How Gainsight Eliminated 1,300 Hours of ULM Work in One Year with BetterCloud
April 4, 2023
2 minute read
Senior SaaSOps Engineer Brandon Wolf is responsible for the management of the many SaaS applications used by Gainsight’s global workforce of 1,400 employees as well as the app’s connectors and automations.
We talked to Wolf about the challenges the Gainsight IT team experienced, the value the team has realized since implementing BetterCloud, and advice he would give others looking to automate routine tasks.
What challenges were you facing that led you to explore a SaaS management platform?
Nearly everything in IT was a manual process. I saw a demo of BetterCloud and thought this is what we need to manage our core applications and remove a lot of the manual labor.
What goals were you trying to achieve with a new solution?
Consistency and long-term stability.
What are the main use cases you’re solving with BetterCloud?
User lifecycle management (ULM). The most noticeable use case is offboarding. Each exit was very time consuming. You have to be methodical. You have to make sure you’re doing everything right and completing certain steps. There is great value in being able to not just cut access to apps, but to automate the migration of data from a departed employee to their manager.
As we continue to grow, we needed to onboard employees in a way that they were ready to go on day one. Going from office based to remote-first, we’ve had to figure out how to reconfigure and refocus. BetterCloud allows us to be nimble. It helps us in keeping things organized.
How has automation provided value to you and your team?
Automation really frees you up in a lot of different ways that are appreciated. You sleep a little better at night knowing that when the offboarding workflow is kicked off, all the things that need to happen have happened. I used to spend a lot of time going back through our spreadsheet and double checking to make sure that things that were checked off as completed actually happened. Sometimes you’d find they didn’t because someone wasn’t really paying attention to what they were doing.
BetterCloud eliminates a lot of the errors that are bound to happen with humans doing the work and has saved us tons and tons of time.
Which blind spots in your processes has BetterCloud uncovered for you?
There were BetterCloud best practices we weren’t doing. There were certain steps that you miss sometimes because it wasn’t part of your main checklist, like transferring group ownership or secondary calendars. There’s tons of details that BetterCloud recommends because they help other companies set up automations so frequently. There are a lot of things they could streamline for us that we had overlooked.
How has BetterCloud helped your SaaS environment remain secure?
One of the nice things with BetterCloud is the visibility to see how many files are shared publicly and who owns these files. What we discovered was that a lot of people who had left the company had their files transferred to employees who had no idea they were shared publicly. Being able to recognize the risk, communicate what’s happening, and remediate the issue provides security.
What advice would you give others looking for a similar solution?
Look at your IT stack and if you are using SaaS apps, then BetterCloud is a no-brainer.
You can read the case study here.