Organisations often underestimate the impact of Shadow SaaS, which creates an underground digitalisation, increasing exposure to security breaches and cyberattacks.

The in-depth guide to implementing an efficient and sustainable SaaS governance 

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Discover interviews of CIOs and CDOs of large companies on the current state of IT democratisation in their organisations and their views on anticipating future challenges.

For a long time, CIOs of large corporations have perceived the massive growth of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) as a governance challenge and focused on the “fight against shadow IT”. With an expected annual growth rate of 18% until 2030, this SaaS trend is here to stay and represents a massive challenge for IT departments. The digitalisation process has led to a major shift, from a traditional model where IT supplied all software applications to a model where even the least tech-savvy business units choose their solutions on their own. This has forced CIOs to anticipate a profound cultural transformation. The challenge? Ensuring complete visibility over all IT assets, establishing optimal management of costs and risks, and offering a brand-new digital experience for employees.

How should companies organise their digital transformation to make it an “opportunity to be seized and leveraged”, as Andréa Jacquemin, CEO and Co-founder of Beamy, describes it? To answer this strategic question, CIOs from large companies such as LVMH, L’Oréal, BNP Paribas Asset Management, Schneider Electric, Heineken and Equans have agreed to share their views. Despite the fact that they each work in different industries and environments, there is a consensus on what needs to be addressed in the next 10 years.

The changing relationship between IT & Business Units

The digitalisation of Business Units (BUs) is a tremendous vector for digital transformation, provided that it is carried out in collaboration with

the IT department. Rather than being put off by BUs’ initiatives, Franck Le Moal, Chief Information Officer at LVMH, believes that 

“a more detailed discussion between every stakeholder is necessary to build the right architecture and standardisation of the IS to support this transition”

. A stance shared by Stéphane Pain, Chief Digital & Technology Officer at Heineken France, who believes the growth of SaaS can not only facilitate cultural change at the level of a group but also positively transform the relationship between BUs and the IT department.

BUs need to evolve and take on more responsibility

With the heterogeneity of SaaS solutions, it has become essential for BUs to evolve in how they adopt new solutions. L’Oréal, for instance, has implemented a 100% SaaS strategy 

“co-engagement, co-steering and co-development”

, as explained by Étienne Bertin, Chief Information Officer at L’Oréal group. As for Fatia-Fatma Balit, Chief Information Officer at BNP Paribas Asset Management, she believes 

“we need to reinforce the overall understanding of the impact of the democratisation of technology, within both the Business Units and IT teams”

BUs’ autonomy, orchestrated by the IT department

Transforming governance around SaaS is also a way to address the complex issue of technical debt within the company. BUs must be responsible for the types of data and uses of the applications while avoiding duplicates. 

“The objective is to give Business Units more autonomy under the IT department’s governance. This is the very essence of the democratisation of technology trend that we are experiencing today”

, explains Andréa Jacquemin. Equans, for instance, has set up a virtual network as well as a centralised governance system that aim to leverage IT skills directly where they are within the organisation.

With this influx of SaaS solutions within organisations, it is essential to build an accurate inventory of all use cases and solutions. 

“An ‘app store’, for instance, is an interesting way of offering an adapted catalogue while controlling access and downloads”

, suggests Étienne Bertin. With this idea in mind, the IT department of BNP Paribas AM has set out to build an automated inventory that can easily be updated. This would help manage shadow IT, although Emmanuel Gachet, Chief Information Officer at Equans, prefers to call it “flex IT”.

The growth of SaaS makes it even more necessary to have a very fine-tuned vision of the standardisation of processes. This is a point stressed by LVMH’s CIO: data consistency should be a priority for both the IT department and the BUs. At Schneider Electric, business architects have been appointed to define the processes that BUs can rely on. Its CIO Europe Robert Auffray believes “the fact SaaS can contribute to the standardisation process is absolutely key to support business transformation”.

The tidal wave of SaaS adoption has also led to increased cyber risks, because the larger and more fragmented and clustered an information system is, the more exposed the company is. That’s why at Equans, security and cybersecurity are among the company’s “must haves”. The same is true for Heineken France, which is focusing on three “sovereign” aspects of the company: cybersecurity, GDPR compliance and adherence to procurement procedures. The aim is to not hinder adoption but rather to regulate it, with a security effort for SaaS on a case-by-case basis, as L’Oréal’s CIO argues.

