Industry Guide for SaaS Management Outlines Criteria and Framework for Overcoming Enterprise Challenges

LeanIX, the platform to plan and manage the Continuous Transformation journey, announced a free, comprehensive guide to help enterprises address the growing challenges of managing SaaS applications. The Guide includes best practices for ways IT organizations can more effectively evaluate, acquire, implement and manage their growing SaaS application ecosystem.

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“At LeanIX, we spend $1.8M in SaaS applications for 360 employees – approximately $5,000 per employee. That is why it is a key priority to make sure we get the most out of our SaaS subscriptions by not overspending on unused licenses, being prepared ahead of renewals or by revoking access when employees leave or change roles,” said André Christ, co-founder and CEO of LeanIX.

Christ says the trajectory for continued SaaS applications will only continue to grow industry-wide. Highly specialized apps now exist to manage any conceivable business function. In the marketing industry alone, there are more than 7,000 solutions available. Worldwide, it is estimated there are more than 15,000 SaaS companies, and the number continues to grow daily.

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LeanIX’s new SaaS Management Guide addresses these issues by laying out the criteria for evaluating existing SaaS applications, providing a framework for implementing them and instilling best practices along the way. It also offers a roadmap for ensuring long-term success factors. The framework includes an in-depth breakdown of the following components:

• SaaS discovery –  discover what SaaS applications are in use, who owns them, and what the company is obligated to pay for on an ongoing basis
• Rationalizing redundancies — determine what software is needed, by whom, and for how long
• Optimizing spend – make empirical decisions and fine-tune license assignments or redeployments (e.g., ‘right-sizing’ subscriptions) based on what is actually needed
• Monitoring usage – effectively ‘control’ the SaaS experience by monitoring compliance and providing usage accountability; this allows IT to maintain this control in a scalable way as organizations grow
• Managing renewals – every renewal may be broken down into a three-part decision: renew, sunset, or upgrade/downgrade. To determine the right course, companies must have insights and a renewal schedule
• SaaS security – know exactly what users own, who has access to services and data, and whether vendors are compliant with internal policies and regulations such as SOC 2, GDPR, and PCI-DSS

“As continuous transformation sweeps through enterprises, leaders must recalibrate how they discuss cloud concepts, such as SaaS,” noted Christ. “SaaS Management is a cross-departmental experience, which is why the entire organization needs to know exactly what service models, concepts, and applications are under discussion before diving in. But no matter how mature an organization’s SaaS management processes are – from reasonably defined to non-existent – it’s not too late to expand management and control.”

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