What Do I Get If I Start Managing Saas? (Part 1 of 6)
Edit: Here are quick links to the other parts:
2. Discover applications and understand domain
3. Manage financials (costs, licenses, renewals)
5. Comply with regulations and certifications
Good question. In the era of spiraling SaS costs, companies want to know how to rein in cloud software.
What’s the solution?
Well, we think Alpin is at least part of the solution, and most likely, it’s all you need. What Alpin does has been called many things: SaaS Management. SaaS Optimization. SAM for SaaS. ITAM for cloud software. CASB lite.
We’ve tried our best to lay out the benefits for you here. There’s a lot to cover, so this is part one of a multi-part series. Here, we’ll quickly summarize the benefits in various areas:
Pretty straightforward, right? So why do we need a post on each one? Well, that’s the summary of the summary because it really looks more like this:
We’ll be adding links to each part of the series as we post them:
1. Overview (this post)
2. Discover applications and understand domain
3. Manage financials (costs, licenses, renewals)
5. Comply with regulations and certifications
Interested in exploring this brave new world of SaaS management? We can do a 10-minute demo and you’ll see how Alpin can work for you. Get started by emailing info@alpin.io.
Would you rather read plain words instead of a graphic? You’re in luck!
SaaS Management Benefits and Activities
Discover applications and understand domain
• Find tens of thousands of paid and freemium SaaS applications
• Get a full picture of your SaaS estate in one dashboard
• Find all users of all applications
• Monitor usage and activity
• Support M&A due diligence by analyzing target company
Manage financials (costs, licenses, renewals)
Cost Cutting
• See costs and cost savings (up to 30%)
• View costs by user, department, tag, etc.
• Eliminate unused licenses
• Consolidate license pools into enterprise contracts
• Downgrade/right-size subscription levels
• Consolidate redundant applications
• Forecast app costs and levels of support staff
• Respond to audits
License Compliance
• Match license usage to purchased license amounts and tiers• Respond to vendor audits
• Move freemium licenses into enterprise pools (to ensure compliance, and reduce the risk of “abandoned IP”)
• Control multi-user accounts (which can violate license terms and corporate IP guidelines)
Renewals
• See comprehensive renewal calendar
• Get alerted to upcoming renewals
• Negotiate better deals using actual license counts and usage
• Avoid undesired auto-renewals
• Prevent over-provisioning
• Ensure contracts don’t expire from neglect
Improve security
• See which applications have access to sensitive corporate data
• Tag applications containing IP
• Identify applications containing personal information
• Control 3rd party access to data and devices (via blacklisting)
• Discover data leakage in shared files and email
• Receive alerts on breaches and vulnerabilities, incl. users affected
Comply with regulations and certifications
• View database of vendor compliance status with GDPR, Privacy Shield, SOC, etc.
• Send your own assessment forms to vendors
• Calculate vendor scores automatically
Manage vendors
• Centralize all info about all SaaS vendors in one easy-to-use dashboard
• Create vendor scorecards
• Measure user sentiment about applications and vendors
• Store documents, history, and notes
• Tag vendors and report on them based on the tags you assign
Interested in exploring this brave new world of SaaS management? We can do a 10-minute demo and you’ll see how Alpin can work for you. Get started by emailing info@alpin.io.
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