Each in their own context and industry, the CIOs all agree: it is urgent and imperative to support this fundamental shift brought upon by the advent of SaaS. The challenge is to have a comprehensive and continuous overview of the digitalisation process in order to monitor all applications used within the company. The management of security risks, GDPR compliance and IT architecture coherence depend on it. The entire organisation needs to be involved, and this beneficial transformation will only be possible by implementing strong collaboration between all stakeholders, especially the BUs and IT department.

How to anticipate the massive leap forward in the democratisation of technology?

SaaS governance is how companies can be sure about the integrity of their security measures and predict potential casualties. It not only protects the financial interests of the organisation but also ensures reduced downtime to overcome any casualty without hindering the productivity of the employees. 

Check the 3-Steps to achieve SaaS governance for optimal flexibility, predictability, and security.

90% of CIOs expect their organisation’s overall IT budget to either increase or remain the same over the next 12 months, according to the

The biggest contributor to the tech budget increase according to this report? Need for security improvements.

There is always a greater need when it comes to security, even with the most effective governance in place, because business operations and priorities are constantly evolving. With the emergence of appealing technologies, increased employee demands, and customer expectations, comes the need for adaptable and flexible governance.

Software-as-a-service (SaaS) has quietly accommodated itself into the organisation’s technology portfolio. IT departments unknowingly let hundreds of SaaS applications that may pose security threats invade the organisation without adequate vetting. And, for governance to stay relevant through the years, it must be granular and should extend to every corner of the organisation.

Originally IT governance teams may have focused on the on-prem giants, prioritised because of the associated financial risk – Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, IBM, VMWare, and Salesforce, referred to as the “Big-6” by the

The governance radar covers the management of these tier-1 software publishers by default because the financial risk resulting from their non-compliance is fairly large.

But the challenge has changed and, now, the IT departments are forced to wrap their head around how they can possibly govern the underlying growth of the organisation’s SaaS portfolios with a framework as robust as that of the on-prem software.

SaaS vendors are selling directly to the end-users who don’t find it necessary to run their purchase decisions by the IT department. Therefore, the need for SaaS governance doesn’t become apparent until IT learns that the business departments’ buying spree has resulted in persisting shadow IT or several unvetted SaaS applications presenting new data storage and privacy threats.

Lack of SaaS governance doesn’t stop at resulting in the wastage of financial resources; rather also exposes the organisation to cybersecurity, operational, regulatory, reputational and organisational risks.

SaaS governance is how companies can be sure about the integrity of their security measures and predict potential casualties. It not only protects the financial interests of the organisation but also ensures reduced downtime to overcome any casualty without hindering the productivity of the employees.

Step 1. Gain complete visibility of your SaaS ecosystem:

The best possible way to start is deep-diving into the SaaS environment of the enterprise. The discoveries resulting from this campaign will set the baseline for SaaS governance. Larger the organisation, the trickier the hunt.

The biggest challenge is excavating the myriad of shadow SaaS that would’ve piled over time when employees purchase subscription-based SaaS tools for personal or departmental use without notifying the IT department.

The best approach is the initiation of an audit across the organisation to discover and flag the managed or unmanaged applications. This formal audit should aim for a pan-organisation check for the SaaS purchases, employees’ navigations logs, SSO data, checking personal devices, browser extensions, etc.

Data from all levels of the organisation - SaaS for personal use by employees, departmental SaaS, and business unit portfolio; should be combined and monitored in real-time to understand trends in SaaS adoption.

The real-time data extracted from the company’s ecosystem will indicate faulty trends and malpractices like unchecked auto-renewal of SaaS subscriptions, functionally redundant tools, no stakeholder responsible for the SaaS’ lifecycle and more such anomalies.

Step 2. Establishing a SaaS governance “Framework”:

The trends observed after the visibility campaign allow us to set forth guidelines and policies, and list best practices to guard every step - from procurement to offboarding of the SaaS app throughout its lifecycle in an organisation. Flexibility, predictability and security are the three main pillars that should be kept in mind during the design of this model.

