But how do you measure the ROI on your SaaSOps environment? How many hours have you saved automating tedious tasks related to onboarding and offboarding? How many automations are you running quarter over quarter? How many files in your environment may still be exposed, despite what seems like a comprehensive security posture?

The BetterCloud Benchmarking Assessment can help. 

Our customized assessment enables customers to gain deep and actionable insights into their SaaSOps environments. The assessment unlocks two main categories of insights:

• How your SaaSOps practice is performing both individually and compared to industry peers
• Visibility into what security vulnerabilities still exist to minimize risk to your organization

Understanding your SaaSOps environment

Every SaaSOps environment supports a different set of business needs and can vary based on organization size, industry, and company goals. A Benchmarking Assessment can give you unique visibility into apps, users, files, and workflows being managed by BetterCloud customized to your environment, including:

• Workflow execution analysis
• Workflow action execution status
• Volume of workflows executed over time
• How much time IT automation is saving you by category (such as onboarding, offboarding, and ULM)
• How users are managed across all of your SaaS applications

These unique data points can help your IT organization understand where it needs to focus its time and resources, and where there may be opportunities to automate more IT tasks. Gaining this level of visibility into your SaaSOps gives you a full picture of how effectively your IT organization is serving the company. These data points can also be aggregated to help you compare to peer organizations, which can help you understand which best practices you have in place and what areas need to be improved so that your IT team can achieve maximum efficiency and security.

Minimizing risk

Securing an organization’s environment, including its SaaS apps and files, is always an IT priority. Whether you’re working with a dedicated security team or on your own, understanding the vulnerabilities of every app and file is a constant struggle. BetterCloud’s Benchmarking Assessment can help any IT team wrap its arms around exposure to threats at any moment. Not only can the assessment help you understand user access to applications and files, but it can also provide data around risks or potential risks, like the number of files shared externally, files that could have external exposure with keywords like “confidential” or “payment information,” and files that are shared with personal email domains.

Understanding these risks, along with which departments might be associated with these vulnerabilities, allows IT teams to measure their true security posture and employee compliance. Minimizing risks like these can ensure data security and get IT the coveted seat at the table as a true strategic business partner, rather than a tactical department who remedies tickets.

BetterCloud’s Benchmarking Assessment is a great first step in gaining actionable insights into your SaaSOps environment, streamlining IT operations and efficiency, and protecting your organization’s files and data. If you’re already a BetterCloud customer, reach out to your account team for a no-cost Benchmarking Assessment today. 

Not a BetterCloud customer yet? See how BetterCloud’s category-defining SaaSOps platform and the Benchmarking Assessment can help you transform your employee experience, centralize data protection, and maximize operational efficiency today.

With IT now responsible for administering and managing hundreds of Zoom accounts, that can add up a lot of tickets. Accounts need to be created when new hires start, and deleted when employees leave. If a group of current employees need changes to their accounts, it can add up to hours of tedious work for already-lean IT teams.  

If your team would like a faster, easier way to manage Zoom-related tasks, you are definitely ready for IT automation. Not only can your team save a lot of time, you can optimize your spend on licenses to keep costs down.

In this blog, we’ll take a look at three great use cases anyone on your IT team can automate with BetterCloud and Zoom.

#1: Automatically create Zoom accounts during onboarding

In remote-friendly workplaces, manually granting the right Zoom licenses to every new hire can take up a lot of time and generate a lot of tickets. This is where automation can really help. Anyone in your IT team can use a SaaS management platform (SMP) like BetterCloud to automate your onboarding process with no-code workflows. 

Inside of these workflows, you can intelligently and automatically create Zoom accounts. If employees in certain departments (such as sales) need a higher level account than others, your workflow can check for that and assign the right license in seconds. Workflows can even include an automated manager approval step. This way, the license would only be granted if the manager clicks a button in their email notification.

#2: Automatically delete Zoom accounts and transfer recording ownership

After an employee departs, going in and deleting their Zoom account can easily become a low priority task—especially compared to the high-urgency tickets IT deals with every day. However, the longer the account remains active and unused, the more IT budget you are wasting.

