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

Beamy and MEGA International, respectively leaders in SaaS governance and enterprise architecture, announce their strategic partnership aimed at fully integrating the SaaS ecosystem into IT’s control. With this partnership, MEGA and Beamy can offer customers significant integrations and synergies between their products.

A complete and powerful solution to eliminate shadow IT

The current context of business digitalization highlights the explosion in the number of SaaS applications used within organizations, creating a phenomenon of underground digitization. Several hundred SaaS applications are frequently used by the business lines, often bypassing those involved in corporate governance (only 32% of SaaS applications are controlled by the IT department, 17% by the data protection officer, and 13% by security)*. According to KPMG, this explosion is expected to escalate, with the cost of the SaaS ecosystem in enterprises being nine times higher by 2030.

Aware of the critical risks that the SaaS ecosystem poses to security and regulatory compliance (GDPR in particular), and more broadly of the need to align SaaS ecosystems with organizations’ IT strategy, Beamy and MEGA decided to combine their strength and integrate Beamy's Discovery SaaS technology with MEGA's HOPEX enterprise architecture platform.

This new integration guides large companies in their adoption of more efficient IT strategies by listing all the applications and technologies used on-premises and in the cloud. Thanks to the search automation offered by Beamy's Discovery solution, IT teams can optimize time management, reduce costs, and reduce the risk of their infrastructure being exposed to cyberattacks.

A strategic partnership between two leading players 

By partnering with MEGA, a recognized global leader, notably within the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Architecture, Beamy is taking another step forward in accelerating its growth. It now benefits from enhanced visibility with 2000 MEGA customers in Europe, the United States, Latin America, and Asia. Beamy thus consolidates its position as a benchmark player in SaaS governance, natively integrated into current corporate governance tools.

For MEGA, the goal is to maintain its leadership position in enterprise architecture by offering the most comprehensive platform possible and integrating the best technologies on the market. The integration between Beamy and MEGA’s solution should appeal to MEGA customers, for whom this phase of identification and inventory of SaaS applications is a major pillar of any transformation project.

Founded in 1991, MEGA International is a global software company and a recognized market leader for twelve years. The company partners with customers to improve governance and accelerate transformation by leveraging technology. MEGA helps companies better analyze how they can operate and make the right decisions to accelerate the creation of value. The HOPEX Platform connects business, IT, data, and risk perspectives in a single place that integrates across an entire company’s ecosystem. The MEGA Services team partners with customers to deliver projects with a pragmatic approach.

Beamy is the leader in SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) Management in Europe and works with a broad range of major players such as BNP Paribas, Fnac Darty, Macif, Gameloft and Engie. Large corporations are currently experiencing very rapid growth in the number of SaaS applications they are hosting. In addition, the resulting underground digitalization is real and largely unseen by IT departments, thereby generating security and GDPR risks. Thanks to its innovative technology, Beamy provides a SaaS governance platform that can be used to detect and control the entire SaaS environment of its clients to eliminate Shadow IT. In this way, Beamy can help the CIOs of large organizations regain control of this parallel IT and rebuild effective governance so that Business Units can expand their digitalization through SaaS within the context of a defined framework. Beamy’s goal is to make SaaS Governance one of the priorities of large enterprises in Europe and across the world.

Partnership MEGA

In the last few years, the rise of SaaS in companies has been perceived as a double-edged sword. A major source of freedom and acceleration for businesses, it has also been synonymous with headaches for IT departments, particularly from a security and compliance standpoint. Didier Fleury, CIO of the French mutual insurance group Macif, and Andréa Jacquemin, CEO of the start-up Beamy, which specialises in supporting this phenomenon, give their recipes for finding the right balance in organisations.

Alliancy. Why did you commission a company like Beamy to detect the SaaS tools used at Macif?

The starting point was really detecting shadow IT (the use of IT resources in the company that are not controlled by the IT department, editor’s note) in a concrete way. The teams often talked about it and we're already trying to have a more comprehensive picture, but the phenomenon had to be objectified.

With Beamy we started with a process of identifying all the SaaS tools used. This highlighted what I already suspected:  the ones we were aware of were just the tip of the iceberg. This starting point opened up the discussion: what does SaaS really do for our organisation?