The challenge is to ensure the right amount of flexibility in the framework. The ease of procuring these SaaS tools has encouraged the end-users to be autonomous and choose the technology that they think fits. And, the last thing the IT teams can do is to put an end to this innovation from the bottom up due to the strict policies.

While there is no standard framework and every structure will be different according to the industry and other factors in question, the one thing that can be in common is its flexibility.

Designing a SaaS governance framework will take rigorous efforts, wherein IT will need to involve external stakeholders specialising in different aspects like security, procurement, finance and even end-users. Already existing procedures like the ones for vetting the SaaS vendor can be optimised in accordance with corporate objectives, communication between the business units can be revised, and data-backed (or ROI-backed) decisions can be given priority in the newly developed model to minimise security vulnerabilities and optimise costs.

Step 3. Create ordered and guided freedom within the teams:

Encouraging the company’s departments to operate within the guardrails of this governance model is a challenge that can be mitigated with the right approach from IT. The governance will only be effective if every SaaS decision remains aligned with the company’s business objectives. SaaS enablement is IT's responsibility.

IT and the departments have been long-advised to collaborate over technology decisions. One approach by which IT can come closer to them is by being sensitive to their technology needs. Introducing a SaaS Directory and an App Store can be that stepping stone toward a collaborative future.

 provides access to over 50K SaaS solutions, including those already in use within the company as well as those on the market that can help meet the employee’s specific needs.

 is an all-in-one platform where teams can request apps through workflow, find key guidelines or best practices relative to the governance policy, engage with other teams to ask for advice about a solution or a need and use the market directory. Essential features of the app store are security criticality scoring, application owner info, approval status and more.

An effective SaaS governance project will reflect in two ways - financially and as an overall changed mindset; where teams are aware of what possible turns can their purchase decision take and how distant their step is from the organisation’s corporate objectives.

What is SaaS Governance? 

SaaS Sprawl is the unchecked proliferation of third-party cloud applications procured directly by employees or business units without adequate vetting, sanctioning and SaaS life-cycle management.

Its impact amplifies exponentially in the context of large organisations. This article discusses the challenges of SaaS Sprawl, with listed recommendations and best practices to prevent or overcome it.

Software-as-a-service (SaaS) vendors have made no mistakes in extending their technology’s target persona from just the IT teams to end-users (employees).

Looking back at the SaaS industry growth, they solved the problem even before it showed up. When the pandemic forced companies to operate online; the ones already thorough with the SaaS model fared better than the conventional ones with on-prem software.

But over-consumption of anything, no matter how good, can be harmful. The same is true of SaaS tools.

There hasn’t been a cap to this consumption lately, and this uncapped adoption of SaaS software is the so-called, “SaaS Sprawl”.

SaaS Sprawl is the unchecked proliferation of third-party cloud applications procured directly by the employees or the business departments without adequate vetting, sanctioning and SaaS life-cycle management.

SaaS Sprawl has a different meaning altogether, and its impact amplifies exponentially in large organisations (1000 employees or more), where collaborative efforts will have to address an extra layer of business units before sorting out sprawling at the departmental level. This article discusses the challenges of SaaS Sprawl, with listed recommendations and best practices to prevent or overcome it, once and for all.

Although Google Docs serve the same purpose as Notion or any other collaborative workspace tool, the latter is a specialised platform and thus more relevant to its niche. SaaS publishers have managed to know the ins and outs of their target market; it is only natural that their customers reciprocate their efforts.

Subscription-based cloud software with a short time to value (TTV) and extensive scalability is in itself a very sustainable model and explains how SaaS has become the de facto standard in application delivery.

Not to mention how its qualities are not just limited to the feasibility of its model; credit also goes to these applications’ capabilities, designed specifically by keeping the digital consumer in mind. For example, no-code solutions are lowkey revolutionary or some vendors offer ample irresistible customisation options like self-service SaaS models.

The pace of SaaS adoption reflects a rapid digital transformation in organisations, but with that comes the challenges of managing the constantly upgrading tech stacks.

All these qualitative factors help SaaS tools to multiply their quantitative reach in organisations giving way to unintentional SaaS sprawl.

SaaS users are always looking for tools that can help them improve their efficiency and productivity, and no employee has to think twice before switching to a better alternative. But with such extensive choices come grave consequences.

