The challenges inherent in discovery, visibility, and balancing concerns between stakeholders are elements in any kind of effective IT management. This iteration probably provides clues to future challenges that are difficult to anticipate.

How IT Got Started

Taking a retrospective look at the creation of IT departments through history provides insight into an important and ongoing management challenge. Some organizations had computer systems in the 1960s and 1970s, but those systems were necessarily expensive, purpose-built, and very clear on the problems being solved.

For example, a bank may have had a mainframe that served as a transactional database for millions of accounts. Although the system would be composed of many pieces, there wasn’t an application portfolio spanning thousands of systems with questions such as:

• Who uses this software?
• Is it redundant with other systems?
• Where did it come from?
• Can we get a better deal just by asking, or by easily switching to a competitor?
• How does the business function tie to business capability (i.e., clearly it does something, and probably something that used to be done with a pencil, but what is its actual value?)
• Is it integrated with [pick your favorite] new app?

Such systems were necessarily supported by dedicated staff, but that staff was organizationally tied to the business units they supported, and questions like these would have seemed comical at the time.

In the 1980s and especially 1990s, with the advent of personal computers and lower-cost terminal devices such as those seen in point of sale or inventory management, software systems expanded greatly along with the hardware to assist in a multitude of business functions. Email became a necessity, and any paper process became a clear opportunity for technologization. In many cases, the value, purpose, and deliberation were in place for those systems, but the sheer increase in size and shared overhead necessitated creating IT departments or outsourcing the management of computer systems to third parties such as MSPs or technology consulting firms. Often, the technical staff that previously supported a few critical technology systems on behalf of discrete business units inherited these burgeoning responsibilities.

Going Full Circle

That worked all right until around 2010, when another iteration of technological advancement challenged the existing model. Web technology and cloud computing were sufficiently established to make data centers the natural home for most business software, and it made ubiquitous smartphones, tablets, and laptops the terminals. SaaS became the norm, with a cost and deployment model that benefited both providers and consumers. With a market the size of the world, almost any niche business function is an arena for competitive development. A critical component of this latter advancement is that all of this became much easier and culturally commonplace.

Around this time, many IT departments found themselves with egg on their faces. For example, perhaps business units asked for a teleconferencing option and were met with long timelines and seemingly unreasonable budgets. Why does it take six months and millions of dollars when any cell phone has video conferencing capabilities ready to go in five minutes?

IT was on the defensive. What about data security? A sanctioned option will save money in the long run. The network must be ready to support the bandwidth. The list goes on. The partnership became strained. In some cases, words like “rogue” and “shadow IT” were used to describe business units that took matters into their own hands by discretely signing up for SaaS applications. It’s an understandable, if ironic, attitude toward things coming full circle. Business units are deploying and financing technology that they find valuable. What is this, 1980?

Today, there is growing acceptance of the idea that SaaS and BYOD options are good for everyone—they just require a way to manage business considerations that may not be apparent to (or appreciated by) all end users. Data and network security is not negotiable, and neither is auditing or compliance requirements. Integration with other corporate systems is valuable, but may not be necessary on day one. Licensing costs may be temporarily higher, but they can be optimized. Most of the pain points are temporary and solvable.

SMPs Address Most Pain Points

SaaS management platforms help to bridge those gaps. They allow IT departments and finance/procurement groups to achieve their goals without obstructing business units from taking advantage of the wealth of easily accessible software on the market. As custom software is gradually replaced with market alternatives, some IT departments may even get leaner and more focused on things like security and integration.

SaaS management platforms can only do so much though, especially with regard to application discovery. Ultimately, they can only “spider out” from known systems to discover unknown systems. They can integrate with corporate identity providers, monitor company email systems, integrate with browser extensions, and scour company expense records for clues as to which SaaS applications may be in use. Some even provide mobile device management integration to enhance the reach into mobile devices accessing the company network.

What about the case of an employee using their personal smartphone over the cell network and a free-tier teleconferencing account tied to a Gmail address? Or what about accidentally using the account of a different organization, such as a school or contracting agency? Was anything discussed on the call confidential? Did it contain clues to trade secrets, or did the data need to be audited or preserved for potential legal subpoena? The organization must evaluate those questions.

Only policy and good training can effectively mitigate these issues, but even that is not perfect and will face headwinds. Regardless, the race for expanded discovery is on, and at some point, it will probably include aggregation of disparate but available usage data with ML analysis, similar to the kind used for web marketing.

The alternative is to allow the organization additional visibility (surveillance software and managed configuration policies) into personal devices and personal accounts. If that loss of privacy does not concern you, bear in mind that the 21st-century mining-town model faces its own headwinds regardless, as seen by recently proposed legislation in California limiting the use of email off work hours.

In my opinion, that is the most compelling reason for software users to enthusiastically use business resources for business purposes. Respecting the integrity of business data effectively preserves the cultural border for personal privacy. If that distinction goes up for grabs, it is back to pencils and sticky notes.

Next Steps

To learn more, take a look at GigaOm’s SaaS management platform Key Criteria and Radar reports. These reports provide a comprehensive view of the market, outline the criteria you’ll want to consider in a purchase decision, and evaluate how a number of vendors perform against those decision criteria.

• Gigaom Key Criteria for Evaluating SaaS Management Platforms (SMPs)
• GigaOm Radar for SaaS Management Platforms (SMPs)

If you’re not yet a GigaOm subscriber, sign up here.

