Just 27% of companies have full visibility over their SaaS stack, according to New Relic’s 2022 Observability Forecast. This presents several challenges for businesses, both financial and administrative. The sheer volume of software that organizations are purchasing can make procurement an increasingly difficult job, often leading to problems like wasted SaaS spend and security risks.
To combat these issues, it’s important to streamline your procurement process. As explained by SaaS purchasing platform Vertice, you can only do this if you have full SaaS stack visibility. This means having a clear view of things like which software applications are in use across a company, how much these cost, their contract terms, the purpose of each application, and who is using them. Having this visibility can help your organization to achieve the following:
1. Reduced costs
Mounting subscriptions can quickly get out of control, particularly in large organizations that have multiple teams with different requirements. Many organizations pay for tools that are no longer used, have become irrelevant to internal workflows and processes, or are legacy tools that haven’t been terminated by previous employees. There’s also the issue of multiple apps being used for the same purpose.
If you’re able to identify these instances and remove obsolete apps from your stack, significant savings can be made. That said, it’s important to check your SaaS contracts to ensure there are no hidden costs or fees for terminating a contract early.
2. Improved productivity
Full SaaS visibility helps you identify when departments and teams are using different apps for the same purposes. This is a very common issue with project management tools. For instance, development teams may prefer to use tools such as Jira or Wrike, where a marketing team could be using the likes of Asana, Trello or Monday.com.
Collaboration becomes more difficult as a result, or extra steps are added to a workflow with teams unable to easily access the same information and data in one place. With full SaaS visibility, however, you’re able to consolidate SaaS usage across different departments and teams, preventing them from working in silos.
3. Increased security
Just a single app vulnerability can give hackers access to your company’s data. Without visibility over the tools in use, you might struggle to identify those that present a security risk. What’s more, the more apps you have, the greater the attack surface.
Research from Axonius has found that a lack of SaaS visibility is a major cause of security breaches among businesses. The cybersecurity company noted that: “Without full visibility into the SaaS application landscape, organizations will continue to find themselves vulnerable to data loss from shadow SaaS, non-compliance with federal and industry regulators, and financial strain from lack of insight into organizational spend.” Having full SaaS stack visibility and subsequently streamlining your stack reduces this attack surface, helping to keep your confidential data secure.