Plenty of options mean that the employees don’t have to adjust to other departments’ choices and would want to use the most familiar technology.

It is a growing trend or rather a ‘common practice’ - that employees have become autonomous in choosing SaaS apps by and for themselves, also decentralising the typical tech procurement and sanctioning methods. The lack of sanctioning these apps by the IT department results in their unauthorised use by the employees or the so-called Shadow IT.

But IT departments have only recently offloaded the burden to obtain and manage technology to these innovative business teams. They have every reason not to stop this innovation from the bottom up as it only allowed them to come closer to the businesses. But it also brings in the unforeseen challenge of persisting SaaS Sprawl.

3. Digital Employee Experience (DEX) & collaboration gap:

A marketing team might prefer Hubspot as their CRM, while the sales team might choose Salesforce, depending on their expertise and preferences.

Unchecked SaaS sprawl results in hundreds of unmanaged SaaS applications across an organisation, each acting as an exposure point for unwanted risks.

Unmanaged SaaS apps present a significant challenge in the following ways:

Beamy’s client organisations (large enterprises) add an average of 30% of new SaaS tools to their tech stack yearly. This proves that SaaS is becoming mainstream and accounts for a significant share of the Enterprise IT budget. But on the other hand, measuring the ROI of every SaaS procured is not feasible because it depends on the extent of its adoption (or usage) by the employees. Underused licenses, inactive applications, overlapping apps, etc. signify unoptimised and wasteful spending.

The SaaS inventory is replenished every year as the business scales, and the outdated apps must retire to avoid risks like data breaches from the SaaS Sprawl. But most companies are not agile enough to upgrade in such a manner every year.

With additional cloud software being procured to address the unique challenges of a large enterprise, the old data gets siloed. Collaborators are spread across all levels in a company. Automated SaaS Management solutions should be introduced to avoid the fragmentation of existing processes and keep agility unimpaired. 

6 Best practices to mitigate SaaS Sprawl:

What is SaaS Sprawl?

Unoptimised SaaS apps are an excellent source of wasteful technology spending in organisations. SaaS Spend Optimisation is a 3-step process aimed at minimising the costs incurred from underused, overlapping, unnecessary SaaS tools and their unoptimised renewals, possible cancellations and consolidations.

Tech vendors are going the extra mile to help their customers trust them.

“Try it free for a month” always sounds interesting.

The aftermath of trying it for free, for some of us, looks like this: we subscribe to tech solutions available online temporarily, to address an immediate need and the next thing we know is that its free subscription ended a while ago, and our company has now been paying for the service we subscribed to, for months.

But until we make room for regret to kick in for using the free subscription, it is too late for the IT department to ask for a refund from the vendor. 

Such shortcomings of SaaS Management are an excellent source of wasteful spending for the IT department.

A lot of focus is placed on software’s ROI in companies but how do we plan to keep up, when their volume itself is unknown? Such is the case of SaaS software, whose standalone prices aren’t high enough to draw the attention of the ROI police but cumulative and unoptimised, they represent a significant share of wasteful technology spend.

In this article, we’ve discussed all the possible optimisations in SaaS operations and assets.

SaaS Spend Optimisation (or SaaS Cost Optimisation) aims at reducing the costs incurred from unoptimised SaaS platforms (often existing as unused, overlapping tools) and their unmanaged renewals, cancellations and possible consolidations.

What are the steps of SaaS Spend Optimisation?

Discussed below, is a 3-step process of obtaining relevant data, assigning stakeholders to process that data and finally optimising the SaaS spend based on the gathered insights.

Overspend results from incomplete visibility on subjects like unknown app users, unmanaged subscriptions and so on. Mapping and tracking this missing information could've been a job already half-done for locating the source of overspend. But most organisations are behind schedule and for them, the best time to start is right now. 

 is the best course of action for getting started. 

This SaaS directory should be a manual spreadsheet, shared between the project owner (PM for SaaS Spend Optimisation) and the individual application stakeholders (discussed later in detail). 

The directory should ideally include the following information:

As the project advances, other important information can be introduced after a deeper investigation and involvement of other departments.

