SaaS Sprawl, or the uncontrolled proliferation of Software as a Service (SaaS) applications within an organization, is fast becoming a challenge for many businesses as cloud adoption increases. This problem rapidly exacerbates in remote and hybrid work environments where you have little oversight and decentralized SaaS procurement.
But the good news is this: you can quickly curb SaaS sprawl by focusing on policy strategies and best practices that align your organization with approved SaaS tools. Let’s explore some techniques and quick wins to help you manage uncontrolled SaaS proliferation and bring it under control.
Establish a SaaS Governance Policy
A governance policy is critical to managing SaaS sprawl. It creates procedures that control how you purchase, approve and deploy SaaS applications, helping you align with your business needs and industry security standards.
Your policy may contain criteria for evaluating new SaaS tools, such as security certifications, cost-effectiveness, and integration capabilities. You may also use criteria like risk assessments, privacy impact analyses, and alignment to business needs. Only applications that meet policy standards and your security, compliance, and functional requirements may be used in your business.
It can also help you determine which personnel can help in decision-making. For instance, you can involve IT and procurement staff in the approval process. You may also use your legal team to determine if your chosen SaaS tools are compliant with data and privacy regulation.
Your governance policy also determines how your employees can use these SaaS tools. Additionally, it may set procedures for how to retire deprecated and underused tools to reduce duplication and redundancy.
Conduct Employee Training
Training is a critical strategy as it helps your staff understand the risks of using unauthorized apps and the benefits of approved tools. It can give your workers critical insight into the potential security and legal risks they expose your company to by using shadow SaaS tools, and how they contribute to SaaS sprawl.
In your training, conduct brief power sessions that explain the security and legal risks of shadow IT and how your staff can use procurement processes to acquire approved SaaS tools. You can do this in multiple ways. For example, you can use live real-time demonstrations to expose the risks of some common shadow IT tools used in your business.
You may also highlight real-world examples of past security breaches due to unmonitored apps, to illustrate the importance of compliance. Other critical tools you can use include email updates, and interactive sessions like employee Q&A sessions.
Share Usage Policies
Once you’ve set up your governance policies, share them with your employees to ensure departments are aware of approved SaaS applications. Doing this improves their efficiency while helping them eliminate shadow IT from their workflows, cutting SaaS sprawl.
To do this, create a centralized list of approved apps, shared via intranet pages or shared documents. This way, staff members know all the tools needed for their workflows and what’s acceptable. You can also make it mandatory to use listed apps for related workflows, minimizing the use of unapproved tools.
You can share these usage policies using email, internal memos or an all-hands meeting to make every employee aware of the policy. You can always update and communicate changes to these policies regularly, ensuring your teams stay in the loop in case you make any massive change to SaaS usage policies.
Set Up SaaS Management Platforms
You can leverage SaaS management platforms to gain complete visibility into your entire SaaS environment. These tools enable you to identify redundancies, track usage, and manage licenses. They can also help you fish out shadow IT in your organization, reducing SaaS sprawl.
Once set up, an SaaS management platform gives you access to a centralized dashboard that stores all SaaS applications being used, by whom, and their usage frequency. It automatically scans and detects SaaS apps, even those outside your IT’s radar. It uses integrations, network monitoring, and browser plugins, offering continuous real-time visibility.
You can use it to identify underused or duplicate subscriptions and unused licenses, reducing your SaaS spend and cutting unnecessary renewals. It also helps you track subscription renewal dates, sending proactive alerts to avoid unintentional auto-renewals and allowing renegotiation or cancellation.
Your chosen aaS management platform can also help you allocate licenses efficiently, helping you onboard and offboard platforms easier. That reduces wasted licenses and cuts SaaS sprawl in your organization.
Use Unified Patch Management Tools
As you proliferate more SaaS tools in your organization, your attack surface inadvertently increases because vulnerabilities multiply. With potential SaaS sprawl, you want to ensure all apps receive critical patches and updates as soon as they are available. That prevents attackers from using vulnerable tools to breach your systems and cause damage to your operations.
With unified patch management tools, you can quickly and automatically discover all the tools in use in your business. This way, you can standardize them and enforce effective patching policies across all platforms. Doing this takes away the manual tracking of apps and ensures all tools receive critical patches in time.
Other SaaS Considerations
Beyond governance techniques, here are some other considerations to make when managing SaaS sprawl:
- Choose SaaS tools that match your budgetary allocations to prevent wasting money, and centralize budget oversight to track expenses.
- Consider data encryption and access management to enhance your cybersecurity posture beyond automated patch management.
- Centralize all your data management to enhance your workflow and keep all your data accessible and consistent.
- Have clear exit strategies to help you retire underused tools, including for data migration and for closing all security gaps.
- Future-proof your SaaS strategy to ensure your business can scale current SaaS tool usage or switch to more sustainable tools. That prevents future sprawl.