An even worse scenario would be this: a marketing or sales team member departs, and a good number of webinar recordings are in their Zoom account. The webinar host leaves the company, IT deletes the account, and no one realizes all those recordings are gone until it is too late!

All of this can be avoided with automation. IT teams can create offboarding workflows that automatically transfer ownership of any Zoom recordings, meetings, and webinars to a manager’s account before deleting the departing employee’s account. To make sure this all happens on their last day, you can set up your offboarding workflow to kick off instantly from a ticket submission or status change in an HRIS.

#3. Automatically reclaim unused Zoom licenses

It is always hard to know which employees are going to actually use an assigned license. Or, maybe an employee was granted two accounts under different email aliases. In either case, it would be great to know if your company was paying for a Zoom account that isn’t being used.

With a SaaS management platform like BetterCloud, there is a quick fix for this. Anyone on your team can set up an alert that lets IT know if someone hasn’t logged in to their account for 30, 60, or 90 days—or any time period you specify. This workflow can also include automated notifications to the user, their manager, and IT. If the account has been inactive for long enough, the account can be deleted, reclaiming the license.

To see all of this in action, watch our short video demo.

Inside of BetterCloud, there are even more tasks you can automate with Zoom—26 to be exact! From creating meetings to resetting passwords, there is a lot your IT team can automate to save time and reduce cost. Check out the list below to see every Zoom action you can currently automate with BetterCloud.

To learn how to start automating your repetitive Zoom tasks, schedule a demo of BetterCloud today.

Automating as many of the routine tasks associated with SaaS management is a great way to save time, reduce errors, and transform your help desk’s day to day work. In this article, we’ll highlight the top processes every IT department can and should be automating. 

A quick note before we dive in. While the market for automation tools is filled with choices, you want to make sure to use a solution that is purpose-built for IT. A fully featured SaaS management platform (SMP) with an easy to use, no-code builder gives the power of automation to anyone on your IT team. This is essential because automated workflows should be regularly reviewed and updated over time, as businesses grow and tech stacks evolve.

The SMP you choose for IT automation should include a deep library of actions to include in your workflows. The more things you are able to automate, the more strategic your IT team can be with their time. You also want to make sure the IT automation solution you choose includes flat fee pricing, so your costs don’t increase the more you automate.

#1: Resolving help desk tickets

Getting to a zero ticket queue is every IT leader’s dream. However, without automated workflows, you would need an incredibly well-staffed IT department to get there. 

By combining the power of SMP with an ITSM like Jira or ServiceNow, you can create self-service portals for employees to request app access. These portals are powered by automated workflows that instantly receive the ticket data, request approval from the manager, automatically grant access to the app, and notify the user. 

The best part is that IT doesn’t have to do anything to fulfill this request—the entire process is 100% automated. Workflows like these can reduce the number of tickets that IT must handle manually by 50% or more.

#2: Zero-touch offboarding

Offboarding an employee is easily one of the most time-consuming tasks IT departments must handle. Without automation, it can take hours or even days.  When offboarding takes too long, the risks of a disgruntled employee causing harm increase significantly. 

Automation also makes sure steps aren’t missed in long, complex offboarding processes. With over 100 SaaS apps in the average IT landscape, it’s easy to miss reclaiming a license, and wind up paying for app access you aren’t using. When resource access isn’t transferred quickly, employees can lose access to critical shared files, hampering productivity.

SaaS management platforms are powerhouses for automating long offboarding processes. The graphic below shows how, with just the submission of an IT ticket, an offboarding workflow can be instantly kicked off. Within minutes, access is revoked across numerous apps, devices are locked, resource ownership is transferred, email is forwarded, and much more. 

To discover the 14 steps every offboarding process should include, and a step-by-step guide for automating the process into a workflow, check out our Ultimate Checklist for Employee Offboarding.

