SaaS management is software that finds every SaaS application that a company's employees use, shows who uses each one and what it costs, helps the company renegotiate renewals, and removes a person's access when the person leaves. SaaS, or software as a service, is software rented by subscription and used over the internet.
Why is this hard? Anyone in a company can sign up for a SaaS application with an email address and a company card. The IT team may never hear about it. Applications used without the IT team's knowledge are called shadow IT. So SaaS management first has to find them. It reads the logins recorded by single sign-on (SSO), the system through which employees sign in once to many applications. It reads card statements and expense claims, which show what the company pays to whom. Some products also add a browser extension, which notes which applications employees open.
Imagine a skincare brand in Mumbai that sells online and has 350 staff. Its IT team believes the company uses about 60 applications. SaaS management finds 140. Three teams pay for three different video-editing tools. A design tool has 80 paid seats, but only 45 people used it in the last 60 days. The renewal is due next month. So the company renews only 50 seats. At ₹1,500 per seat per month, the 30 fewer seats save ₹45,000 a month, or ₹5.4 lakh a year. Some products also negotiate renewals for their customers, because they know what other companies pay for the same application.
The second job is removing access. When an employee leaves, her accounts must close on her last day. Otherwise she can still open the company's files and customer lists. SaaS management starts from the employee's record in the HR system, an idea explained on the page on the HRIS. Say a marketing executive at the skincare brand leaves on a Friday. SaaS management finds her accounts in 23 applications. It closes most of them through SSO, and the rest through each application's API, a fixed format through which one program sends instructions to another. It also moves the files she owned to her manager.
SaaS management sits between two neighbours. Large companies often control access to their main systems with identity governance and administration (IGA), which also runs regular access reviews. SaaS management focuses on rented applications, and on their cost as well as their access. A different product, SaaS security posture management (SSPM), checks the security settings inside each application. Renewal decisions then go to the purchasing team, through procure-to-pay software.