Finding value in your existing tech stack
March 15, 2024
4 minute read
It’s 2024 and we’re all trying to make the best with what we have. From getting the last bit of toothpaste out of the tube to making coffee at home, we’re looking to get the best bang for our buck and maximize value everywhere.
With inflation, interest rates, and the economy posing numerous uncertainties, everyone is trying to spend as efficiently as possible. Businesses worldwide are carefully examining every dollar spent, including each application in their tech stack.
Understanding your current tech stack
Before slicing and dicing, you’ll need to conduct a comprehensive audit of your tech stack. This audit should include:
- Identifying all tools, platforms and services currently in use
- Costs and functionalities associated with all of these tools
- Analyzing current usage and adoption rate
By gaining a clear understanding of your existing infrastructure, you can pinpoint areas of redundancy, inefficiency, and underutilized resources.
Leveraging SaaS Management Platforms (SMPs)
If you’re anything like the average company, you’ve got 112 SaaS applications (State of SaaS 2024, coming soon!) and you’ll need to keep track of them all. Enter a time saver (and life saver): a SMP.
SaaS Management Platforms (SMPs) are an invaluable tool for optimizing your SaaS usage and provide a centralized view of all your subscriptions, usage, license management, and compliance monitoring.
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A SaaS management platform is critical enterprise IT infrastructure, and its automation is a competitive necessity for efficient operations. Therefore, if you don’t have it in this quarter’s budget, you most certainly should include it in your next quarterly budget cycle.”
– BetterCloud
Finding hidden gems
You need visibility into your SaaS stack in order to make informed decisions. Having a sole point of reference for all of your tools and services, allows you to become proactive in the everyday.
After accessing all your applications and services all in one place, you can identify redundancies and unused licenses, enabling your team to free up budget.
License management is made easy with BetterCloud as IT admins are able to act quickly to identify what already exists and enact cost-saving measures (without lifting a finger) when removing redundant apps and licenses.
Saving time is saving money
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Keeping a handle on time-consuming, and ultimately essential, tasks is one of the hardest parts of scaling up a business.”
– Forbes
Apart from having clear visibility in your tech stack, automating time-consuming tasks can free up valuable time.
Popular opportunities for automation include user life cycle management (onboarding and offboarding), remediate risky file sharing, and initiating contracts and their subsequent renewals.
Centralized security capabilities
Having adequate security in place for your files and applications is invaluable. Confidential and personal identification data leaks happen more often than you think and typically in the shadows.
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A sales VP may store a spreadsheet in Dropbox containing confidential sales pipeline data and customer names and addresses. Initially, his interactions are innocuous. He only intends for his CEO and sales director to access this data, so he shares it with the two of them.
But from there, the sales director shares it with her three sales managers, who in turn download, export, forward, email, save, and share it with internal (and external) users, who in turn do the same. The more people the file is shared with, the bigger the sprawl is. The growth becomes exponential. The larger the sprawl, the higher the risk of human error or negligence, even though users may have the best of intentions.”
– BetterCloud
Achieve full visibility into where files are going and get notified when sensitive data is shared incorrectly.
Spend management
Living in today’s economy, every cent has to be questioned. Which is why a spend management tool is a need (not a want) for every SaaSOps professional.
Eliminate redundant tools, monitor utilization, and automate your spend management workflows all with your SMP to make smarter choices when allocating your budget
Get the upper hand on vendor negotiations
If you’re walking into a vendor meeting with no supporting data, you’re already at a disadvantage.
Combine leading vendor insights and spend intelligence with IT’s most advanced no-code workflow automation builder for end-to-end saas management (LINK: Spend Management page).
Finally, IT can credibly act as the honest broker between Finance and business leaders.
Unveil cost savings with usage monitoring
Ever implement a product and wonder if you’re using the complete product?
Take advantage of benchmark utilization to help your business understand if you’re utilizing the software better than other companies within the same industry.
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As an example, let’s say your business has purchased 1,000 licenses for SOFTWARE X and has made the necessary moves to allocate 800 of these licenses. G2 Track would show you that your “license allocation efficiency” is 80%.
Taking this even further, let’s say that out of these 800 licenses that are allocated, 600 of them are actively being used. That means, 600 employees are logging in and using the software as they deem necessary, giving SOFTWARE X an “engagement efficiency” score of 75.”
– Source
Now you won’t be stuck wondering how you stack up against your competition.
Involve your team for key decisions
Every team is different and every person on that team is unique, meaning their software needs are different.
Liking a software is akin to everyone’s tastes and preference, which is why it’s important to evaluate with your team what works for them and what doesn’t.
Collect user sentiment data within the BetterCloud platform (G2 Track) to maintain a single source of truth for all of your data in real time. Share the controls with your team to replace, eliminate, renegotiate, and/or keep and expand across your entire SaaS stack.
Unlocking full value starts with a clear view into your tech stack
Today’s IT professionals need a complete SMP to do everything from seamlessly onboarding and offboarding users to ensuring file sharing safety to monitoring spend.
BetterCloud is the end-to-end SaaS Management Platform that facilitates increased efficiency and informed decision-making across your organization’s cloud-based application.
Request a demo today to learn more about how BetterCloud can help your IT team automate mundane tasks and get a complete view of your tech stack.
