Attention: The 2022 Gartner® Market Guide for SaaS Management Platforms is out today!
Leading analyst group Gartner has included Torii in its 2022 Market Guide for SaaS Management Platforms. We’re delighted to be included! In this post, we’ll examine what Gartner’s report means for the industry and the future of automated Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) management.
Gartner recently unveiled its new Market Guide for SaaS Management Platforms, which explores the tools available to manage SaaS portfolios, as well as the business case. Gartner defines SaaS Management Platforms (SMPs) as tools that “provide central admin console capabilities to discover, manage, automate, optimize, govern and enable SaaS used by employees. SMP also enhances protection of identities and data while using SaaS…”
The guide’s authors say that the market for SMPs is still immature despite SaaS spending continuing to grow by 15-20% annually.
That being said, the authors also believe that SMPs will soon become much more accepted. “By 2027, 40% of organizations using multiple SaaS applications will centralize management using an SMP, an increase from less than 25% in 2022.”
The analyst group recommends that Infrastructure and Operations (I&O) leaders adopt an SMP to increase their visibility and manageability of SaaS usage, automate repetitive tasks, and secure identities and data across SaaS applications. Without an SMP, it is much harder for I&O leaders to track usage, automate processes and create a secure environment.
However, Gartner highlights that adoption of SMPs has been slower within large enterprises, compared to small-to-midsized businesses (SMBs). This is despite Gartner’s own 2020 I&O Leaders Survey finding that 70% of organizations are investing in SaaS and public cloud offerings.
The must-have Capabilities of SaaS Management Platforms
According to Gartner, “Through 2027, organizations that fail to attain centralized visibility and coordinate SaaS life cycles will overspend on SaaS by at least 25% due to incorrect and unnecessary entitlements and not rationalizing overlapping tools and instances.”
This illustrates the importance of understanding exactly which capabilities are central to an SMP. The analysts provide a list of SMP Capabilities that differentiate these tools from adjacent markets tools which might have some overlapping capabilities.
|
Capability |
Details |
|
Discover |
Uncover sanctioned and unsanctioned SaaS use and cost. |
|
Manage |
Centralize multi-SaaS configuration and policy management within a single console. |
|
Automate |
Simplify SaaS administration with turnkey configuration and policy templates, workflow engine and intelligence-driven actions powered by AI/ML. |
|
Optimize |
Analysis, insights, alerting and automation to optimize SaaS cost and entitlement (licenses). |
|
Protect |
Analysis, insights, alerting and automation to protect organizational identities and data within SaaS. Also includes ensuring SaaS policies and configurations are compliant with corporate, security or regulatory standards. |
|
Govern |
Foundational capabilities that include reporting, alerting and measuring SaaS availability, as well as the breadth and depth of integrations with SaaS apps and other IT tools. |
SMPs must empower I&O leaders to discover the apps in use within their infrastructure and create a central data repository for them to be managed easily and securely. SMPs must also provide management and automation control in a single centralized resource so that users can be easily on- and offboarded. Finally, SMPs must provide secure control, in particular, bidirectional ‘read/write’ integration so SaaS app issues can be addressed.
By careful selection of the right solution, Gartner adds that organizations adopting SMPs should benefit from:
- Greater visibility and manageability of SaaS
- Maximized return on SaaS investment by driving adoption and optimizing entitlements
- Improved management and decision-making regarding SaaS contracts and renewals, as well as optimized costs
- Less unsanctioned SaaS usage with a curated store experience for employees to find approved SaaS apps
- Streamlined onboarding of new employees to existing SaaS apps and of new SaaS apps to the organization
- Reduced IT overhead with automation
- Enhanced employee on/offboarding workflows
- Better collaboration between teams that participate in the SaaS life cycle
Automation is key to successful SaaS management
When reading the Gartner Market Guide, it’s impossible to overlook the prevalence of automation throughout the future promise of SMPs. Not only is “Automate” a Primary Capability for SMPs, it is also a primary method by which other capabilities (see “Optimize” and “Security”) are accomplished.
This trend will only increase as more people become comfortable with automation influencing and augmenting more of their daily work.
The analysts highlight that “Some of the SMPs focus on SaaS operations and automation. They tend to target small-to-midsize customers, as they usually have centralized responsibilities for SaaS and better understand the SMP value proposition.”
While the report mentions larter enterprise adoption of SMPs remains lower than small to midsize, we’re seeing those larger organizations shifting towards SaaS Management as well. After all, they have the most to gain by saving on all those hidden SaaS subscription costs and securing dangerous open data portals when staff leaves the organization.
Torii is the only Distributed SaaS Management Platform that is both holistic and automated. In fact, we put automation at the heart of Torii right from the very beginning. We wanted I&O leaders to be able to access insights on usage, spend and risk exposure at a glance so that they could waste less time and money on SaaS, and not have to worry about security.
By empowering organizations of all sizes to automate their SaaS management, we’ve delivered significant business benefits to our customers. For example, global content marketing agency Rock Content says it has saved more than $1 million so far by using Torii. It has saved three-quarters (75%) of the time IT spent managing SaaS and even found 700 apps on the first day. You can learn more about our customers’ experiences over in our case studies.
Successful automation of SaaS management starts with accurate data. Torii connects to more than 160+ different tools within your IT toolkit and, using our Advanced Data Engine, ingests millions of data points from these systems, normalizes that data, and turns them into personalization tokens which become the backbone of the automation in your SaaS environment.
Using Torii, straight away you enjoy full visibility over unsanctioned apps, unused and duplicate services, unassigned licenses and valuable insights into how to save time and money by managing your SaaS applications more effectively.
Gartner predicts that SaaS management platform adoption will grow significantly in the coming years, so why not explore what an SMP could do for you? Get in touch with Torii today!