These data can be obtained by means of an audit - a pan-organisation check which should include the financial footprint from the SaaS purchases to locate each and every application which is paid for and can also be extended to a screening of the personal devices in hybrid working environments.

This step of 'discovery' gives us a blueprint of the company’s SaaS environment, now available for further optimisation.

This directory will also serve as an MVP for further advancement in the project using an 

 discovery dashboard and an internal real-time app store for the company’s SaaS ecosystem.

Step 2. Assigning an owner to each SaaS app

With ample information now available, we can move on to the next step. Which is assigning a stakeholder (or owner) for each application, who will oversee its management throughout the SaaS app’s lifecycle. 

An owner can be anyone with an understanding of the SaaS tool and the ins and outs of the external provider. 

External SaaS providers also tend to compromise their client organisations' security in the form of 

Such scenarios signify the importance of having someone accountable for the application and its provider, to keep the situation from going haywire.

, the collaboration distance between the IT department and the end-users (employees, who procure the SaaS software) is extremely wide. Astronomical amounts of SaaS tools await proper management and new apps keep appearing in no time.  In such instances, it is highly recommended to assign a business application owner from the

for all apps to avoid any mismanagement later on.

An application owner(s) should be responsible for the management of the following:

A one-man army cannot optimise hundreds of SaaS and it should be expected of the Finance or the Procurement department to be involved in all the stages of SaaS Spend Optimisation as their insights will only refine the raw data.

 An enterprise-level approach, which includes operational actions to address the most urgently required optimisations in the current tech stack. These optimisations will ideally have an extensive influence on the company’s budget and will allow the setting of the best course of action for future SaaS investments.

 A long-term optimisation approach should address all the ongoing and future optimisations of the tech stack based on the in-depth benchmarking, adequately defined processes and accountable stakeholders to prepare an unfailing foundation for any future tech needs. 

7 Best Practices in SaaS Spend Optimisation

1. Deprovisioning abandoned or underused SaaS apps:

Over 30% of new SaaS tools are added to the SaaS portfolio, year over year, in Beamy's client organisations.

A percentage of these new applications will eventually be abandoned with time as they become too outdated for further usage, or as new applications replace the older ones. 

With this practice, organisations often end up with multiple SaaS platforms, with little to no significant usage. These SaaS tools exist in the background and the 

 of the SaaS applications can only be proved through their level of usage or the level of adoption by the respective teams. Tracking usage also improves future purchase decisions. 

With clear visibility of what apps have no longer a purpose to solve, companies can bring a balance between the budget spent on acquiring new SaaS apps and getting rid of the older, unused ones.

Application owners should be responsible for reporting such underused or abandoned tools, followed by their timely de-provisioning from the SaaS portfolio, thereby saving significant money on idle software.

2. Reducing duplicate and overlapping SaaS apps:

While companies cannot disregard employees’ satisfaction in using the tools of their choice, they sometimes tend to overlook the possibility that different departments could be using 

 apps - different apps serving the same purpose. 

For example, it is only wise that the Customer Success department uses a different video conferencing tool than the rest of the teams because their clients utilise that tool. But this comes with a cost.

Sometimes the features that a team wants in an app are not distinct enough from what was already present in the tech portfolio. For e.g. some employees choose Notion over Google Docs as their preferred collaborative workspace. 

, the tendency of duplication or overlap in SaaS apps is higher, as the redundancies occur on a 

 instead of only between different business teams.

There lies ample financial opportunity to eliminate such redundancies by improving the overall visibility of SaaS software in use and its overlapping functionality. A collaboration between the business units (or departments) can help identify such redundant software. 

3. Rightsizing unused or underused SaaS licenses:

Companies often purchase licenses in bulk quantities, but there is no follow-up process that checks the usage of these licenses. By rightsizing the licenses - discarding the unused ones and adding new ones as and when needed, SaaS-associated costs can be greatly reduced.

Unrevoked licenses from ex-employees are a common problem. Without having known what all apps the employee used, it becomes difficult to manage their offboarding from several SaaS apps at once. These non-terminations incur extra costs.

4. Excess & Auto Renewals of SaaS subscriptions:

Renewals of SaaS subscriptions can be manual or automatic. When a SaaS platform doesn’t have a responsible stakeholder, there is a fair chance that the deadline to renew the license can be missed.

