Software as a Service (SaaS) management tools will soon be table stakes for IT organizations in large enterprises. The current administrative overhead from each SaaS acting as a walled garden is causing real pain for many large enterprises.
Each SaaS usually has its own management console to set up user accounts, including access and permissions. This means that for every end-user onboarding, offboarding, or re-assignment, each SaaS’s management console must be updated with the appropriate account and permissions changes. Today, this usually means that an administrator must log into the console and make the appropriate updates manually, usually through a web browser.
This manual process is error prone and often results in administrative burden for IT Operations. Most organizations lack a central tool to make changes and updates or even to provide full visibility into the accounts, users, and permissions of their smorgasbord of SaaS tools. When this scales across hundreds of SaaS applications and thousands of end users, the enterprise ends up with a massive administrative headache – especially when one factors in security, compliance, and audit requirements.
Vendors are offering a new set of SaaS management tools in response, designed to allow IT operations single-pane-of-glass visibility and control into accounts and access for SaaS applications. Right now, most of these tools only address a limited subset of the most popular SaaS applications.
Our Take
Info-Tech expects this product space to develop rapidly and to evolve to cover an ever-increasing amount of the most popular SaaS applications. We also expect that vendors of software asset management tools will expand their product line to incorporate SaaS management functionality, likely through the strategic acquisitions of software asset management start-ups. Enterprises who can take the pain for now may want to wait to make SaaS management tool purchasing decisions until after the market has consolidated.
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