What is SaaS Management? The 2025 Guide

Editor’s Note: This article was updated to include more recent data and new functionality from the SMP marketplace.

Confused as to what to do with all of these SaaS apps that Sales, Marketing, HR, and Finance keep requesting? It was all fun and games until your job as IT became 75% user permissions and license and spend management for Google, Zoom, and the rest of the apps. Not only is this soul-crushing work, but it’s totally out of control. You need a SaaS Management Strategy – that works for you and the company.

Managing your tech stack of SaaS apps shouldn’t be this hard. But what is the solution? The first step is a comprehensive SaaS Management strategy.

What is SaaS Management?

Just like your weekly screen time report can surprise you, finding out just how much time you really spend on answering support tickets for SaaS apps can too.

SaaS management is automating and centralizing management tasks across a company’s entire portfolio of software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications. The first step of SaaS management is understanding and controlling identity and access to SaaS. The next step in SaaS management is streamlining the processes across a company’s entire SaaS portfolio for:

• user lifecycle management (ULM)
• spend optimization
• application configuration
• visibility and auditability

When these SaaS management practices are put into place, your IT departments can finally breathe, focus, and get back to strategic initiatives. They get hours of time back, produce fewer errors, shorten their ticket queues, and keep their fellow employees productive.

Once you build your framework and write your scripts, you still see gaps in this semi-manual process. This is why most IT administrators find that using a SaaS Management Platform (SMP) like BetterCloud is the best solution.

What is a SaaS management platform?

According to Gartner, a SaaS management platform (SMP) is a software tool that aims to help organizations discover, manage, optimize and automate the SaaS application life cycle from one centralized console.

A fully featured SMP should help IT admins with all of the following:

• Optimize SaaS app usage to boost collaboration and productivity
• Automate day-to-day SaaS management tasks
• Reveal all apps in use highlighting Shadow IT
• Protect the files and sensitive data in their environment
• Manage budgetary spend and reduce overlap

A SaaS management platform is an all-in-one tool that helps IT implement the three core practices of SaaS Operations (SaaSOps):

1. SaaS management (as discussed above)
2. SaaS discovery
3. SaaS security

What is SaaS discovery?

SaaS discovery provides full visibility into what SaaS applications are running within your environment. An SMP should be able to show you both sanctioned apps (the ones approved and vetted by IT), and unsanctioned apps (shadow IT being used by employees without approval). 

SaaS discovery allows IT admins to optimize SaaS application usage and SaaS spend. Eliminating overlapping apps saves budget so it can be used elsewhere – remember that new hardware you requested? You just found the money for it. 

App consolidation not only cuts SaaS costs but also increases collaboration. When the whole organization uses the same apps, it’s easier to share information, increase user onboarding, and minimize the risk of leaking sensitive data. If an unsanctioned app is being heavily used, IT can either step in to sanction it or unsanction it.

What is SaaS security?

SaaS security is the process of mitigating the security risks of both sensitive and proprietary data.  When is the last time you found out that an important pitch deck was shared outside the org? How about sales projections? If you don’t know, then we need to help you lock that down. An SMP should be able to secure your SaaS apps by responding to security incidents immediately with automated alerts and remediation. 

Another important part of SaaS security is creating and enforcing security policies to fulfill compliance regulations. SMPs help IT admins prove compliance with the ability to implement IT security policies and document them with non-expiring audit logs. Finally, an SMP should give you the granular access controls you need to implement least privilege access models.

How do I get started with SaaS management?

Step 1: Gain full visibility into your entire SaaS portfolio

WIth organizations now using an average of 112 SaaS apps, you need a comprehensive picture of your SaaS environment to do your job. More than half of IT professionals surveyed say the #1 challenge in their SaaS environments to solve is a lack of visibility into all user activity and data. 

SaaS management platforms like BetterCloud are designed to give IT full visibility. From a single, centralized dashboard, you can:

• See every app in your environment
• Identify who is using each app
• Uncover which apps have been granted OAuth access
• Gain visibility into shadow IT
• Set up real-time alerts to notify you when employees log in to risky apps
• Automatically log employees out of risky apps

These insights help IT admins make strategic, informed decisions on what apps to use. With the data from your SMP, you can optimize your SaaS usage by:

• Uncovering potentially redundant apps 
• Consolidating SaaS usage to save on license costs
• Identifying functionality gaps in your SaaS portfolio

Step 2: Automate everyday SaaS management tasks, especially user lifecycle management

User lifecycle management (ULM) is the practice of onboarding, offboarding, and managing user accounts on a day-to-day basis. This includes managing mid-lifecycle changes (e.g., an employee changing roles), resetting passwords, updating profile information, and giving proper access. This is an unnecessary burden on IT with shrinking numbers.