#3. File sharing remediation

The greatest threats to IT security don’t always come from malicious outside actors. File-sharing apps have made it easier than ever for a well-intentioned employee to cause a data leak or breach. It takes just minutes for someone to add sensitive or proprietary information into a document and share it with the wrong person, or worse, publicly for the world to find.

This alert-based security workflow reduces IT’s threat landscape with the power of automation. As soon as BetterCloud detects that a file has been created that contains sensitive information and has been improperly shared, a workflow will immediately kick off. In the example below, the file is immediately unshared and the user is notified that their actions violated security policy.

These alert-based security workflows help you create a “self-healing” IT environment. A SaaS management platform allows IT and security team members to create and enforce security policies automatically—reducing alert fatigue, educating users, and improving your company’s overall security posture.

#4. Revoking OAuth access

Another way your well-meaning colleagues can become insider threats is by granting OAuth access to unsanctioned apps. It’s very simple for an employee to decide to use a new app, click the “Create Account with Google” button, and just like that, it now has broad access to modify, delete, and read company data. 

Shadow IT—using apps not approved by IT—is notoriously difficult to detect. An SMP gives you not only the visibility you need to see what apps have access to your environment, but also the ability to automatically take action.

In the workflow illustrated below, BetterCloud automatically detects when an employee uses their work credentials to grant OAuth access to a risky app and triggers an alert. The alert instantly kicks off a workflow, notifying IT and revoking the user’s access to the app. Finally, it sends an email to the user letting them know about their potentially risky behavior.

Similar to the file security workflow we discussed earlier, this type of workflow remediates a potential threat with input from IT. Emails and notifications in each of these workflows can be completely customized to let IT, managers, and the employees know about the policy violation and the risk their actions pose.

#5. Instant Slack and Zoom war rooms

Not every useful workflow is triggered automatically. On-demand workflows can complete a series of tasks with just a click of a button. To respond quickly when a security incident occurs, IT can immediately create a virtual war room in Slack and Zoom.

These war rooms can instantly notify a wide range of people—and give them a designated, virtual place to meet—the minute the incident occurs. A single workflow can even create different rooms for response types, including:

• A business incident response channel to discuss logistics only—i.e., what’s happening, when it’s happening
• A technical incident response channel to discuss the technical aspects only—i.e., how to mitigate the security incident

The workflow can also automatically create a Zoom call so that leadership can discuss remediation right away.

Conclusion

These five workflows are just the tip of the iceberg for what IT can automate in a SaaS management platform. Strategic BetterCloud customers often create 20 or more workflows that automate everything from onboarding to file security. Because BetterCloud ingests SaaS data to enable more powerful actions, anyone in your IT and security team can use its no-code builder to create and manage workflows.

With each workflow you create, your IT team becomes more strategic, the employees you support have a better experience, and your IT environment becomes more secure. To see BetterCloud workflows in action, schedule a demo today.

IT teams at companies with large SaaS stacks can spend hours of time on manual, repetitive tasks, such as adding and removing user accounts. Numerous security risks, from data breaches to shadow IT, have been added to IT’s threat landscape. Fully onboarding new hires can take days or even weeks, giving them a slow, frustrating start with their new role. SaaS app access requests from remote employees are burying help desks in mountains of tickets.

SaaS operations management (SOM) is a framework for giving IT the strategies and tools needed to tackle these challenges. In this article, we’ll take a close look at everything IT needs to know about SOM, including:

• What is SaaS operations management? 
• How does a SaaSOps management strategy benefit IT teams?
• What does SaaS operations management software do?
• What are some SaaS operations management use cases?

With new SaaS apps being added to IT environments every day, teams can easily get overwhelmed with repetitive work, including access requests, threat remediation, and more. With a SaaS operations management strategy—along with a skilled SaaSOps team and a fully featured SaaS management platform—IT can not only overcome these challenges, but transform their work from reactive ticket-takers to strategic business partners. 

