7 Tips To Self-Analyze and Manage Your SaaS Stack

By 2025, 85% of business software will be SaaS-based, up from 70% today. Furthermore, it may enable these companies to market new capabilities 20% to 40% quicker.

Business interruptions can happen at any time and last for any time. If these disruptions have impacted you, you could have needed to "flip" your operations and reevaluate your SaaS stack lineup.

What products, services, or suppliers are required to be kept on board? Could you carry on as usual without it? How long may an outage last before it starts to have an effect?

If you need to know how the changes will affect your critical business processes, and the financial implications, making decisions about your SaaS selection can be challenging.

So, how do you know which SaaS changes will affect your company? We recommend carrying out a self-analysis of your SaaS stack.

How to Manage and Analyze Your SaaS Stack

A SaaS tech stack is a collection of frameworks, libraries, software languages, and infrastructure used to create and launch a fully functional platform. Even if you have the best sales, product, or customer success teams, they are only useful with an appropriate tech stack. 

According to Forrester (through Workday), 75% of business leaders switched to a SaaS solution after realizing that it increased their company's agility. The tech stack, then, serves as the software's basis and establishes the parameters for the entire development cycle. It consequently directly affects how much time and money you spend on development.

For example, you could use free trial periods to test new software before purchasing. You may be negotiating volume discounts or other perks with vendors.

While these are excellent spend management techniques, they require an elaborate method that can be applied over time to be effective - which is what we'll discuss below.

Review Your SaaS-Based Apps

The adoption of SaaS is now a need. New applications may keep getting added to your stack because the most recent SaaS apps regularly turn into essential tools for particular business functions.

However, you must implement an appropriate review and vetting procedure for each newly acquired app if you want to stop the SaaS adoption in your business from becoming out of hand. Think about feature sets, security, permissions, and simplicity of integration.

Additionally, you should confirm that these apps comply with the laws your business and its clients must abide by.

Automate SaaS Product Adoption

If your SaaS product assessments are going to be reactive, automating as much of the process as possible will at least help lower errors and lag times. For instance, SaaS management tools can currently monitor and discover SaaS apps. They can securely gather data on every SaaS activity occurring on your network.

Furthermore, monitoring tools can alert administrators when something needs human intervention. An app's license should be revoked if it goes dormant because it can be an account that has been abandoned. 

What's more? You can receive a notification if an app you uninstalled is reinstalled. To help managers make wise decisions, custom triggers can also be used to deploy surveys and queue up evaluations. All issues can thus be immediately addressed.

Simplify the App-Related Process

To prepare for the unavoidable reality of app turnover, you should streamline your app approval, implementation, and removal processes as much as possible. This way, it will be a smooth process when it comes to making a change.

We recommend implementing a decentralized IT management paradigm—what we call Collaborative IT—to improve your processes. Team leaders can select, purchase, and implement apps rather than having a central IT function handle every technology decision. 

As you might expect, removing unnecessary gatekeepers and hurdles accelerates app implementation and removal. To balance this freedom with security and budgetary constraints, look for a single SaaS system of record that provides management visibility into the entire stack.

Automate User Onboarding and Offboarding

Your staff members need to know how to use your apps properly. By connecting users with the apps they should be utilizing, onboarding is sped up, and ramp-up time is decreased.

Offboarding users is essential as well. Implementing security measures when an employee departs from your business is crucial. Verify that all work data has been correctly given over. Removing their access credentials with a few clicks is all required when they leave the firm.

Make sure no unauthorized users are still on your network, and get your new staff up and running as quickly as possible. This makes it simple for you to deprovision unused subscriptions and apps.

Consolidate and Optimize Licenses

Personal preferences can sometimes influence SaaS app selection, leading users to acquire multiple apps that support similar functionalities. This can result in collaboration silos and redundancies in your app stack, which wastes your software budget.

You can avoid this trap by creating a list of preferred apps. Determine which apps are the safest and best fit with the rest of the stack, adding true value to your company's work. Make sure you understand how these apps benefit each department. 

When new products are added to the mix, reconcile these parameters with the frequency of use and subscription costs, and keep an eye out for use case overlaps.

Furthermore, having access to an up-to-date list of renewal dates allows you to renegotiate terms or migrate from one platform to another as needed. A streamlined stack enables you to make the most of your SaaS investment.

Streamline SaaS Buying Decisions

The expected increase in SaaS spending is 241%. Businesses frequently run into financial difficulties while investing money in software. On the one hand, they wish to avoid the expensive licensing fees for each employee. However, they want to be able to choose a flexible on-premise solution.

You may get the best of both worlds—low costs and flexibility—by centralizing your SaaS procurement decisions. This is how it works: one person or department acquires software using a set procedure rather than individual departments buying their licenses. 

You can regulate how much money your company spends on software and save money by using this method.

Seek Community

An excellent approach to testing the waters is to look at the size of the community surrounding a particular app. While being one of the first organizations to embrace brand-new SaaS software can be thrilling, you might want to be something other than one because there won't be a community of people who have used it sufficiently to build best practices or adequate support around the tool.

Look to check if a product has established a strong and vibrant community; many apps have done this to gauge where it stands in terms of its community. As an alternative, research their existence in nearby communities. 

If it's a development tool, you can also look into developer communities like Stack Overflow, Github, and Reddit to see how active the app's communities are. Some of them are SparkPost Community, Coding, BadCode, and many more.

Final Thoughts

For improved user activity monitoring, maintaining access restrictions and inventories, and creating rules catered to the requirements of your IT infrastructure, comprehensive visibility and awareness of your app stack is essential. You can optimize the value of your apps and increase organizational efficiency by taking critical steps to manage your app stack effectively. Self-analysis guarantees that you will save time and money.