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SaaS has revolutionized work. Even in the digital workplace environment triggered by COVID-19, SaaS has enabled us to work closely and productively. SaaS, which is widely used around the world, such as GWS, Slack, Zoom, and Notion, has already raised enterprise productivity to unprecedented levels. According to BetterCloud research, 70% of business apps currently used by companies are SaaS-based, and 85% of business apps are expected to be SaaS-based by 2025.

With the rapid spread of SaaS, companies are facing a number of major challenges. As the number of SaaS applications used within organizations has increased, IT departments have become unmanageable. As employees freely pay and use SaaS applications, security teams are unable to understand how sensitive business data is being managed. This soon sparked a new movement called SaaSOps.

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What is SaaOps?

SaaOps aims to create a secure and productive SaaS environment for employees with the combination of regulations, processes, technology, and people required to successfully support an organization through SaaS. The three key elements of SaaOps are:

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1. SaaS Discovery

This includes discovering the SaaS applications that the business needs or that employees want, and understanding which SaaS applications are currently being used within the organization. SaaS is mostly used by individual subscriptions by teams or groups, and is in a management blind spot. We can move away from shadow IT by understanding our organization's SaaS usage, such as what SaaS is being used by the company and whether SaaS is being used well according to the purpose of use.

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2. automation

In order to successfully manage SaaS, user lifecycle and application license management must be automated. IT staff productivity is bound to decrease if they spend a lot of time allocating and recovering accounts due to employee onboarding and offboarding. All SaaS usage and users can be automatically identified, and licensed users can be queried in real time through provisioning. You can reduce wasted costs by finding duplicate, long-term unused, and neglected licenses.

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3. security

Through the use of SaaS, employees have much more control over business assets. As a result, not only external threats, but also security risks such as data breaches and unauthorized access due to employee mistakes have increased. Appropriate security policies such as IP restrictions, two-factor authentication, and session timeout settings must be implemented so that SaaS can be used safely and effectively.

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The roles expected of the SaaOps team and SaaOps personnel

1) SaaS app budget and cost management

2) Understand the status of SaaS apps

3) Manage employee access to SaaS apps

4) Manage the SaaS app license renewal cycle

5) Training programs for using SaaS apps

6) Measuring the suitability of SaaS app subscription plans

7) Recommending and approving new SaaS apps

8) Licensing criteria policies such as organization, role, and project

9) Lifecycle management such as onboarding/offboarding

10) Automate operations using tools

11) Establishing security policies and processes

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Currently, if you search for “SaaS management jobs” on Google, you can see that the industry's demand for effective SaaS management is increasing as more than 65,000 search results are displayed. More detailed functions and operational organizations are needed to drive change without sacrificing productivity. If you have a SaaOps team, the SaaS app owner can work with the finance team, accounting team, general affairs team, and security team to build a better SaaS management environment.

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Democratizing technology and SaaSOps

The democratization of technology is shifting the evolution of digital leadership, responsibilities, and competencies outside the IT organization. The transformation of IT solutions into cloud-based SaaS products reduced adoption costs and simplified customer support and initial onboarding. This provides an environment where new technologies can be tried while minimizing costs and risks. In the 'Top Tech Provider Trend for 2023: The Democratization of Technology' report, Gartner introduced business technicians as employees who develop technical or analytical functions for use in internal or external businesses, and Citizen developers as employees who use tools approved by the IT department to create application features that can be used by themselves or other employees. As more and more business technologists and citizen developers within the organization develop applications and features that simplify customization and creation, the democratization of technology is expected to be realized rapidly.

In line with this trend, it seems that SaaS management will not be limited to the IT department's exclusive responsibility. The future of SaaS management will be a way for IT departments to manage everything from a central console and assign intermediate management systems to appropriate departments and personnel. SaaOps, which consists of a combination of regulations, processes, technology, and personnel, such as understanding the current state of SaaS used by employees and understanding the organizational system and assigning appropriate managers, will become the next generation of SaaS management measures.