To learn more about how CIOs can transform their IT strategy with a SaaS operations management framework, check out our ebook, The Strategic CIO: How to Evolve IT from a Reactive Cost Center to a Strategic Partner. 

What is SaaS operations management? 

To keep SaaS applications running effectively in their environment, IT teams end up with numerous operational admin and security tasks. SaaS operations management is a strategy for automating these repetitive, mundane tasks in order to effectively manage a large SaaS stack. 

There are two parts to SOM: 

1. Defining acceptable use policies for SaaS apps.
2. Using SaaS operations management software, such as a SaaS management platform, to execute and automate those policies.

IT teams can use a SOM strategy to create, enforce, and optimize everyday usage policies for mission critical SaaS applications.

How does a SOM strategy benefit IT teams?

When an IT team implements a SaaS operations management strategy with a SaaS management platform (SMP), they improve the way their own department and the company as a whole works. Let’s take a look at three of the biggest benefits.

Improved Efficiency

At the core of a SOM strategy is automation. By using an SMP to automate the operational processes of SaaS management, hours can be saved each time the process is completed. 

For example, take the long, complex processes of employee onboarding and offboarding. By automating these processes with an SMP, IT teams in companies like Superfly have gotten back up to 85% of the time they were previously spending on user lifecycle management.

Better Employee Experience

By using a SOM strategy to optimize the use of SaaS, IT teams can improve employee collaboration while saving on cost. With an SMP, IT teams can discover all the apps in use in their IT environment, including unsanctioned apps (also known as shadow IT.) Then, IT can strategically consolidate usage or add new apps to improve productivity and employee experience.

At the core of a SOM strategy is automation, which enables IT teams to spend less time on repetitive SaaS administration tasks. App access request tickets can be fully automated using a zero-touch workflow created in an SMP. With less time spent resolving tickets and managing SaaS apps, IT teams can spend more time on strategic work. When IT teams don’t have to spend 90% or more of their time dealing with tickets and SaaS administration, they have the ability to develop new skills, grow their careers, and take on more meaningful projects.

Centralized Data Protection

The more SaaS you have in your IT environment, the greater your security risks are. Well-meaning employees using the most popular file sharing apps, like Google Drive and Dropbox, are just one click away from causing a major data breach. They also have a tendency to use shadow IT, granting apps OAuth access to your environment with IT ever being aware. Without centralized, granular app access control, far too many accounts with super admin privileges are created—increasing the risk of unauthorized access or accidental misconfiguration. 

With a SaaS operations management strategy, you can define and enforce a number of important security and compliance policies. IT teams can create workflows in an SMP to automatically revoke access to shadow IT, or unshare files that contain sensitive or proprietary data. This way, you can quickly and proactively address the security threats introduced by SaaS sprawl with automated threat remediation.

How does SaaS operations management software help?

To get all the benefits of a SaaS operations management strategy, you need the right tool. SaaS operations management software, also known as a SaaS management platform, should have a full range of features and capabilities that enable IT teams to discover, manage, and secure their SaaS stack.

A SaaS operations management platform should provide a single, powerful location for no-code automation, threat remediation, intelligent alerting, and actionable insights. If an IT team fully leverages all the capabilities of a SOM platform, they can realize major time and cost savings, decrease their threat landscape, and ensure a great employee experience.

The marketplace for SaaS operations management tools can seem daunting and complex, if your team is looking for the right solution. However, Gartner has clearly defined all the capabilities a fully featured solution should have. If you want to deep dive into all the ways SaaS operations management software can help, this comprehensive SaaS management platform buying checklist has everything IT needs to know to buy the right tool for your environment.

What are some SaaS operations management use cases?

A SaaS operations management strategy can be applied to many IT operational processes to save time, decrease security risks, and improve the employee experience. Let’s look at a few of the most common use cases that deliver some of the highest return on investment (ROI).

Employee Onboarding and Offboarding

Automating employee onboarding and offboarding processes with SaaS operations management platform delivers many benefits to both IT and the entire organization. New hires can get the access they need to be productive right away with automated onboarding workflows. 

