users in your identity system, collaboration suites, video conferencing, and any of our 70+ native integrations – BetterCloud maps your form inputs to your SaaS’s Public APIs for user management. 

As a plus, BetterCloud can also send emails or Slack messages to your people team and hiring managers to keep them informed or request access approvals for your new hire. 

The demo

Watch the demo below for a step-by-step walkthrough of configuring Google Forms and BetterCloud.

Resources

Want to start achieving your zero-touch onboarding with Google Forms and BetterCloud? Here’s a Google Forms template and AppsScript (Password is ADd9kEu8Di) to get started!

Automated offboarding with BetterCloud workflows saves IT teams tons of time. It also reduces errors in a big way—a workflow will never forget any step in the process, no matter how long it is. 

If you are already automating some or all of your offboarding process, making the workflow zero-touch can be a great way to improve your security posture and save even more time. 

With zero-touch automated offboarding, IT no longer has to wait for a manager or HR to contact them to let them know an employee has departed. Instead, a manager can simply fill out a ticket at 5:00 pm on an employee’s last day, and app access is revoked immediately, with no IT involvement at all. 

Let’s take a look at how to set that up with Jira and BetterCloud.

The challenge

If you are not automating any part of employee offboarding, your scenario might look like the diagram below.

In this process, HR creates a Jira ticket that notifies IT that an employee is departing. An IT team member receives the ticket, and has to set aside time to manually offboard the employee. They must spend time, often hours, turning off access to the IDP, transferring data, and going into SaaS applications and other systems to deprovision accounts. 

As an organization grows, or even goes through furloughs or layoffs, manual offboarding can eat up a lot of IT time. Worse, as the hours pile up, so do the chances that employees can retain access to your IT environment long after they depart, driving up security risks.

The solution

By creating a zero-touch workflow with BetterCloud and Jira, this process can be fully automated. A manager, member of HR, or IT, can simply submit a ticket to start an offboarding workflow.

With a single BetterCloud workflow, the entire offboarding process is now automated. No manual steps are needed to transfer files and calendar events to managers, revoke app access, and more. Even better, the offboarding process happens immediately after the ticket is submitted—and in minutes.

To see a demo of how to set this up in BetterCloud and Jira, watch the video below.

Automation is a journey—and the horizon shows that the destination is zero-touch IT. 

In this blog post, we’ll dive into some highlights of our newest original research at BetterCloud. In our latest SaaSOps Automation Report 2022: The Rise of Zero-Touch IT, we explore the growing imperative to automate SaaS operations, its massive impact, and what it all means for IT.

Why zero-touch automation is increasingly important

IT leaders are moving beyond single task automation and onto orchestration and zero-touch automation.

In the world of zero-touch automation, IT aims to remove every manual touchpoint to orchestrate entire IT processes. Each process you orchestrate using zero-touch automation is a win-win.

IT jettisons the tedious, repetitive work—trading it for more engaging and innovative activities. Meanwhile, employees get fast access to the tools they need to do their jobs.

Along the way, you eliminate human error. As a result, your SaaS environment becomes more secure, and sensitive data is proactively kept safe.

With this context in mind, we wanted to get insights from IT professionals about the state of SaaSOps automation and how zero touch is emerging.

SaaSOps Automation Report 2022: The Rise of Zero-Touch IT

Our research set out to understand organizations at different stages in their automation journey. By using a well-known market research panel, we surveyed 413 IT professionals who work at organizations that use SaaS for at least 25% of their enterprise applications.

Among respondents, there were three groups:

• Automation Leaders who’ve automated at least 50% of SaaS-related tasks,
• Automation Newbies who’ve automated less than half of SaaS-related tasks, and
• Future Automators who don’t automate yet, but plan to this year

For each group, among other things, our research explores:

• Frustrations that automation could solve
• How the help/service desk is loaded with automation opportunities
• Why the rise of zero-touch IT can help reduce your high IT turnover
• The biggest benefits automation has delivered so far
• How zero-touch IT is crucial to an organization’s future

Here are a few highlights from the report.

1.) Complex SaaS environments have IT drowning in manual, repetitive work

As SaaS adoption rises, SaaS environments grow increasingly complex to manage. Access management, permissions, file security, user lifecycle management—it all amounts to a deep, swirling ocean of mundane, manual tasks.

IT might be keeping the lights on, but the tedium prevents them from working on strategic projects that improve margins, create better customer experiences, and/or raise revenues.

And it’s across the spectrum of automation groups too. A whopping 92% of Future Automators say they spend too much time on repetitive, manual tasks that could be automated.

Even among Automation Leaders, 65% agree they spend too much time on routine work. And 72% of them say it prevents them from working on projects with real strategic business value.

2.) Employees wait too long for help desk tickets to be resolved, and IT knows automating SaaS operations can help

Since IT teams are so stretched, employees are waiting too long for IT to resolve tickets. The impact to the organization, unfortunately, is an idle employee and a poor employee experience.

In fact, the average user downtime for a simple password or multi-factor authentication reset is 6 hours. A SaaS app access request is 9.3 hours.

So it begs the question: Can your organization afford the lost productivity from employees who must wait nearly a day for a simple request that can be easily automated?