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To be considered full-featured, an SMP should enable SaaS financial operations (SaaSFinOps) to handle spend and contract renewal, as well as SaaS operations (SaaSOps) for user lifecycle and sensitive data management. Most SMPs started with a focus on one or the other of these areas and are now evolving to support both. They’re doing so by continuing to mature SMP foundations while investing in intelligence and emerging capabilities. The expectation is that solutions that deliver a full-featured platform will see wider adoption, while those that do not will become niche providers or strategically differentiate into other spaces like identity risk management.

Full-featured SMPs enable a cross-functional, integrated SaaS application operating model that provides several benefits, including:

• Visibility of SaaS application usage, spend, security risks, and entitlements.
• Seamless integration for discovering and managing applications.
• Cost savings from reducing underutilized and redundant applications.
• Operational efficiencies and governance enabled by automated workflows and low-code development tools.
• On-time contract renewals with optimized entitlements aligned to application usage.
• Reduced security risks through discovery and remediation of unauthorized applications and exposed sensitive data.
• Continuous improvement enabled by insights, recommendations, benchmarks, and machine learning (ML).
• Increased user engagement, productivity, and satisfaction through use of an application catalog, along with sentiment surveys, intelligent provisioning recommendations, collaboration analytics, and intuitive integration with commonly used collaboration tools.

SMPs are generally priced per user seat based on the number of users in the company’s identity provider (IdP) directory. In many cases, they offer a base tier, then higher tiers or add-ons for premium features. The ability to negotiate depends on the volume of users and the level at which the vendor sets the entry point. It’s important to map the desired features to each vendor’s pricing model and evaluate relative differences in pricing, as well as the floor and ceiling pricing across vendors. This market is still evolving, so pricing when renewing subscriptions is likely to change. Most vendors bundle basic support in the per-seat license costs. Some provide managed services for data curation, integration, and vendor management at additional cost.

This is our third year evaluating the SMP space in the context of our Key Criteria and Radar reports. This report builds on our previous analysis and considers how the market has evolved over the last year.

This GigaOm Radar report examines 10 of the top SMPs and compares offerings against the capabilities (table stakes, key features, and emerging features) and nonfunctional requirements (business criteria) outlined in the companion Key Criteria report. Together, these reports provide an overview of the market, identify leading SaaS management offerings, and help decision-makers evaluate these solutions so they can make a more informed investment decision.

The post GigaOm Radar for SaaS Management Platforms (SMPs) appeared first on Gigaom.

As Figure 1 shows, SaaS application management platforms (SMPs) enable more efficient operations by consolidating cost and application usage data through integration, creating an application inventory, identifying contract entitlements and cost savings, automating operational lifecycles, and enforcing security controls.

Figure 1. SMP Functions

SaaS applications require standard processes to address spending, operational, and security challenges. Unnecessary costs may be incurred by over-committing to contract entitlements or maintaining redundant or underused applications. Operational overhead can snowball when access, licensing, and user requests are managed manually with no time for proactive trimming the inventory of existing applications. Security risks escalate without proactive monitoring and remediation to protect sensitive data being stored in the applications.

Small-to-medium businesses (SMBs) and large enterprises alike benefit from investing in an SMP:

• SMPs use discovery to create an application catalog with visibility into all applications in use. The catalog enables collaboration and shared accountability across finance, IT, security, and sourcing departments for cost savings and operational efficiency. It is enriched with application spend, licensing, and usage data obtained directly from the managed applications.

• Spend management enables cost savings by identifying opportunities to reduce application usage. Contract management enables cost savings by determining where and when to cut or cross-level an entitlement.

• Operational efficiencies are achieved by using workflow automation to offload operations from people performing repetitive tasks. Security risks are reduced by leveraging application integration to identify locations where sensitive data is stored and using workflow automation to remediate access to exposed sensitive data.

Business Imperative
SaaS applications are easy to start using; in many cases all that is needed is a credit card and an internet connection. While this is a great model in terms of deployment and accounting, it makes it more difficult for IT to manage the application portfolio. The effects of this can be severe; at times, organizations may be paying too much due to a lack of volume licensing or lax management of unused licenses, or an inability to anticipate usage may lead to hardware and networking shortfalls. Even worse, sensitive company data may make its way into the wrong hands or properly secured identity providers go unused and no record is kept of access to important systems.

An inability to manage an organization’s SaaS applications makes it even more difficult for IT to partner with business units. Beyond saving money and mitigating risk, SaaS management platforms make it easy for employees to access the software that they need when they need it, alleviating a common frustration that organizations have experienced in the age of digital work.

Sector Adoption Score
To help executives and decision-makers assess the potential impact and value of an SMP deployment to the business, this GigaOm Key Criteria report provides a structured assessment of the sector across five factors: benefit, maturity, urgency, impact, and effort. By scoring each factor based on how strongly it compels or deters adoption of a SMP, we provide an overall Sector Adoption Score (Figure 2) of 4.6 out of 5, with 5 indicating the strongest possible recommendation to adopt. This suggests that an SMP is a very credible candidate for deployment and worthy of thoughtful consideration.

The factors contributing to the Sector Adoption Score for SMPs are explained in more detail in the Sector Brief section that follows.