As soon as an employee departs, you can revoke access to apps in minutes, keeping your environment safe from potentially destructive or risky actions. For security and compliance, a SaaS operations management platform can easily provide a record of enforcing your offboarding policies with non-expiring logs. 

File Security

File sharing apps are designed to be very easy to use. In minutes, an employee can add sensitive information to a Google Doc and share it with an external contact. With a SaaS operations management platform, you can easily locate sensitive data, no matter where in your IT environment it lives. You can also set up automated remediation workflows that unshare files and notify IT and managers.

Access Control

Implementing least privilege access and other access control policies is another important use case for SaaS operations management. Using a SaaS operations management platform, you can create and enforce policies around how many super admin accounts are allowed for each app. Anyone in your IT department can use the platform itself to manage apps, reducing the need for more than one super admin account per app. Automated workflows can also be created to automatically revoke access if someone tries to create too many super admin accounts.

Conclusion

Success in a modern IT environment—filled with SaaS apps and remote workers— requires a specialized approach and the right tools. A SaaS operations management strategy, along with a SOM platform (or SMP), gives IT the ability to create and enforce policies for administering SaaS. Once in place, these strategies and platform capabilities improve the day-to-day work for IT and other departments, by saving time, boosting productivity, and keeping data secure.

To learn more about how BetterCloud can deliver improved efficiency, data protection, and a better employee experience, schedule a demo.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

With no time to research or compare tools, SaaS was adopted and deployed at breakneck speed. As each new challenge arose, IT scrambled to find a tool and implement it as fast as possible. For many IT teams, the SaaS whack-a-mole game lasted for far too long, as working remotely for “just a few weeks” became “the new normal.”

Managing and securing all of these new SaaS apps added a ton of work to IT’s already-full plate. The rapid pace of SaaS adoption left IT to deal with overloaded work days, 1000s of open browser tabs, never-ending ticket queues, and frustrated remote workers. 

Now that the pandemic is becoming endemic, IT leaders are seeking to solve these challenges (and save their team’s sanity) by “right-sizing” their SaaS portfolio and getting control of the sprawl. 

In fact, Gartner has identified management confluence as one of the “Top 6 Trends Impacting Infrastructure and Operations for 2022.” In this article, Gartner contributor Katie Costello discusses how the consolidation of multiple solutions into one comprehensive management tool can reduce costs and improve ROI.

Gartner even recommends a three-step process to achieve this: inventorying current tools in use, identifying potential areas where tools can be combined, and leveraging unified automation from a single dashboard.

An all-in-one SaaS management platform can easily do the work of multiple tools to become the workhorse of your IT department. With centralized SaaS visibility, automation, and security in one platform, an SMP’s value scales over time as you leverage and extend more of its capabilities.

However, if you don’t know what a fully featured SaaS management platform should truly be capable of, you can easily end up with a cobbled-together web of point solutions. 

To learn what you need to know to make an optimal decision for your IT department, let’s walk through the following:

1. What should an all-in-one SaaS management platform be able to do?
2. How does an SMP compare to a SAM, CASB, IAM, IGA, or iPaaS? 
3. Why does your IT team need an all-in-one SaaS management platform?
4. How can IT leaders leverage an SMP to drive value?

What should an all-in-one SaaS management platform be able to do?

To get started, let’s quickly review the Gartner definition of a SaaS management platform, and its core capabilities. In the 2021 edition of its Market Guide for SaaS Management Platforms (SMPs), Gartner defines SMPs as stand-alone tools that can discover, manage, and secure multiple SaaS applications from a central admin dashboard, delivered as a turnkey service.

The graphic below shows all of the functionality that a fully featured SMP like BetterCloud provides.

Discover: An SMP should serve as a single, centralized location that pulls in data from various sources to provide full visibility of your IT environment. It should be able to show you every app employees are logging into—even shadow IT. You should also be able to see the way each app is being accessed, such as OAuth or via SSO. The insights provided by an SMP should enable IT leaders to optimize their SaaS purchasing decisions. 

