The changing business landscape and global pandemic have made working from home the current standard. But while we’re adjusting—or even if we’ve already adjusted—it might be difficult to see all the new issues buried in the mountain of software as a service (SaaS) within your business.
Yes, SaaS—easy to buy but hard to manage, especially for those in IT. SaaS is simple to spin up, as most applications don’t require you to include them in your procurement process and you can just put the application on a credit card.
But issues arise when you’re using SaaS and your organization is undergoing constant change. What one individual or business unit deems necessary today might become unneeded or redundant next quarter.
Companies are buying more SaaS and not using it all
And when they don’t use their SaaS application it’s wasted budget that could be applied to short-handed business units. Gartner estimates businesses could cut their SaaS by an estimated 30 percent, meaning you’re probably overbuying SaaS regularly. And SaaS investment is climbing; it’s projected to reach more than $140 billion by 2022.
But if you use Coupa for business spend management, you’re in luck, because Flexera now integrates with Coupa, the market-leading expense management solution, to help optimize your spend.
Coupa works with other companies to create new and unique capabilities that empower customers, partners and suppliers to deliver increased visibility, insights and solutions for their business spend management. Flexera now is one of Coupa’s trusted partners.
Why is this new integration important if you use Coupa to manage expenses? Because the SaaS you own could already present a problem.
You’re more likely to find an unauthorized app than an authorized one
One byproduct of buying outside the usual channels is the proliferation of shadow SaaS—unseen or unsanctioned spend on cloud-based applications that IT and finance don’t know about. Shadow SaaS can be as innocuous as an Adobe app purchased for design purposes or as problematic as a subscription to a site of dubious nature.
Shadow SaaS presents a host of problems because IT isn’t aware of its deployment, potentially creating security risks. And finance is unaware of the purchase, adding financial risk. It also adds to application sprawl issues and could overlap with existing IT assets. And there’s the added concern of identifying former employees who might still have access to a company’s SaaS applications.
Companies have found there are 15 times more cloud-based applications in their environment than are authorized, and that number is climbing. This sprawl affects your business in ways you don’t even realize until there are holes in your budgets and vulnerabilities being exploited.
What can we do about SaaS sprawl?
There’s a lot you can do. IT, finance and procurement can easily collaborate by using Flexera SaaS Manager and Coupa to get the full view of risk and spend coming from your organization’s SaaS landscape.
There are pieces you can put in place today to get your SaaS under control. Flexera SaaS Manager gives you:
- Visibility into your SaaS with an enterprise-wide catalog of sanctioned and unsanctioned SaaS
- Cost control over your software spend while identifying waste from unused software
- Security so you can identify and remediate unauthorized access to SaaS applications and data
Coupa + Flexera: business spend management meets SaaS management
You can use Flexera SaaS Manager to identify approved expenses while also getting a single view of usage and unsanctioned spend—using insights on SaaS application expenses from Coupa Expense. You can discover, manage, optimize and secure all your SaaS applications while remaining in compliance with regulations (such as GDPR and HIPAA), centralizing your reporting and tracking elusive users.
Ready to get a handle on your SaaS spend?
Contact us to discover how integrating Coupa and Flexera can help your SaaS management.