Meanwhile, IT knows that zero-touch automation is a solution to help desk woes.

Let’s take Automation Leaders. Forty-two percent of them say they could automate another 51 to 75% of their help desk ticket resolutions. Another 14% say more than 75% of ticket resolutions could get automated.

Meanwhile, 60% of Future Automators think they could automate away less than half of help desk tickets.

The lesson here: The more you automate, the more you learn almost every task can be automated—backed by Automation Leaders who have 34% fewer SaaS-related tickets per week than those who don’t automate.

3.) Zero-touch automation is critical to IT’s career development, IT employee experience, and retention

According to BetterCloud research, IT turnover currently stands around 23%. With high turnover and IT talent scarcity, zero-touch IT will be increasingly important for IT leadership and the whole IT team.  

First, it’s increasingly necessary for IT employee retention.

Just look at the Automation Leaders. Eighty percent say zero-touch IT will be very critical or critical to job satisfaction in the next 12 months. Almost 70% of them also agree that it’ll be a critical part of their individual career development, if it isn’t already.

Once IT teams begin to automate, they get firsthand experience with its positive impact. For many, they start by automating a process like offboarding. Then, they improve that process, where it grows from offboarding birthright SaaS apps to all apps.

Before you know it, IT automates mid-lifecycle changes and other processes like password resets and app requests.

The end result for IT? A far more interesting and rewarding job with time to work on strategic projects that truly help the business and grow innovation—which are certain to help retain IT talent.

4.) Automation delivers benefits: About 70% say the biggest upside to automating the SaaS environment has been productivity gains

When looking at organizations who have experience with automation, the biggest benefits they’ve experienced are:

1. Productivity gains,
2. Help or service desk improvements, and
3. Fewer errors

Meanwhile, Future Automators are clearly motivated by different reasons. Likely driven by IT talent scarcity, their top benefit they expect automation to deliver is, by far, at 88%, help/service desk improvements. A distant second, at 60%, is productivity gains and third, at 56%, is cost savings.

Fortunately, these organizations that are beginning their automation journey will enjoy all three perks.

So what does IT expect in the future?

5.) The path forward—for better data security and IT operational efficiency—is zero-touch automation

As we look to the coming year, organizations must meet the simultaneous business requirements of:

• growing productivity,
• cutting costs, and
• improving IT employee retention.

The time for zero-touch IT is now, and there’s strong consensus. More than 80% of organizations say in the next 12 months, zero-touch automation will be critical or very critical for data security and IT operational efficiency.

Most significantly, though, is how many IT professionals consider zero-touch IT critical to their organization’s future.

As the level of SaaS usage and manual work rises, zero-touch IT becomes increasingly crucial. Even Future Automators understand the need for it. More than half (52%) say it’s critical to their company’s future, and a monumental 80% of Automation Leaders feel the same way.

The bottom line, though, is that organizations across varying levels of automation maturity all agree that zero-touch IT is critical to organizational health and future competitiveness.

Grab the full report to learn more the rise of zero-touch IT

Download the full report to learn:

• The #1 task your peers most want to automate using zero-touch IT
• The single biggest driver behind automation
• The most urgent challenges automation is solving today
• 5 tips to get started with zero-touch automation

Until now, we had a lot of anecdotal proof that showed how zero-touch IT automations impacted BetterCloud. We knew that we had it good, but didn’t know just how good. 

But our faithful director of IT, Brian Farrell, recently crunched the numbers. The verdict? Our IT folks have automated nearly 50% of the requests they receive.

That number is staggering. So I chased Farrell down to dig deeper into how IT automated its way out of so much manual work, the impact this has on the entire company, and what it means for the future of his team.

First, a look at the raw data

I think it’s important to show you just how many requests our IT team gets over the course of a typical 6-month period. As of the writing of this blog post, 372 people work for BetterCloud. It doesn’t take a deep thinker to deduce that a zero-touch IT mindset reduced tickets from, say, 16 to 8.

As you’ll see in the chart below, we’re talking about 2,645 help desk tickets over the course of six months. Out of that total, 783 of those tickets were closed thanks to zero-touch automations. Another 457 of them were closed thanks to what Farrell describes as one-touch automations. There are only 5 members on our IT team, including Farrell. It’s safe to say that without zero-touch IT automations, they’d likely never see their loved ones.

Before we dig into how this has impacted our company, let’s talk about “zero-touch” versus “one-touch.” 

A zero-touch workflow can be kicked out without any intervention from IT. Someone in HR might submit a Google Form, for example, which triggers an onboarding workflow. Farrell says that he also considers cascading workflows “zero-touch,” meaning that a workflow is triggered when a separate workflow or action is completed. A one-touch workflow, on the other hand, kicks off after IT receives an alert that directs them to take an action, such as moving a user from one Org Unit to another.

OK, so what does this all mean for BetterCloud employees? Thanks to zero-touch IT automations, the IT team was able to get to a backlog of zero in December. Now that they can resolve requests more quickly, they’ve updated their service level agreement (SLA) around requester wait time. 

Here’s what we’ve been told to expect:

• Urgent: 8 hrs
• High: 1 week
• Normal: 2 weeks
• Low: 2.5 weeks

This is kind of a big deal. How many times have you sent an “urgent” help desk ticket, only to have to follow up several times over the course of a few weeks? We’ve all been there at least once, right? But now that so many time-consuming tasks have been automated, our IT team is able to consistently deliver against some seriously aggressive SLAs like the one above.