In fact, the ubiquity of SaaS is understandable. Start-ups are attracting businesses by offering highly relevant solutions in specific verticals, so the interest is obvious. What’s more, the initial costs are low, it’s easy to get started, and there’s no complex integration... And, most of the time, you can get started with such a solution without having to go through the Purchasing Department indeed, given the needs and amounts involved at the outset, a simple business bank card can bypass conventional purchasing processes. This makes sense because businesses need to move fast. The problem is that when the subject is detected too late, the place it has taken in the IT environment is very important, but without taking on board GDPR compliance, regulatory compliance and compliance with the ACPR (

‘Autorité de contrôle prudentiel et de résolution

’ - the French supervisory authority that supervises banks and insurance companies), even though these are essential points in our activities.

The growth of SaaS is not something new. How aware are CIOs of the problem today?

 There was an extra surge during the health crisis, especially in marketing and HR activities. Everything went very fast in companies. In the best of cases, businesses have taken a declarative approach, such as MARIE, but this is seldom verified in detail. This explains the current gap between what CIOs think they know about shadow IT and the reality. In our case, for example, we had about 50 identified solutions, but the discovery showed us that there were actually more than 150 in use.

 This is in line with the average numbers we see in the 1000+ companies we work with. On average, out of 190 SaaS in an organization, only 27 are fully managed by the IT department, and another 46 are partially approved... That leaves nearly 120 that are completely unknown. The phenomenon is systemic and can no longer be dismissed as residual shadow IT. It affects all types of companies, but SaaS is a more difficult subject for traditional organisations, compared to those founded in the digital age, for whom this technological approach is often the basis of the business. Above all, few CIOs are still humble enough to say they are not sure. We still often hear arguments like, ‘in my company it’s different’... The phenomenon is considerably underestimated.

What should be the new role for CIOs in this context?

 In our case, we were able to sort it out thanks to Beamy’s application dictionary, which presents the typical attributes of the various SaaS, their referencing, and their hosting. This gives CIOs a basis for checking and creating a catalogue of validated and consistent applications... We don’t want to prevent businesses from having ideas, but we want to be able to guarantee that they won’t reinvent the wheel and that they will integrate security and compliance dimensions into their quick selections. The role of the CIO is, therefore, to enable anticipation, in order to avoid breakdowns later on, after the projects have progressed.

 The debate is potentially explosive, because it pushes us to break out of our old habits, and it questions the traditional IT-business relationship. But this debate must take place. In a recent study, KPMG estimates that the volume of SaaS in companies will increase ninefold in ten years. This means that there will be an average of more than 1,000 applications of this type in 2030, with the proportion managed directly by the IT department in a centralised manner remaining very low compared to that managed by the business departments, which is soaring... The issue is, therefore, one of ensuring the proper decentralisation of IT, because, in any case, digital technology is everywhere nowadays. In this context, the role of the CIO is to detect and build a catalogue in conjunction with the business departments. This is to make them responsible for their solutions, by creating an ad-hoc governance of this new decentralised environment.

It is, therefore, a long-term approach that we recommend, based upon specific data models for each sector and type of company. The role of CIOs is changing significantly to allow them to give this autonomy to business departments through a matrix of responsibilities.

 Indeed, discovery is not enough. There must be ongoing monitoring of the applications used, but also, and more importantly, the implementation of a governance framework that is truly adapted. It’s not just a question of wanting to police. That would be pointless.

What should be the characteristics of this governance framework?

 It starts with a common rule, in order to be a point of reference for all the business and IT parties, with business representatives who will be able to check what solutions already exist in relation to their needs and match them to projects already underway. In this way, we move away from very sequential processes and better integrate the IT-business relationship, with the CISO engaging constructively on the issue of security.

 When we speak of governance, we must also speak of accountability: the spirit is to define a framework of freedom for the business departments according to the specific characteristics of each company, but in which responsibilities are clearly established. Transparency and the communication that goes with it are, therefore, also essential features.

 That was one of the things I hired for when I arrived: having someone whose job it really is to do IT marketing and communication is very valuable. When a CIO doesn’t make it known that he or she understands the business, it’s very difficult to be credible and to be listened to... There’s no point in having nice consultant speeches about agility, without real life experience and the difficult questioning required by these changes.

In terms of the IT-Business relationship, the problem of the traditional project management and project control approach has, I think, been known for a long time. Depending on the period, project management assistance, which was the link between the two, tended to lean more to one side or the other, and this was more or less well received by the stakeholders...