Manage: From centrally managing all of your SaaS apps without having to log in to each separately, to implementing role-based controls, an SMP should be a “one-stop shop” for all of your SaaS management activities. To save time and reduce errors, an SMP should include powerful automation and orchestration capabilities. Any member of your IT team should be able to use an SMP’s no-code builder to orchestrate workflows that automate employee onboarding, offboarding, and internal job changes.

Secure: From insider threats to data loss prevention, an SMP should be able to secure your IT environment in multiple ways. Using the information it pulls in from connected apps, it can quickly locate sensitive or proprietary data, giving you valuable insight into which app it is located in and who owns the file. An SMP should also send you real-time security alerts, such as when files are shared with outsiders (such as competitors), and or when too many administrative-level accounts have been created. Security-related workflows created in the SMP should automatically remediate policy violations to enable your IT environment to “heal itself.” 

The summaries above only just touch on the deep capabilities of a fully featured, all-in-one SaaS management platform. When evaluating whether or not an SMP is a good fit for your IT department, you should make sure the platform truly delivers everything Gartner says it should.

How does an SMP compare to a SAM, CASB, IAM, IGA, or iPaaS? 

Every IT environment experiences the challenges of SaaS management in different ways. Security and compliance requirements can also greatly affect IT’s choice in what solutions they can and should use. 

The graphic below shows where the functions of a SaaS management platform sit in relation to other platforms and the services they provide.

SMP vs. SAM: Similar to most SAMs, BetterCloud provides a centralized way to see all the apps in your environment, enabling you to optimize spend by right-sizing your license allocation. However, an SMP should provide far more than just a way to just track licenses. To go a step further and ensure licenses are always reclaimed quickly and accurately, an SMP can orchestrate complex workflows that automate account removal and creation. SMPs should also help secure your IT environment by allowing you to uncover risky apps and automatically revoke their access.

SMP vs. CASB: Most of BetterCloud’s mid-market and SMB customers do not need any additional platforms to create and enforce a robust set of IT security policies. Larger organizations, or those with very high compliance requirements, sometimes deploy a CASB alongside an SMP to create a single control point for SaaS application data flow.

SMP vs. IGA/IAM: Some BetterCloud customers leverage IGAs and IAMs to determine whether a new user can have access to an application based on company-specific policies. For most SMBs and mid-market companies, they are able to benefit from centralized and automated SaaS management without the need for one. 

SMP vs. iPaaS: iPaaS platforms are often capable of automating some of the granular SaaS management tasks that an SMP can. However, because iPaaS don’t ingest and analyze data, orchestrating a lengthy automated onboarding or offboarding process leads to incredibly long, complex workflows that often require a developer to manage.

For a more in-depth look at where BetterCloud fits in this provider ecosystem, check out our article on how BetterCloud fits into your tech stack.

Why does your IT team need an all-in-one SaaS management platform?

Like we reviewed above, the marketplace for ways to solve many of the challenges of SaaS management is filled with providers and acronyms. 

You may find yourself in an IT department that already has a point solution in place, thinking you may not need everything an SMP offers. You could also be attempting to compare products that all claim to be tools for “SaaS management,” and struggling to uncover their true differentiators.

A true all-in-one SMP like BetterCloud is purpose-built for IT’s specific needs and requirements, seeking to address their most urgent operational challenges. 

Many of the point solutions in the market are built to deliver value for other business units or end users. For example, SAMs were created primarily for heads of finance and accounting. Most iPaaS are created to save developers time, not automate hardware procurement or user lifecycle management.

By leaving a fully featured SMP out of the mix, you will miss out on key opportunities for optimization. Worse, you could be leaving your company’s data vulnerable to misuse or theft. 

Extremely detailed spend tracking can save money, but so does reclaiming licenses immediately after an employee departs. Quickly revoking access to all those apps and shared resources also protects sensitive data and makes it easier for your security team to pass compliance audits.