Freeing up IT’s time with automated role changes

It’s usually good news when your colleagues earn a promotion or move into new roles on different teams. In fact, it’s something we recently celebrated on our LinkedIn page (more on this in just a minute). If you’re looking for a new job, we’re hiring. 

However, this presented a huge challenge for our IT team before they automated their way out of this work. Farrell actually discussed this challenge in a previous episode of The SaaSOps Show—and the impetus for automating their way out of all of that work.

As you can see in the screenshot below, this onboarding workflow is triggered whenever IT moves someone into the Marketing Org Unit. While this is an onboarding workflow by name, it handles any movement in and out of this Org Unit.

As we’ve discussed in previous posts, none of the tasks that the workflow is handling are particularly difficult. But it is a long list of tasks, including adding each person to the appropriate Google Groups and Calendars, Slack channels, and product management apps, just to name a few. Thanks to the workflow above, our IT team doesn’t have to do any of that work manually.

“This can fluctuate based on the types of team changes you’re dealing with,” Farrell adds. “Some users might have 10 SaaS apps, but others might have 1,000, which makes doing this work manually really complicated.”

Automating movement in and out of Org Units and Groups

Many workflows I’ve seen in my time at BetterCloud are triggered by changes across Org Units and Groups. That prompted one simple question: Isn’t doing that manually also a pain?

Farrell agreed, which is why he says his team has begun automating Org Unit and Group updates at BetterCloud. While we don’t have any robots doing all the work for us, Farrell says his team has built out systems that enable folks like me to handle Group and Org Unit changes by ourselves.

Check out the screenshot below of a recent Google Group request our IT team received. Thanks to a subtle automation, this user was able to resolve the issue himself.

Farrell explains that this automated response is triggered whenever someone submits a help desk ticket and selects “Yes, adding/removing a person” from the “Modifying Google Group Membership” dropdown. After the ticket is submitted, the user receives an automated email that includes instructions on how to add or remove people from Google Groups. In the case above, the user quickly realized that he could resolve the issue himself and only replied to close the ticket.

In fact, the only action IT needed to take was to close the ticket after receiving a response to the automated email. Farrell says that this frees his team up to work on projects that impact the entire business. 

Want to know more about those projects? So did I. Let’s chat about them.

What IT is doing with all of their free time

OK, fine. They haven’t automated themselves into a cushy retirement just yet. But rather than spending unpredictable amounts of time resetting passwords and granting app access, Farrell told me that zero-touch IT automations have freed his team up to dive deeper into complex help desk tickets.

Farrell says this has a two-pronged impact. Not only does a zero-touch IT mindset enable the team to serve as a strategic partner, but his team gets unique opportunities to uplevel their skills while resolving the more sophisticated issues that pop up in help desk tickets. 

“At a typical company of our size, IT admins might spend 5-10% of their time on project-based work,” Farrell continues. “My small team of 5 on the other hand gets to dig into new issues in Windows, for example—and they get to spend roughly 20-50% of their time on project work like this, which benefits everyone at BetterCloud.”

Want another peek behind the curtain of how we achieve zero-touch IT at BetterCloud with BetterCloud? Check out this article.

Want to learn more about how a zero-touch IT mindset can impact your entire organization? Schedule a demo.

While this is great news for employees and hiring managers, it places a huge burden on IT departments. Support teams are drowning in tickets and monotony as demand skyrockets for hardware procurement, SaaS account creation, and software training. One recent article described this as a helpdesk meltdown.

To give IT a much-needed lifeline, it is more critical than ever to start automating the repetitive, error-prone IT tasks involved with HR processes such as onboarding new employees. Because a smooth onboarding process is critical for retaining talented remote workers, we’ll discuss how to leverage a SaaS management platform (SMP) to automate your onboarding process.  

In this article, we’ll deep dive into how to automate a great onboarding experience for new hires that also saves your IT team time and sanity. To make sure the first impression your company has on a new employee is a good one, we’ll cover everything you need to know to automate your onboarding process.

1. What do you need to know to select the right SMP for automating onboarding?
2. What is the process for building an automated onboarding workflow in an SMP?
3. How do you start a workflow from a ticket or HRIS to achieve zero-touch onboarding?

The first step to automating onboarding is making sure you’ve got the right automation tool in place. Otherwise, you can end up with a solution that is designed primarily for finance teams (not IT), or has a near-vertical learning curve. The last thing your IT team needs is an automation tool that makes it really hard to create and manage workflows.

How to select the right SMP for automating your onboarding process

Before you automate any IT task, you have to make a key decision: which SMP to bring into your IT environment. While other solutions, such as iPaaS or IDaaS, might offer automation capabilities, they are best used when automating short, simpler tasks, such as sending a Slack message when a Salesforce event occurs. 

For multi-step, multi-app HR processes such as onboarding or offboarding an employee, however, the workflows these automation tools create can become exponentially more complex. This is because they simply connect one app to another, merely passing instructions along.

For most IT departments, an SMP like BetterCloud is a far more accessible and user-friendly choice for automation.