This is also why vendors offer “automatic renewals”, but it hardly solves the entire problem and rather creates a new one. Which is that the tools that are no longer used will also be automatically renewed and their bills paid off, even if you didn’t know about it or didn’t want a renewal in the first place.

The point of optimisation here would be clear visibility of renewal dates, so no unexpected charges show up upon billing.

Further exploring the rightsizing of licenses, we can see opportunities where a certain department(s) has more SaaS features available to them than needed. Additional features come with a higher-priced tier, and not all employees engage with the premium features on a routine basis.

Departments are usually well aware of how they are not able to leverage the SaaS to its maximum potential, but there are hardly any follow-up actions to remove the high-priced option.

A semi-annual check should be sufficient to understand if the licenses are of the right price tier and if the teams require it for another semester. 

Consolidated contracts allow companies, especially large entities, to group the software needs of their 

several business units under a single contract.

 These contracts are win-win for both, the SaaS vendors and their users. 

 This also helps the vendors expand the scope of their services and be able to bag additional clients with minimal sales efforts.

 is also possible for large groups, thereby freeing up many resources for other projects.

Consolidation of contracts can take up to 

of time and should be thoroughly anticipated. A common strategy with defined volumes, prices and uses of each department can allow you to set clear expectations for a smoother negotiation.

Cutting down on premium licenses or de-provisioning inactive apps are not the only ways to improve return on software investments. 

to make optimal usage of their applications. 

It is commonly observed that users are uncomfortable with changes in digital platforms. Workshops, tutorials and feedback forms can be circulated among the users to understand their pain points and educate them on the newly introduced software.

The ease of procuring a SaaS tool has overshadowed the ways it can hurt a company financially, in the long run. SaaS Spend Optimisation is one of the many features of SaaS Management Platforms (SMPs), that are tailor-made to manage and secure an enterprise’s SaaS ecosystem. 

What is SaaS Spend Optimisation?

Beamy’s 3 Key Takeaways: SaaS Management Platform’s (SMP) stance in the Gartner® Hype Cycle™️ for Digital Workplace I&O, 2022.

Beamy has been recognised as a sample SMP vendor on the latest Gartner® Hype Cycle™️. This article provides insight into how large organisations (>1000 employees) can overcome their “lack of awareness, maturity or priority to drive SMP investment”. 

The Gartner® Hype Cycle™️ explores the ‘hype’ of Digital Workplace solutions, their maturity, adoption and potential to support organisations’ business and abilities. A Digital Workplace is a virtualised ecosystem of workplace technologies allowing collaboration among employees. 

SaaS Management Platforms (SMPs) remained at the ‘peak of inflated expectations’ in this 2022 report, as their advanced machine learning capabilities and powerful algorithms are able to streamline the coordination between other components of the Digital Workplace. 

SMPs are particularly tailor-made to fit right into the changing dynamic of the Digital Workplace and have shown exceptional potential in enhancing the Digital Employee Experience (DEX) - which has been the priority of IT departments lately.

Over 30% of new SaaS tools are added yearly to Beamy's client organisations’ tech portfolio. According to Gartner's research, an average of 30-40% of the IT budget is spent on tools the IT team doesn’t know about. These figures are alarmingly underestimated in organisations and such is their understanding of the SaaS sprawl and the associated risks. Lack of regard for shadow SaaS or budget overruns has fewer consequences than the implications they create - exposure to cyber threats, noncompliance with data protection regulations and other IT vulnerabilities.

Large groups are often resistant to substantial changes and are bound by a heavy-legacy centralised IT system, unlike the digital-native SMBs. 

 typically has 800 collaborators in sync for 400 SaaS applications

 and is generally a characteristic of large organisations. Often concerned about “an addition of another management tool”, these large groups are found to lack awareness that SMPs are explicitly designed to facilitate crucial changes in legacy systems and organise their existing decentralised IT landscape.

By definition, the 6 core functions of SMPs are to discover, manage, automate, optimise, secure and govern the SaaS apps. It seems that organisations that have already implemented alternative tools to SMP are often unsatisfied with their limited capabilities, which also explains the popularity of SMP tools.