But in fact, that’s not the issue. IT must define set rules, infrastructure and cybersecurity; and from there, the business solutions are the direct responsibility of the business departments, with the associated IT skills, enabling them to manage their entire responsibility within the framework of the rules set out.  This has already been tried in the past, but now we are trying to take a comprehensive approach. By gradually moving away from V-cycles, we are asking for a change in the mindset of the teams, which is clearly moving in this direction. And the effects can be seen at the highest level: for the past two years, the general management has been paying close attention to the challenges of the information system as a whole.

Macif

With a forecast of an average annual growth of 25% through 2030, the rapid rise to power of cloud computing raises major issues in terms of security and governance. The French government's initiatives to establish "cloud sovereignty" fail to adequately address the impact of SaaS, despite the fact that it is creating underground (or shadow) IT systems in companies, thereby dramatically increasing their exposure to cyberattacks.

The use of SaaS among employees is booming, creating an underground digital world

According to a KPMG study carried out last May, as part of the French government's initiative on data sovereignty and the Cloud, the European cloud computing market is set to expand, reaching €560 billion by 2030. It distributes €230 billion equally between infrastructure needs - IaaS/PaaS -, and software/application requirements: SaaS. But, while data infrastructure has dominated the sovereignty debate over the past few months, with the European Gaia-X initiative and the defence of French providers OVH, Orange and Scaleway against US tech giants such as Amazon, Google and Microsoft, little or nothing has been said about its software equivalent: SaaS. 

And yet, often unbeknownst to IT Departments and upper management teams, the use of SaaS among employees is booming, creating a kind of underground digital world with little regard for security (GDPR) or digital sovereignty issues.

As a result, in the top firms listed in France's CAC 40 index, and across large companies as a whole, SaaS is now a key vector in digitalising their business. Often referred to as Shadow IT, the SaaS ecosystem generally relies on the widespread use of tools made available online, which are usually extremely specific and operate on a subscription basis. These tools are deployed without the oversight of onerous corporate governance procedures, and mostly pass under the company's radar since “the group doesn't bother looking at anything under €100k”, even if they represent millions of euros in cumulative annual costs. This outsourcing of IT regularly manifests as unrestricted use of personal data (more than 40% of SaaS used is American), potentially generating a multitude of future security issues and compliance vulnerability.

Only 14% of SaaS providers in CAC 40 companies are properly managed 

Therefore, these are without a doubt "underground" digital systems, with an average of over 190 different Cloud providers for a company with more than 1000 employees. Out of these 190 providers, only 60 are managed by an IS Department, 44 by the DPO, and 36 by security teams. And if, as predicted by KPMG, the Cloud continues to grow, then more than a thousand different SaaS providers could be used by a single company in 2030. Establishing a clear governance framework for cloud-based SaaS will therefore be vital for the future, since it brings to the fore issues of data sovereignty, cyber defence and the digital performance of our companies.

Allowing business lines to manage their own digital transformation

Since digital transformation is everyone's business, and especially that of the teams themselves, it's only natural for them to want to tackle it hands-on. Particularly those from the latest generation: the generation of smartphones and apps that can be installed and uninstalled in a click. This "one-click" generation expects companies to provide the very best that technology has to offer, whether in terms of processing speed, user-friendly interfaces, or the use of tools to simplify and enhance their work performance. And what’s more, it would be something of an understatement to suggest that this is not yet part of the solutions offered by major companies.

Despite the fact that the technology required is available on the global market - almost 100,000 SaaS - with venture capital investments in the hundreds of billions of euros. These solutions rank among the fastest, the most powerful and the best-suited to ensuring the digitisation of processes, but are also those that store and use the most personal data abroad. What is needed, therefore, is the creation of a kind of App Store for each company, to give businesses the ability to choose the best software for themselves, while carefully guiding them to select, use and de-risk these tools in the long term.

Coordinating business units and IS teams for effective digital governance 

The CIO holds a strategic position in this regard: that of providing the company with a framework for decentralising digitalisation. Of making sure, despite the technological progress pursued by operational teams, that a regulatory framework is respected, that personal data processed by these tools are properly protected, and that external security breaches are brought down to a minimum. In this context, the CIO acts as the orchestrator of the digital ecosystem, giving freedom to business units while making sure that the application landscape is optimised and safe.

The focus on a "sovereign cloud" will remain a futile endeavour if SaaS, which counts for half of Cloud Computing, is still placed in the background. Within companies, it is up to general management to initiate the construction of decentralised approach to digital governance, the only thing capable of successfully bringing structure to this volatile part of the Cloud. It's a strategy that requires the involvement, not only of the CIO, but of the entire executive committee, and all departments affected by the challenges of digital transformation.