In a recent survey, we found that offboarding one user takes an average of 7 hours of staff time. A whopping 82% of respondents said they spend at least 20% of their work week (i.e., an entire day) working on repetitive tasks. And 58% of IT departments missed the Day 1 deadline for onboarding new employees.

To make your job more enjoyable, we recommend using an SMP to automate as much as they can. Automation is great for the minutiae of your job. But do you want to sit down and write 1000 scripts to get it done? No. It’s important that your SMP includes a no-code workflow builder. No-code builders should make it easy enough for anyone in your IT team to update and manage automated workflows. You know, the assistant you can hire since you saved $135,000 in unused licenses.

We recommend the following steps to get started with automation:

1. Start with the library of pre-built templates
2. Customize each workflow to meet the specific needs of your company
3. Regularly update your workflows when new apps are added to your techstack or improve it for continued easy auditing

When you have mastered the basics of workflow management, you can move towards a zero-touch IT model. Here are just two of the many ways you can save even more time with your SMP through automation.

1. Leverage custom triggers to create workflows that can start in another business unit, such as HR. (For example, when someone is given a start date in an HRIS, it automatically kicks off an onboarding workflow in your SMP.)
2. Create self-service IT portals where users can request SaaS app access through a form or ticket, and a workflow kicks off that automatically adds them.

Step 3: Mitigate data security risks and protect sensitive data

We’re always doing a dance between convenience and privacy – or, from an IT perspective – productivity and security. Even with fewer SaaS apps used in 2024 (112 down from 130), there are still over 100 apps in use. Every one of those productivity-boosting apps are also potential points of failure. How can you manage over 100 potential points of failure on your own? The truth is – you can’t.

In 2021, SaaS file security violations have spiked 134%, and the number of files containing PII has grown 1944% year-over-year. It’s easy to share files. It’s not easy to know they were shared. (Well, it is with BetterCloud but keep reading.)

To mitigate these data security risks (and sleep better at night) we recommend using an SMP to:

1. Automate file security: An SMP can be set up to immediately notify you when a document has been shared publicly, or with a user outside your organization. That alert can also kick off a workflow that automatically unshares the file and notifies IT and the user.
2. Implement and automate a least privilege access model: Implementing least privilege is a best practice for any organization. If any users have been granted super admin access, and the number of users exceeds your threshold, an SMP can automatically revoke those excessive privileges. Additionally, an SMP should provide the granularity of permissioning most SaaS applications do not offer natively.
3. Locate and protect sensitive data: When you first get started, you should use your SMP to perform a one-time search of all files in your SaaS portfolio that contain sensitive data. You can then take action to protect those files if needed by unsharing them or reaching out to the file’s creator. After the initial scan, you can automate “go-forward” policies that alert you immediately when sensitive data is exposed, and even take action to properly secure the file.
4. Create and enforce IT security policies: An SMP should provide the tools you need to create and enforce your IT security policies, such as timely offboarding and sensitive data protection. With lifetime log retention, your SMP can help you prove you followed your policies, as well as investigate past incidents.

Step 4: Manage SaaS spend

The downside of automation and productivity in a challenging economy is reduced budgets. What isn’t reduced by SaaS spend, affects personnel decisions. Yet, the lack of visibility and a do-it-for you workflow, makes it almost impossible to audit SaaS licenses. 

The average company wastes $135,000 a year on unused licenses – either because IT isn’t aware of employee adoption or because those licenses are automatically reviewed without audit. 

The truth is that you can’t manage SaaS Spend without the previous three steps. You need to gain full visibility, automate user lifecycle management, and mitigate data security. 

Anyone these days can use their credit card and a personal device to produce deliverables. Maybe Google Docs is sanctioned but they use their own Word account and share it to Google (or Vice Versa). They could lack proficiency at Adobe Cloud and use Canva instead. Maybe the newest sales hire prefers Salesforce over HubSpot. 

Either way, overlapping SaaS apps and SaaS sprawl are a waste of money, time, and resources. Of course, they also present security risks.

You should be able to sync data from all departments to minimize SaaS sprawl. You should be able to easily see what apps are renewing. You should be able to easily compare apps by feature. And you can. With BetterCloud. Managing SaaS spend is the best way to ensure your job security and happiness.

You automate everything else, Why not SaaS management, too?

BetterCloud is so much more than just a user lifecycle management tool. It automates employee onboarding & offboarding, license reclamation, spend management, application access, and entitlement. 

Eliminate thousands of hours of manual IT work and thousands of dollars in wasted software expenses with BetterCloud.

What are you waiting for?