Today’s modern businesses depend highly on cloud applications to achieve increased productivity and facilitate collaboration and operations within a company.
In addition to project management applications, there are many specialized analytics applications that are commonly used by numerous employees each day. Without the centralized governance of SaaS license management, tracking all active subscriptions can become a challenging task.
With the help of structured SaaS license management, the management of IT will be able to track subscriptions, eliminate waste, and improve the efficiency of their investments in cloud software.
In simple terms, SaaS license management can be described as a special subcategory of software license management that allows the tracking, evaluation, and management of subscriptions for cloud applications during the whole lifecycle of the use of such applications.
The cloud model of software differs significantly from the traditional one since, in this case, the purchasing of subscriptions is done using the corporate credit card and on-demand.
Without specialized tracking solutions, cloud software platforms tend to experience various inefficiencies in operations that eat into company budgets:
In order to have proper visibility and control over the use of their cloud applications, businesses set up a number of processes around the following four pillars:
Having a source of truth implies having information about the contracts, credit card information, and Single Sign-On (SSO) logins. The ongoing SaaS licensing tracking identifies every cloud application.
Integration of SAM tools with SaaS providers’ API provides detailed information about the use of the software by particular users through the analysis of their login time, usage of particular features, and the creation of documents and files.
By automating the process of user deprovisioning, companies can reclaim those licenses that are no longer used and assign them to other people who just joined the team without buying additional licenses.
Proper license optimization includes analysis of different subscription types. It is important to downgrade people who only use basic functionality of software from premium licenses to the standard plan.
The implementation of a subscription management model brings the following business benefits:
Although both SaaS subscription management and IT asset management have a common aim of maximizing the return on investment from technology, SaaS management is radically different from traditional IT Asset Management (ITAM).
ITAM concentrates on the monitoring of hardware assets and local servers as well as software licenses on a permanent basis, which have definite depreciation.
On the other hand, SaaS management deals with browser-based applications that operate on flexible subscriptions. As a result, many of the traditional IT asset scanners cannot detect browser extensions and web subscriptions.
SaaS license management relies on real-time API telemetry and login frequencies for feature usage.
License management of SaaS is crucial to maintain control in today’s IT environment by saving money, securing valuable information, and making cloud solutions generate their full value.
Ans: It is used to monitor cloud software usage and make it more cost-effective.
Ans: Unauthorized software purchases are additional costs and duplications of applications.
Ans: Automated removal of inactive user accounts.