But for now, the most pressing priority is to take stock of the existing Shadow IT being used in this way!

Tribune Shadow IT

Beamy, a European pioneer in SaaS management for large companies, has raised more than 9 million dollars in Series A funding. This funding round was led by the 

 funds, as well as business angels Nicolas Hernandez (

). The solution has already attracted notable customers including 

 to provide a framework for governing the decentralisation and implementation of their SaaS tools across their businesses.

Becoming aware of the explosion of SaaS in business is vital.

, offers companies a unique solution that can detect and control the explosion of SaaS applications used in a decentralised way. The platform thus helps CIOs and other IT leaders to control this parallel IT/digitalisation and strengthen their employees' technological autonomy while preserving corporate governance.

The days of cumbersome and complex software suites being solely implemented and managed by IT departments are over. For years, SaaS has been exploding uncontrollably in large companies, creating underground digitalization.

In companies with more than 1,000 employees, there are on average several hundred different SaaS solutions in use, representing several million dollars in annual costs. According to a recent study by KPMG, the SaaS budget of companies is set to increase by 90% in the next 10 years, covering several thousand different solutions. A new IT paradigm is emerging.

However, this massive adoption of SaaS is largely outside of the IT department’s control, which leads to a considerable underestimation of the real volume of SaaS applications already used by the business lines. Consequently, these companies become highly vulnerable to the risks of cyber attacks: each uncontrolled SaaS application represents a potential security breach. Finally, SaaS budgets, representing an ever-increasing share of corporate IT, are largely under-optimized. Many SaaS solutions cover the same uses and are thus redundant, while others are underused or even completely unused. 

The need to build a framework of technological autonomy for all professionals

There is a change in the way large enterprises procure, implement, use and manage SaaS software applications. It's more than just an IT phenomenon - the explosion of SaaS has introduced a real change in business organisation: 

Accepting this trend means allowing employees who consider technology to be vital to the completion of their activities, to be engaged and become the primary actors in their IT landscapes. 

For this, Beamy has developed powerful scoring algorithms capable of detecting all of the SaaS applications actually implemented in the company. Beamy is then able to follow the evolution of each application over time, provide employees with a catalog of all applications implemented in the company, define an autonomy matrix according to the potential risks of future applications, and navigate an app store of more than 50,000 applications on the market.

Beamy thus guarantees a global approach to SaaS governance necessary to support large companies in the long term to structure their IT decentralisation and establishing synergy between all stakeholders (CEOs, CIOs/other IT leaders, and business teams).

Beamy wants to accelerate its international expansion

With an impressive end to 2021, this fundraising will allow the company to accelerate its international development (Beamy already being present in France and the United Kingdom on the international market), to create global leadership, and to strengthen customer relations by supporting them in their long-term governance efforts. “We are convinced that SaaS issues are major issues for large companies, whether French or international. With this fundraising from major investors including Agaé Ventures and Isai, both of whom are recognized for offering cutting edge expertise in the tech sector, we are setting out to conquer the international market,” explains Andrea Jacquemin.

To do this, Beamy plans to focus its investments on two major areas: recruitment, with plans to hire 40 more team members in the next twelve months, and product development, with the strengthening of detection technology and decentralisation workflows to further streamline collaboration between IT and business lines in the implementation and management of new SaaS solutions.

Thanks to its innovative technology, Beamy offers a SaaS governance platform that detects and controls the entire SaaS environment of its customers and eliminates Shadow IT. Beamy thus helps the CIOs of large companies to regain control of this parallel IT and rebuild effective governance to enable businesses to amplify their digitalization through SaaS while framing it. Beamy's ambition is to make SaaS Governance one of the priorities of large companies in Europe and internationally. To learn more, visit https://www.beamy.io

Aglaé Ventures, the “tech” investment vehicle of Groupe Arnault, invests between €100k and €100m in fast-growing technology companies. Present in France and the United States, Aglaé Ventures focuses on SaaS software, marketplaces and content platforms. Companies supported by Aglaé Ventures include Airbnb, Algolia, Backmarket, Databricks, Lyft, Meero, Riskified, Slack and Spotify.