The innovation in Digital Workplace technologies can be overwhelming if organisations lack the maturity to implement effective solutions at the right time. SaaS adoption must be in tandem with SMP adoption to avoid creating an overgrowth of long-tail shadow SaaS and maintain a comprehensive view of the organisation’s SaaS stack over time. For larger groups, the time they take to understand their SaaS sprawl will be the time lost when they could’ve reacted proactively to the inevitable SaaS explosion.

Gartner® Hype Cycle™ for Digital Workplace Infrastructure and Operations, 2022; Autumn Stanish, Pankil Sheth, Stuart Downes;  21 July 2022

Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in our research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner's research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

Why SaaS Management Platform is the next most-hyped Digital Workplace technology for large groups?

SaaS will be the showstopper when ​cloud spending worldwide reaches the 

. From being a novelty just a couple of years ago to becoming mainstream, the software-as-a-service industry only came out stronger through the global pandemic. But the showstopper has a daily customer whose hands are full, and pockets shelled out.

SaaS hypergrowth is appropriately termed as SaaS explosion, because now, SaaS solutions exist for every niche and company, from SMBs to large groups. And, SaaS cannot and never will be enough. They are present and used in excess, and for good reason. 

But everything that is in excess needs management. 

The need to manage these software-as-a-service applications is indispensable and luckily achievable. 

SaaS Management is essentially a process of discovering, managing and governing all the SaaS applications present within an organisation’s technology portfolio and monitoring its apparent (purchases, licenses, renewals, etc.) and unapparent assets or attributes (usage, expenses, compliance, duplications and more.)

It would also have been called SaaS Management even if these SaaS records were maintained through a spreadsheet, but that management procedure would hardly be scalable. Hence the requirement for automation (discussed later in this guide). 

When automated, SaaS Management exceeds its functionality because it is interrelated to or facilitates other important 

 like business organisation, budget optimisation, innovation, technology democratisation and overall digital transformation.

SaaS apps - all that glitters ain’t always gold.

 of the organisations said that they expect at least 80% of their software needs to be entirely met by SaaS after 2022. And most certainly, there's hardly a need to think twice, if it only takes 

 for an employee to implement new software.

Software-as-a-service(SaaS) applications have 

But every path has its puddle and even SaaS is not flawless. 

It is now impossible to go back on the ease, that the SaaS cloud-hosted subscription model has brought to organisations. The only way out is to identify and address the errors; or simply put - 

But when all the companies end up putting a lot of focus on a transition to “cloud-first”

cloud-first approach is incomplete without the ‘SaaS Management’ approach.

The cost of managing SaaS is far less than the cost of implications that follow if left unmanaged. Research finds that an average of 

 of the purchases in the enterprise involve shadow IT spending. 

Unmanaged SaaS presents these 4 massive challenges:

Read reviews, compare, place an order and voilà; “your SaaS order is out for delivery”.

SaaS is made to be easy to obtain, and as a result, SaaS apps have changed the way companies, especially employees, engage with IT resources. 

End-user spending in this area might exceed 

, 87% of executives believe technology democratisation is critical in their ability to ignite innovation in their organisation.

from the end-user, taking away the burden off the shoulders of IT but this is also where things start going sideways.

In hindsight, the democratisation of technology is decentralising IT. And what is empowering the departments is also taking away control from the IT department. A decentralised IT is one where 

400 SaaS applications would have 800 collaborators in sync

Each SaaS application is found to have scattered collaborators in the following areas:

It is one of the biggest challenges to organise and bring uniformity to a decentralised IT when it is a result of attractive and unavoidable SaaS solutions whose volume will

The business departments take charge of their own needs while the IT can sit back. 

But, freedom is risky when its consequences have no owners

Poor visibility  of the tech stack is due to the following:

SaaS apps are not inherently dangerous but in most organisations, their presence is in hundreds and each of them acts as an exposure point for risks increased by a factor of 10. 

Managing the SaaS apps has been given little to no priority compared to the on-prem giants. IT Governance has mature practices and policies to administer the on-prem software because of the large financial risks that could result from their non-compliance, while the SaaS applications are largely ignored as their costs are insignificant comparatively. But the same cannot be said about the risks posed by these SaaS tools.

3 key security risks and concerns arising from unmanaged SaaS are:

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