BetterCloud ingests and analyzes metadata from the apps it is connected to, so the platform itself knows who manages who, or if a user account already exists in an app. As a result, IT teams can create intelligent automated workflows with a minimum number of steps.

It is critical to make sure your SMP or other automation tool doesn’t come with unexpected opportunity costs. With IT teams already lean and overburdened, you don’t want team members spending their valuable time in extensive product-specific training or learning scripting skills just to build a workflow. 

With an SMP like BetterCloud, your IT team gets the operational intelligence and ease of use you need to get workflows up and running in weeks—not months. Beyond automation, a fully featured SMP can also secure your SaaS, enable you to make bulk changes, and provide valuable application insights to help you make smarter purchasing decisions. You can take a closer look at why you need a SaaS management platform that does it all, and the value you can deliver throughout your organization.

How to build automated workflows for onboarding remote employees

Once you have an SMP in place, you can start getting ready to build automated workflows. The first step is to take inventory of your current IT environment and see where you fall on the spectrum of “low-cloud” to “high-cloud.” Whether or not you use an IDP, the number of SaaS apps you have, and any automations already in place are all important factors to consider. 

You also need to think about automating more than basic app access. An onboarding workflow in BetterCloud can also add users to shared folders, specific Slack channels, and more.

We invite you to watch the on-demand workshop below to learn how to build an onboarding workflow. Three BetterCloud experts walk you through how to get your IT environment ready for automation, and how to structure onboarding workflows.

To learn more about how to automate onboarding in BetterCloud, check out the Automating Employee Onboarding episode of the SaaSOps show. Two IT leaders at BetterCloud deep dive into how they automated employee onboarding in a remote-first workplace that uses a lot of SaaS. They also discuss how they iterate their workflows over time to meet changing needs.

Starting a workflow from a ticket or HRIS to achieve zero-touch onboarding

To provide the best possible onboarding experience for new employees, you will want to orchestrate a zero-touch workflow that automates every manual task in the onboarding process. 

When IT doesn’t need to perform any manual steps to onboard an employee, everyone wins.

Hiring managers can simply set a hire date in an HRIS like Greenhouse, or submit a ticket or form to IT, and the wheels are set in motion. New hires get what they need to do their jobs quickly, errors are minimized, and IT can focus on more strategic work.

In the video below, BetterCloud Solutions Engineer Michelle Lam walks you through, step by step, how to use BetterCloud’s Greenhouse integration to create a seamless, zero-touch onboarding workflow.

Another way to set up end-to-end automated onboarding is to have the workflow start when a hiring manager submits a Jira ticket. Below, you can watch a 30-minute workshop with two BetterCloud experts to learn how to use BetterCloud’s Jira integration to create a zero-touch onboarding workflow. They also review best practices and even include a look at a third-party tool you can use to validate webhooks.

We all know that employees that have a positive onboarding experience will be more invested in their role. After hiring managers do the hard work of interviewing and negotiating job offers (especially in a challenging labor market) the last thing you want to do is frustrate a new employee with app access and equipment delays. No one wants to spend their first day of a remote job submitting IT tickets, or wondering when their laptop will arrive.

When you automate onboarding processes in an SMP like BetterCloud, the benefits are numerous. IT can avoid the error-filled drudge of manual onboarding, and hiring managers can rest assured that the new employees they worked so hard to recruit will have a great onboarding experience. 

With automated onboarding, new hires can get everything they need to be productive from day one, quickly and seamlessly—even access badges for facilities. They can focus on diving into their new role, not figuring out how to get access to Slack or Zoom. 

Automated onboarding is a key part of delivering a magical employee experience for all of your remote workers. To see BetterCloud’s automated onboarding workflows—and other powerful workflows that save IT time and keep remote employees happy—schedule a demo.

Although remote work has evolved into just work for so many people, IT pros still do most of their jobs manually. All too often, they get buried under endless (digital) piles of help desk tickets. They jump between hundreds of tabs to grant and revoke app access. And to ensure that everyone has the hardware they need to do their jobs, they run shipping departments out of their own homes. 

If you’re reading this post, you probably know that this needs to change. Remote work has changed how and when we work. Most of us can think of at least a dozen times when we stepped away for an afternoon to pick up our kids from school, to do a mid-afternoon workout, or just to catch up on the latest Netflix miniseries. Work days have become non-linear—and asynchronous work is just work in 2022.  

Remote work has also changed how we work, but it has also changed your users’ expectations. Even if your IT department is based on the East Coast, employees on the West Coast expect to get the tools they need as quickly as they can hail an Uber in 2022. Oh yeah, and if you deliver a less-than-stellar employee experience, your best people won’t have trouble finding new jobs.

These are just a few reasons why businesses around the world are embracing a zero-touch IT mindset to deliver a best-in-class employee experience and elevate IT. That includes us! We’ve talked about many of these tips in previous posts, but here’s one place where you can read about how we’re moving towards zero-touch IT at BetterCloud, with BetterCloud. 

Zero-touch hardware procurement (and provisioning)

Most of us can’t do a job without a computer, right? Even if your onboarding process is bad, I’m willing to bet that the first step of said process is to procure hardware for new hires. 