Nearly 300 successful entrepreneurs, who have invested in ISAI funds, and more than 50 ISAI-backed start-up co-founders share the collective ambition of co-writing great entrepreneurial stories. ISAI invests in differentiated projects run by ambitious teams that it selects rigorously and actively supports. ISAI Gestion, an investment management company approved by the AMF, with over €500 million under management, aims to finance and support high potential Tech companies, at the seed/post-seed stage (venture capital, ticket from € 150k ticket to € 3m with participations in successive rounds) or when they have already reached the break-even stage (Tech Growth/LBO, tickets from €5m to €50m). More information on 

Beamy raises Serie A

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 the 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 the IT. And what is empowering the departments is also taking away the 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:

The 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 the unmanaged SaaS are:

The infamous Shadow IT, more recently known as 

refers to the systems, software or applications that individuals in an organisation

 procure and use without the knowledge of the IT department. 

It applies to the context of ‘SaaS’ even more so because they are the quickest known way to digitalise.

The size and scope of this problem are widely underestimated. Beamy has consistently discovered 

apps than the already known SaaS apps in client organisations.

 of employees have admitted using SaaS apps at work without getting approval from IT. Autonomous end-users (or employees) find no reason to involve the IT department in the SaaS procurement procedure. Additionally, most product-led SaaS are 

Thus, ‘SaaS’ can rightly be interpreted as a double-edged sword - as it inspires freedom and autonomy but creates havoc when let loose. Consequently, this digital transformation sprouting inside the business departments inevitably leads to unmanageable SaaS sprawl and spending behind the scenes.

A lot of enterprises’ data makes its way into the SaaS tools, and it can be compromised because of any of the following reasons:

It’s extremely easy to get caught in any of the risk factors mentioned above because 

and, so are their security environments. 

In fact, they are complex with attractive integrations, and extensions. And most importantly, are super ambitious, with new updates and new features always popping up on their roadmaps. 

And with more SaaS apps will come more gaps & loopholes in the security.

With this comes the need to protect it. Lawmakers around the world are increasingly demanding

and are trying to regulate it through GDPR, SOC 2, external audits, security certifications and more.

The gap in the company’s understanding of its SaaS environment and the reality of the data being stored in a non-compliant way, point to the need for data protection laws. The General Data Protection Regulation (

) is European personal information (name, IP, email, etc.) law regulating data stored both online and offline (in hindsight it applies to all the companies in the world with a global footprint.)

 of up to 50 million euros (roughly $21,338,800), or up to 4% of the company’s worldwide annual revenue from the preceding financial year, whichever is higher are imposed for 

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

Even the enterprise-level software companies are moving toward the SaaS model. 

And accordingly, each SaaS problem identified today will have an 

in the coming years if the SaaS environment remains 

Additionally, by 2024, some 70% of IT departments will lack the relevant roles, skills, and tools to support SaaS-enabled digital transformation (Source: Gartner), hence adding to the disarray. 

These forecasts, when compounded over the years of growth of 

 in companies, increasing headcount and complexity among different business departments and business units, will only result in an exponential increase in the risk factor compared to today.

Therefore, digital transformation is accelerating but not without speed bumps and potholes. 

How do these challenges pose a threat to your organisation?

Without investing in SaaS Management today, digitalisation will only be rapid but vulnerable in the long term. Thereby making your organisation 

exposed to the following categories of risks:

The challenges of the SaaS sprawl: autonomy, lack of visibility and security concerns cannot all be fixed with one stitch. It is a process that begins with understanding the aforementioned challenges and then setting forth 

End goals can be decided by asking the following questions:

There’s no one-stop solution or possibility to answer these and several other questions at once, as there’s 

a big gap between what IT think they know about the company’s SaaS environment and what the reality is.

. It is about scanning the SaaS environment in real-time, automating this step and other required actions, and fitting like a glove when the IT is ready to set out a framework of regulations to back and industrialize the SaaS Management across the company.

The holistic view of a SaaS Management strategy is a 

 that encompasses identifying the problem and solving it, based on accurate 

Comprehensive recognition of the problem should be the first step of any strategy. But in the case of SaaS Management, there exist problems one does not, and cannot know of. 

While not all SaaS applications are risky, double the risk lies in not knowing which ones are. 

SaaS applications are purchased and used across the organisation by different business units, departments or employees without proper 

The recognition or discovery step is when the IT department initiates a review, or more formally, 

an audit across all the levels of the organisation

 for discovering and cataloguing sanctioned and unsanctioned (Shadow IT) SaaS applications. 

financial footprint from the SaaS purchases, employee navigation logs, SSO data

 and can also be extended to a screening of the personal devices, increasingly in use in hybrid working environments.

What is SaaS Management?

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.

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