Simply optimizing spend will leave your IT environment vulnerable to well-meaning employees that log in to risky apps with their work credentials or share proprietary information with outsiders. Without the ability to easily orchestrate complex workflows, your IT team will keep spending far too much time as “ticket-takers.”

To keep your environment as secure and efficient as possible, it is important that your SMP have the power to address IT’s most pressing challenges.

How can IT leaders leverage an SMP to drive value?

When BetterCloud customers take full advantage of everything it has to offer, they can drive tremendous value in their company. Let’s walk through the benefits experienced by just one customer, a growing company with 1,200 employees that is saving over $1.12 million annually.

• After their IT team saw all their apps in one place, they gained important insights into what was and wasn’t being used. They are now saving $140,000 per year through license optimization.
• They used BetterCloud’s zero-touch automation capabilities to create a self-service SaaS access portal. As a result, they realized productivity gains of $796,000 annually as employees no longer had to wait for IT to manually grant app access. 
• By automating their onboarding, offboarding, and mid-lifecycle change processes, they save $184,000 annually in IT staff time.
• Their operational efficiency improved so much that two full-time employees could refocus their responsibilities to support go-to-market efficiency and revenue growth.
• The company’s sensitive and proprietary data is now being protected with proactive monitoring and automated remediation policies on over 4,000,000 files.
• They identified and revoked OAuth access to 312 risky apps that did not meet security standards. 
• To implement a least privilege access model, they reduced the number of users with super admin access from 15 to 3. 

While every BetterCloud customer doesn’t always realize over $1 million in savings, the stats above highlight all the different ways a SMP can deliver value. From efficiency to security, a fully featured SMP is a single platform that provides multiple, far-reaching benefits for IT.

To get a sneak peek at what BetterCloud can discover about your IT environment, schedule a free, personalized SaaSOps assessment.

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.

Here are just a few key takeaways from yesterday’s session:

• IT is now playing a “front and center” role in rapidly growing companies. How and when SaaS applications are deployed now have a direct, measurable impact on strategic business goals. Today, IT departments find themselves responsible for multiple critical business systems and have to work more cross-functionally than ever before. Hoyt emphasized the importance of continually aligning the work of IT with operations across the rest of the company.
  
• In rapidly growing companies, IT leadership must prioritize—and do it very strategically. IT departments continue to be under-resourced when compared to product development or sales, so leaders must learn how to say “no” (or “not yet” as Hoyt advised). Otherwise, the successful execution of projects most critical to the company’s goals will suffer.  “[You] have to focus on one thing, not 75, because there are always 75 things,” Hoyt said.
  
• The skills needed to be a successful IT leader are changing. With IT playing a more strategic role within companies, soft skills are becoming more valuable than deep technical know-how. “It’s not necessary to understand everything at a fundamentally technical level,” Hoyt said. Success as an IT leader now depends on effectively communicating with fellow business leaders, and building a strong, execution-focused team.

Near the end of the chat, Hoyt offers some helpful tips for those pursuing roles in IT leadership. You can watch the full discussion by registering for Altitude 2021 here, where you’ll get on-demand access to this and all of our other sessions from this week.

Announcing the 2021 SaaSOps Stars

Now in its third year, BetterCloud’s SaaSOps Stars Awards program celebrates innovative individuals and teams that have transformed their companies, careers, and the IT industry. Joe Iantosca, Head of Customer Success at BetterCloud, presented awards to five winners whose SaaSOps practices are pushing IT to new heights.

• Orchestration Wizard: Gareth Thomas, Ocado
• Security Specialist: Ben Silber, 605
• SaaSOps Rookie of the Year: VMware Team
• Discovery Detective: Chloe Becquet, HelloFresh
• Superhero of the Year: Jon Aviles, Ibotta

Want to learn more about this year’s winners? Check out this in-depth blog post about the unique challenges they faced—and more importantly, how each winner thrived this year.

This is just a small sample of what you missed during #Altitude 2021. If you missed anything, you can watch any of our sessions on-demand by registering here.