But like most things, doing so manually makes things unnecessarily difficult. Here are just a few realities of manual hardware provisioning:

• Lots of time wasted running updates (about 30-45 minutes per computer, according to our IT folks)
• Uncertainty & delays on when new hires could start
• Doubled cost of shipping
• Slower new hire starts = slower ramp up = less success

Those are a lot of words to describe an already cumbersome process. If you like charts, here’s one that outlines the pain of manual hardware provisioning:

To remedy this, our IT team recently set off on a mission to improve everyone’s quality of life by enabling a true zero-touch onboarding experience. For those of you who like images, here’s how hardware procurement works at BetterCloud.

Let’s talk about what’s happening here:

• When a candidate is hired, our wonderful People team submits a Google form that includes that person’s name, their address, and the type of computer they’ve selected
• Once the form is submitted, an automated workflow in BetterCloud sends an email to our distributor and places an order for a computer
• The new employee receives a computer that’s already enrolled in an MDM (in our case, Jamf)
• IT gives that new user the green light and the automated workflow continues granting access to the apps that person needs
• Brian Farrell and Dennis Irizarry no longer have to do this all manually and get to enjoy cocktails after work 

I know what you’re thinking. “Rich, you did a lot of writing to explain this. How is this zero-touch hardware procurement?” And I get it. But check out this video to see the workflow in action. Spoiler: It’s not very long. 

Zero-touch role changes across your entire organization

In a previous post, we talked about the drudgery of employee transfers. A single move from one team to another means removing and granting access to an endless list of new applications, not to mention all the groups you need to move that person into and out of. Multiply that by even just 10 employees and IT suddenly has a nightmare filled with manual tasks on its hands, all of which are prone to human error because nobody’s perfect when you have 1,000 tabs open at the same time. 

But as you might have guessed by now, you can automate app provisioning and deprovisioning with workflows that run when IT moves users into and out of Org Units in Google Workspace. In case you missed that post and don’t feel like clicking away from this one, here’s a quick refresher:

What the heck is happening here? Here’s a quick breakdown:

• Removing a user from the Marketing Org Unit triggers the marketing offboarding workflow, which removes that person from marketing-specific Slack channels and revokes access to applications like Asana
• When IT adds that person to the Solution Engineering Org Unit, BetterCloud runs the solution engineering onboarding workflow, which grants access to relevant groups, Slack channels, and additional apps they need to do their job

Isn’t it wild how much you can get done just by moving a user from one Org Unit to another? The images above cover just one example of an internal transfer that we use BetterCloud to process. Our IT team uses an additional 150 zero-touch IT workflows to handle any internal transfer, promotion, or departure seamlessly.

I know what you’re thinking: Why did BetterCloud’s IT team put itself through the torture of thinking through and building these workflows? 

The short answer is that research shows that new hires who have a positive experience are more likely to contribute to business goals and remain with their employer. Additionally, organizations with a strong onboarding process improve new hire retention by 82% and productivity by over 70%.

That’s probably convincing enough data to automate your onboarding and offboarding processes. But can you use BetterCloud to automate help desk tickets? Of course. We wouldn’t have asked this hypothetical question if you couldn’t. Here’s how we do it. 

Using chatbots to resolve help desk tickets

Last year, our IT team resolved thousands of help desk tickets. And get this: The median resolution time was just under 12 hours, with 62% of tickets resolved within 24 hours.

How do we do it at BetterCloud? We have teams of IT admins who sit around and do nothing but respond to help desk tickets all day. Just kidding. In addition to the zero-touch IT workflows we’ve already discussed in this post, our IT team is testing out a chatbot that will enable us to request and gain app access from Slack.

Editor’s note: This is the part where I’m required to tell you this is still in testing. We haven’t rolled this out yet, so please hold all questions for Brian Farrell and Rudy Fraser until further notice, or I’m going to be in big trouble.

Want to see how it works? I thought so. In the image below, you’ll see that the user has typed the words “I need access to an app” into the chatbot. The chatbot responds by adding an emoji reaction to the message to acknowledge the request was received, then replies with a dropdown menu of applications for the user to select from.

Once you confirm that you want access to the application you’ve selected, IT receives an email notifying the team that you’ve used the chatbot to request access.

Neat, right? How did we do it? Was it a little Python script running in the background? Nope! We extended BetterCloud’s platform support for the apps that aren’t available in our Integration Center (in this case, PagerDuty). These extensions listen for events such as a ticket submission, or in this case, a message sent to our chatbot.

This one’s pretty simple and ends with a notification to the IT team, but you can also configure this workflow to find additional details from the user or even provision access to the application. 

Oh yeah, we won’t be restricted to just requesting access from this chatbot. In the screenshot below, you’ll see that our IT team is testing a feature that would allow employees to reset their Okta MFA.

A lot is happening in the background here, but this entire chatbot is powered by one extension of BetterCloud’s platform that’s listening for a large list of actions. Again, this is still in the works—but I think you’ll be pretty jealous of everyone at BetterCloud once it’s live.

Zero-touch offboarding with BetterCloud

When you’re done begging (er, asking) your colleagues to reconsider, offboarding can quickly become a huge mess for IT. There’s application access you need to revoke (and revoke fully). There are the files and calendars you need to either delete or transfer to that person’s hiring manager. There’s a long list of people you need to notify when these tasks are complete. And don’t get us started if someone makes a mistake along the way, right?

