Remote Work Shift Highlights the Need for SaaS Management Platforms

The invention of the personal computer led to many predictions that our jobs would eventually be freed from the office––and home would be the exciting future of work.

Despite these expectations, remote work adoption has accelerated at a steadier pace. Now, a once-in-a-century health crisis is altering the future of work in a way no one could have imagined.

The good news for companies? Study after study after study into remote work has made one thing clear: Remote workers are more productive than their office-bound counterparts.

The downside is that there are many new challenges facing organizations and their newly distributed workforces. Policies and systems that work for a once-a-week remote worker or the occasional snow day can break down when remote work is continuous and pervasive.

COVID-19 has thrown the mother of all curveballs at IT teams around the world. It’s also spurred interest in tools that can maintain data compliance and provide insight into employee productivity.

Let’s take a look at some of the critical ways COVID-19 has changed the way we do business and how a SaaS management platform can help.

COVID-19 and Cybersecurity

COVID-19 forced IT departments into engineering a full shift to remote work in warp speed. Reddit is full of unfiltered stories of the challenges of this unprecedented ask.

To support this larger than anticipated work-from-home workforce, IT departments will need to scale access controls and other critical security processes to support the increased workloads indefinitely.

Before, security teams could mostly treat remote workers as an exception, building systems that accommodate them as such. Now, it’s looking increasingly likely that companies need to manage remote work as the default when building and securing their networks.

Some of the changes this experience could bring to the forefront include IT departments standardizing remote work policies as part of future employee onboarding. And even employees who are signing up to work from an office will still be given training on software, connectivity, credentials, and VPN security in anticipation that ongoing training will be easier to maintain than an immediate crash course during a crisis.

Likely IT departments will need to review their equipment and software purchasing practices. Companies were caught unaware by COVID-19 and have perhaps allowed employees to use personal devices to conduct business and purchase unauthorized SaaS products, but that will likely no longer be allowed once the pandemic ends.

With a SaaS management platform, companies can easily track usage of unauthorized SaaS applications to enforce SaaS security policies. They can also quickly automate SaaS provisioning, de-provisioning, and the approval process, which smooths out the process of onboarding remote employees.

SaaS Spend and Coronavirus

CFOs around the world are reigning in excess spending. COVID-19 is undoubtedly increasing scrutiny on budgets, and SaaS spend is one of the first areas where finance is shining the spotlight.

Nonessential software fees are a logical first cut as a downturn looms. Take WPP, which said in a statement last month it had “identified savings above $124 million in property and IT capital expenditure against an initial 2020 budget of around $495 million.”

Organizations need to be careful here. The shift to remote has meant many companies are now relying 100% on cloud-based technologies. For instance, investing in security solutions and redundant cloud infrastructure help protect sensitive business information and keep systems alive in the event of data center downtime.

This is another area where a SaaS management platform can help you. As you get full access to your SaaS application usage reporting, you can compare usage to licensing to identify areas of bloated spending. This analysis allows you to optimize spend in a way that lowers the risk of negatively impacting business processes.

Ensuring that you remove only non-productive areas of SaaS spend to ensure that employees still have access to the productivity tools they need (and they are using them in a secure and compliant way).

Control the Chaos

A SaaS management platform can help you gain control over the chaos COVID-19 has caused. As organizations look to cut costs and untangle the web of solutions that add up to staggering costs, they’ll need assistance to make sure they aren’t doing more damage.

Similarly, understanding and tracking usage and provisioning of SaaS applications should help businesses combat the likely rise of Shadow IT and the corresponding compliance and security issues.

Before Coronavirus, today’s organizations were facing significant challenges when it came to managing their Saas environments. The shift to remote means that business leaders can no longer ignore them.

Want to learn more, please check out our SaaS Cost Reduction eBook.

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