How Industry-Leading Brands Secure User Interactions in SaaS Apps

A panel discussion with BetterCloud’s Chief Product Officer Jim Brennan and speakers from Bird, Juul Labs, Peloton, and Spotify.

This year at Oktane, we hosted a customer panel where we shone a light on a few of our phenomenal customers. They discussed how they use BetterCloud to save their organizations time and money (and their own sanity).

The power—and danger—of SaaS

SaaS applications are rapidly being adopted in the workplace because they make collaboration effortless. However, the same functionality that makes SaaS so powerful also puts you at risk.

Last month, BetterCloud released the State of Insider Threats in the Digital Workplace 2019. Our report findings confirm what we suspected: well-meaning end users pose the biggest security threat. It’s not that they mean to expose sensitive data—it’s just that they don’t know what they’re doing.

This is where Okta and BetterCloud can help. Okta secures user connections and BetterCloud secures user interactions, meaning that the two give you visibility into your SaaS applications.

For a more in-depth dive into how BetterCloud and Okta can help you secure users and their interactions, read our webinar recap here.

Meet our customers

Let us introduce you to our panelists. The panel included Jay Feliciano, SaaS security engineer at Spotify; Peter Barnett, systems administrator at Bird; Raul Santos, lead DevOps engineer at Peloton; and Karl-Philippe Cassel, API integrations engineer at Juul Labs.

Each panelist is a customer of both BetterCloud and Okta. They joined us to discuss how they have configured BetterCloud to solve some of their most frustrating and time-consuming IT tasks.

Automating onboarding and offboarding: “We just plug in the info and BetterCloud takes care of the rest”

Onboarding and offboarding can be the most tedious tasks for admins. However, making sure that they are done correctly is a vital part of securing your environment and giving your end users a seamless experience. BetterCloud and Okta help IT admins automate these processes so that they can concentrate on other tasks.

Onboarding

Many of our panelists are from high-growth organizations. While scaling is an exciting part of a startup’s lifecycle, it can be hard for small IT teams to keep up with the demand of onboarding while also taking care of everything else on their plates.

Cue BetterCloud’s bulk onboarding feature.

“The bulk onboarding feature is really helpful because sometimes we have onboarding classes of 100. This feature allows you to bulk add or move users,” Cassel said. “It makes large changes easy and time efficient; these things were a real time suck before we had BetterCloud. Now with bulk add, we just plug in the info and BetterCloud takes care of the rest.”

Santos mirrored this sentiment. “Peloton has tripled in the last year. Before we were a BetterCloud customer, I had my own script to handle this kind of thing. However, with the amount of things changing, it was time intensive to keep up with the scripts and if for whatever reason, I couldn’t be there, the scripts would be meaningless to other people. Now, even if I’m not there, anyone can pick up BetterCloud and understand how to use it.”

This gives him the comfort of knowing that if he’s out of the office, other people on his team will confidently know how to handle whatever challenges they face with the help of BetterCloud.

Offboarding

Offboarding can be just as much of a time suck as onboarding, but it has added gravitas. If offboarding is done incorrectly or incompletely, you are opening yourself up to insider threats and potentially exposing proprietary information.

BetterCloud uses automated workflows to help ensure that end users are fully offboarded when they leave your organization. Feliciano from Spotify said that “BetterCloud has helped eliminate the little pieces that are often forgotten during offboarding,” which helps him keep his environment safe.

Barnett from Bird took this sentiment one step further:

“If I got hit by a bus, who is going to solve the problem? But with BetterCloud, it’s all built in the system and anyone could pick it up,” he said.

When it comes time to bulk offboard seasonal workers from Bird, anyone is equipped to take over, though hopefully no one gets hit by a bus in the process.

Simplifying processes: “BetterCloud paid for itself in an afternoon”

Beyond onboarding and offboarding, BetterCloud helps streamline IT processes across the board, saving your team time and circumventing human error.