At the risk of sounding like a late-night infomercial, what if I told you that you could do all of these tasks with a workflow? Here’s what that looks like for BetterCloud’s IT team.

All our IT folks need to do to revoke app access from a departing employee is run an offboarding workflow they’ve built. But offboarding doesn’t necessarily stop at deprovisioning app access. What do you do with all of your former employee’s documents and calendar events? Transfer each item to a manager individually? Nobody has time for that.

Instead, the IT team at BetterCloud built a workflow that handles all those transfers—and all you need to do is move the former employee to a dedicated Org Unit they’ve named “Deprovision.”

As you can see in the image above, the automated workflow handles everything from setting auto-replies from the former employee’s inbox to transferring ownership of groups, calendars, and files to that person’s manager. 

To put this time savings in perspective, I have 10GB of files in my Google Drive right now. If I were ever to leave this company, that would be a nightmare for someone to transfer to my boss, file by file.

Multiply that amount of work by just five employees and it’s not difficult to see how much of a headache this workflow saves our IT team from.

As we’ve said several times on this blog, we’ve only scratched the surface of how a zero-touch IT mindset can help you deliver a best-in-class employee experience. At the same time, the “beginning” of our movement towards a self-service environment has freed up our IT friends to focus on more strategic initiatives that are enabling people like me to meet my goals. 

Want to learn more about how you can use BetterCloud to create a best-in-class zero-touch employee experience? Check out the resources below.

Urgent SaaS access requests from remote employees pile in from across time zones, countries, and continents. Churn from the Great Resignation means more IT hours spent onboarding and offboarding employees. For every new SaaS app that gets added to IT environments that likely have 110 or more already, already-lean IT teams must find the time to provision new accounts, manage licenses, and ensure the app doesn’t pose any security risks.

Enabling remote work and controlling SaaS sprawl demands a massive amount of time and effort from IT. CIOs can easily end up overseeing overworked, frustrated IT teams that spend nearly all their time as reactive “ticket-takers.”

Despite IT teams working harder than ever, new hires and current employees still spend hours (or even days) waiting for access to the apps and resources they need to do their jobs. When employees depart, if IT can’t revoke app and file access fast enough, sensitive and proprietary data are put at serious risk.

It may seem like multiple solutions are needed to address the disparate problems of wasted time, lower productivity, and data security risks, but the truth is that they all stem from one place—a lack of SaaS management automation.

For every repetitive, manual IT task you automate with a SaaS management platform (SMP), your IT team gets hours of time back. Automating onboarding and app access requests boosts productivity for both new and current employees. Automated offboarding processes reduce your threat landscape and protect your company from data loss and theft.

These benefits multiply with every task and process you automate. This is why CIOs should strive to adopt a zero-touch approach to their IT automation strategy.

What is zero-touch IT?

Zero-touch IT is the orchestration of end-to-end, automated workflows that replace repetitive, manual IT processes. The goal of zero-touch IT is to reduce the number of manual “touch points” by IT support to as close to zero as possible.

To orchestrate zero-touch workflows, a SaaS management platform like BetterCloud is needed. BetterCloud’s no-code workflow builder will ensure any member of a modern IT team can create and manage zero-touch processes—no developers required.

To show the power of zero-touch IT, we created the illustration below to show how fast and easy provisioning app access can be. 

On the left, we see the manual IT process for responding to a request for app access. 

1. The employee opens a ticket requesting access to the SaaS app. 
2. An IT team member opens the ticket and reviews the request.
3. The IT team member looks up who their manager is, and sends an email requesting approval.
4. Once the manager responds, the IT team member opens the SaaS app and creates the new account.
5. The IT team returns to the ticket, responds to the ticket, and closes it.
6. The IT team member then emails the employee that their account has been created.
7. The employee is finally able to log in to the SaaS app.

On the right, BetterCloud, an SMP, has replaced the IT team member in every step, orchestrating a true “end-to-end” workflow. BetterCloud automatically receives the ticket data as soon as it is submitted, and then kicks off an automated workflow that performs the remaining steps—notifying the manager, waiting for approval to continue, provisioning the new user, closing the ticket, and notifying the employee that they can now log in.

BetterCloud’s zero-touch workflow removes every human touchpoint needed to provision a new account. When this effect is multiplied across the numerous SaaS access requests tickets that come in every day, it is easy to see how IT’s efficiency can increase exponentially.

Now that we’ve taken a close look at a zero-touch IT process, let’s dive into the business value it drives both inside of an IT department and across an entire company.

Zero-touch IT boosts productivity, especially in remote-first workplaces

When an IT team is manually managing SaaS, the negative effects can be far-reaching. Remote employees who need access to a critical app might spend hours waiting for an IT support person in a different time zone to start their work day.

With zero-touch provisioning workflows, you can deploy self-service SaaS access portals that remove these wait times completely. Remote employees can simply fill out a form or submit a ticket to request access to a new app. Once approved by their manager, their new account is created instantly.

Companies never get another chance to make a first impression, but the complexity of onboarding frequently leaves new hires sitting and waiting for equipment and access (and as a result, frustrated and confused). For every new person that joins a company, IT staff must procure and ship hardware, provision new accounts, and grant access to shared resources.

With zero-touch onboarding, new hires can have all the resources and access they need on day one—ensuring their first experience with your company is a positive one.

A zero-touch onboarding workflow can be started from an HRIS or a ticket on (or even before) a specified hire date. All of the required apps and resources are then instantly provisioned—without anyone in IT needing to do anything at all.

Even procuring, preparing, and shipping laptops and other hardware can be orchestrated by an SMP into a zero-touch hardware provisioning process. Check out the video below from the IT team at BetterCloud to see this transformation in action.

Zero-touch offboarding keeps your company data secure

Offboarding an employee is another long, complicated process when done manually—often taking seven hours or more of valuable IT time. Former employees retain access to sensitive and proprietary company data every minute that an offboarding process is delayed. When those minutes grow into hours, days, or even weeks, the risk of that data being stolen, misused, or overshared grows.

Zero-touch offboarding removes access much faster, and more completely. At 5:01 pm on a departing employee’s last day, HR can submit a ticket that will instantly revoke access to SaaS, files, devices, and other resources.

When offboarding is handled with a zero-touch automated workflow, proving compliance is an easier task as well. When each offboarding workflow completes, and the requesting ticket is closed, your security team gets a clear record of having completed the offboarding process in a timely manner. 

IT security teams can also leverage BetterCloud’s non-expiring audit logs to quickly generate compliance reports to prove that employees were offboarded quickly and completely.

Zero-touch automation allows IT teams be more proactive and strategic

No one likes to fill their hours with tedious, repetitive tasks, day after day. IT teams that are manually managing large SaaS portfolios rarely get a free moment to be proactive, let alone innovate.

If your IT department is also manually provisioning hardware, onboarding new hires, and offboarding departing employees, that easily adds up to days, weeks, and even months of time that could be focused elsewhere. When manual IT touch points are eliminated with zero-touch workflows, operational efficiency is dramatically improved.

With zero-touch automation in place, especially for user lifecycle management, IT teams are no longer spending the majority of their time reacting to incoming requests. Far more IT staff time becomes available for innovative, proactive, and strategic work (such as performing in-depth research on new SaaS tools).

Myriad benefits, one solution: zero-touch IT

From reduced risk to happier, more productive IT teams, implementing a zero-touch automation strategy has far-reaching benefits that multiply at scale. 

An SMP like BetterCloud with a large, prebuilt integration library and an easy-to-use, no-code workflow builder is key to implementing zero-touch IT automation. Workflow templates can be leveraged to get up and running fast—all while following best practices for IT process automation, including offboarding, onboarding, and access requests. 

Over time, workflows can be easily extended into more apps, removing more and more manual IT touch points. The closer your processes get to zero touch, the more secure and efficient your IT environment will be.

To get a closer look at how to orchestrate zero-touch workflows with BetterCloud, we invite you to schedule a demo.

What is SaaS management?

SaaS management is automating and centralizing management tasks across a company’s entire portfolio of software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications. The first step of SaaS management is understanding and controlling identity and access to SaaS. The next step in SaaS management is streamlining the processes across a company’s entire SaaS portfolio for:

• user lifecycle management (ULM)
• spend optimization
• application configuration
• visibility and auditability

When these SaaS management practices are implemented well, IT departments can benefit in many ways. They get hours of time back, produce fewer errors, shorten their ticket queues, and keep their fellow employees productive.

To put these best practices for SaaS management into action, IT administrators often turn to a SaaS management platform (SMP) like BetterCloud.

What is a SaaS management platform?

According to Gartner, a SaaS management platform (SMP) is a standalone tool that can discover, manage, and secure multiple SaaS applications from a central admin dashboard. A fully featured SMP should help IT admins with all of the following:

• optimize SaaS app usage to boost collaboration and productivity
• automate day-to-day SaaS management tasks
• gain visibility into all apps in use, including shadow IT
• protect the files and sensitive data in their environment

A SaaS management platform is an all-in-one tool that helps IT implement the three core practices of SaaS operations (SaaSOps):

1. SaaS management (as discussed above)
2. SaaS discovery
3. SaaS security

We discussed SaaS management in detail earlier, so we’ll take a quick look at the last two items.

What is SaaS discovery?

SaaS discovery provides full visibility into what SaaS applications are running within your environment. An SMP should be able to show you both sanctioned apps (the ones approved and vetted by IT), and unsanctioned apps (shadow IT being used by employees without approval). 

SaaS discovery allows IT admins to optimize SaaS application usage and SaaS spend in their environment. They can consolidate SaaS licenses if multiple apps are performing the same function. App consolidation cuts SaaS costs and increases collaboration as more employees use the same apps. If an unsanctioned app is being heavily used, IT can step in to sanction it and make sure it is properly licensed and secured.

Check out the two resources below to learn more about SaaS discovery.

What is SaaS security?

SaaS security is the process of understanding where sensitive and proprietary data is located in your SaaS portfolio, and actively working to mitigate security risks. An SMP should be able to secure your SaaS apps by responding to security incidents immediately with automated alerts and remediation. 