Our panelists discussed how easy BetterCloud is to use, especially compared to the alternative of building an in-house tool. They also expressed appreciation for BetterCloud’s automation capabilities. It enables them to set up workflows that complete necessary actions overnight or on weekends—something that is especially appreciated because their teams are lean.

Santos from Peloton said:

“I’ll only take one afternoon connecting a new connector in BetterCloud. Trying to build that internally would take so much time and manpower. So the way I see it, the product paid for itself in an afternoon.”

He also appreciates that the remediation workflows within BetterCloud help educate end users on SaaS best practices, which takes the burden off the end user to educate themselves.

Building off this, Feliciano told us, “Getting on BetterCloud was like the Thanos snap. It was that quick.”

Similarly, he echoed the thought that BetterCloud is an intuitive app, and that buying is easier than building your own tool. It allows you to build off of it if something you’re looking for isn’t already there.

Cassel uses onboarding workflows to make sure that people have the right level of access—a security best practice. His workflows correct sharing settings to ensure people only have visibility into the documents that they need to see.

As Barnett from Bird concisely explained, “BetterCloud has allowed me to walk 10 dogs at one time with one leash.”

Security: How BetterCloud helps Spotify automatically secure compromised devices, saving 1.5 hours of work per device

Security is top of mind for IT admins and organizations as a whole. It’s important to keep your data secure and sensitive information private. However, SaaS applications don’t natively give you much visibility into your environment.

Cassel from Juul discussed how BetterCloud solves this challenge. “Being able to do reporting through BetterCloud is helpful. It allows you to see what actions people have taken, which is the benefit of having a centralized platform where you can see into all your SaaS apps.”

He underscored an important point: You need more than visibility into just one app. In order to really understand what is happening in your environment, you need to understand what actions are happening across apps for the instances to be meaningful to admins. BetterCloud gives you that ability.

Additionally, Feliciano discussed an interesting security use case. He explained that as companies scale, problems compound. So when a company is smaller, compromised devices are easier to handle. However, as you scale, so does the number of compromised devices you face.

BetterCloud allows him to act quickly to secure the user.

He has an on-demand workflow that kicks off once he reports the name of the user, and then BetterCloud takes over from there. This workflow quickly secures the user without needing to go into each individual app, ultimately saving him an hour and a half of work per compromised device.

Customer support: We have a 10-second average chat response time

As we built our platform, one aspect that we wanted to make sure we got right was our customer support. We know how frustrating it is when you need help, but it takes hours to get a response. Our average chat response time is 10 seconds because we don’t want you to have to wait to get your questions answered.

Barnett can attest to this. He once got a response from our support team in two seconds.

“I’m pretty sure everyone on the support team knows me personally. I speak to them once or twice a day on average. It’s such a good partnership to have,” said Spotify’s Feliciano. “You brainstorm and there are people there waiting to help you figure out how to do what’s in your head. Even if they haven’t seen it before, they’re there to figure it out with you.”

Santos from Peloton elaborated on this idea:

“They help me achieve what I’m trying to achieve. It becomes a partnership and it’s instant. In the SaaS world we’re all working together and we’re all trying to achieve the same things.”

The BetterCloud community: “The BetterIT Slack is really helpful”

A unique part of BetterCloud’s offering is the community that we build. We bring IT professionals together to help them succeed (and of course, commiserate every once in a while).

Spotify’s Feliciano elaborated on the importance of community in his field, saying that “admins tend to operate in silos and forget that we’re all facing the same challenges. The BetterIT Slack [community] is really helpful to talk through your problems with other IT admins.”

It’s also a useful place to suggest new features, he says. In his opinion, this is how you can tell that the BetterCloud community drives the product because feature requests are addressed rapidly.

He’s right. Our small but mighty community that we’ve built so far has a significant influence on how BetterCloud evolves. One of our guiding principles is “always strive to delight.” We want to make sure our customers are getting what they need out of our platform, so your feedback is important to us.

Interested in watching the full panel discussion? You can find that here.