Another important part of SaaS security is creating and enforcing security policies to fulfill compliance regulations. SMPs help IT admins prove compliance with the ability to implement IT security policies and document them with non-expiring audit logs. Finally, an SMP should give you the granular access controls you need to implement least privilege access models.

We invite you to check out the two resources below to learn more about SaaS security.

How Do I Get Started with SaaS Management?

Step 1: Gain full visibility into your entire SaaS portfolio

With companies now using an average of 110 SaaS apps, gaining a complete picture of a company’s SaaS environment is a critical need. More than half of IT professionals surveyed say the #1 challenge in their SaaS environments to solve is a lack of visibility into all user activity and data. 

SaaS management platforms like BetterCloud are designed to give IT full visibility into all the SaaS applications in use. From a single, centralized dashboard, you can:

• See every app in your environment
• Identify who is using each app
• Uncover which apps have been granted OAuth access
• Gain visibility into shadow IT—unsanctioned apps that employees are logging into with their work credentials that aren’t approved or vetted by IT

IT admins should use these insights to make strategic, informed decisions on what apps to use. With the data from your SMP, you can optimize your SaaS usage by:

• Uncovering potentially redundant apps 
• Consolidating SaaS usage to save on license costs
• Identifying functionality gaps in your SaaS portfolio
  

In our 2021 State of SaaSOps report, 69% of IT professionals were concerned about unsanctioned apps creating security risks. This is why it is important that an SMP be able to mitigate security risks and protect sensitive data. To improve data security, we recommend using an SMP to:

• Set up real-time alerts to notify you when employees log in to risky apps
• Automatically log employees out of risky apps

Step 2: Automate everyday SaaS management tasks, especially user lifecycle management

User lifecycle management (ULM) is the practice of onboarding, offboarding, and managing user accounts on a day-to-day basis. This includes managing mid-lifecycle changes (e.g., an employee changing roles), resetting passwords, updating profile information, and so on. If managing these processes sounds like a lot of tedious, manual work, it is! 

In a recent survey, we found that offboarding one user takes an average of 7 hours of staff time. A whopping 82% of respondents said they spend at least 20% of their work week (i.e., an entire day) working on repetitive tasks.

To make IT’s job far less tedious and time-consuming, we recommend using an SMP to automate as much as they can. To get automation up and running as fast as possible, it is important that your SMP includes a no-code workflow builder. No-code builders should make it easy enough that anyone in your IT team can update and manage automated workflows. 

We recommend the following steps to get started with automation:

1. Start with the library of pre-built templates to make sure you’re following best practices for the process you want to automate
2. Customize each workflow to meet the specific needs of your company
3. Regularly update your workflows when new apps are added to your portfolio

When you have mastered the basics of workflow management, you can move towards a zero-touch IT model. Here are just two of the many ways you can save even more time with your SMP through automation.

1. Leverage custom triggers to create workflows that can start in another business unit, such as HR. (For example, when someone is given a start date in an HRIS, it automatically kicks off an onboarding workflow in your SMP.)
2. Create self-service IT portals where users can request SaaS app access through a form or ticket, and a workflow kicks off that automatically adds them.

Step 3: Mitigate data security risks and protect sensitive data

Let’s just be honest for a moment. The use of SaaS, especially across 100 or more apps, has been amazing for productivity and collaboration, and awful for data security.

In 2021, SaaS file security violations have spiked 134%, and the number of files containing PII has grown 1944% year over year. 

Over half (55%) of IT professionals say the biggest security concern is not knowing where sensitive data exists. It’s not just the apps themselves that are the biggest threats—72% of IT pros feel that the well-meaning but negligent user poses the greatest risk for data loss.

To mitigate these data security risks (and sleep better at night) we recommend using an SMP to:

1. Automate file security: An SMP can be set up to immediately notify you when a document has been shared publicly, or with a user outside your organization. That alert can also kick off a workflow that automatically unshares the file and notifies IT and the user.
   
2. Implement and automate a least privilege access model: Implementing least privilege is a best practice for any organization. If any users have been granted super admin access, and the number of users exceeds your threshold, an SMP can automatically revoke those excessive privileges. Additionally, an SMP should provide the granularity of permissioning most SaaS applications do not offer natively.
   
3. Locate and protect sensitive data: When you first get started, you should use your SMP to perform a one-time search of all files in your SaaS portfolio that contain sensitive data. You can then take action to protect those files if needed by unsharing them or reaching out to the file’s creator. After the initial scan, you can automate “go-forward” policies that alert you immediately when sensitive data is exposed, and even take action to properly secure the file.
   
4. Create and enforce IT security policies: An SMP should provide the tools you need to create and enforce your IT security policies, such as timely offboarding and sensitive data protection. With lifetime log retention, your SMP can help you prove you followed your policies, as well as investigate past incidents.

With the astronomical rise of SaaS adoption in recent years, SaaS management is becoming an increasingly important area for IT. The pace of work is too fast, and the stakes are too high, to keep manually managing SaaS tools. To tackle these new challenges, IT must turn to centralizing and automating their SaaS operations. With a fully featured SaaS management solution, IT can finally manage their SaaS portfolio more effectively—and regain control over their SaaS environment.

To learn more about how BetterCloud can help you discover, manage, and secure your SaaS environment, request a demo.