It's Friday afternoon and your technology team has discovered forty total tools that were utilized and linked to the main company database unsuccessfully because no one approved these tools.
Finance is telling you that by next week, you must cut your software costs by 15%.
In this guide I will show you the top SaaS management platforms that automate access reviews, eliminate shadow IT, and drive vendors to consolidate, all happening behind the scenes, without interrupting your everyday operations.
I will explain how these leading systems support each of your business's size, security requirements, and active technology stack.
The Truth About Cloud Waste and Tool Sprawl
Most companies make their decisions about whether or not to use a tool based solely on guesswork.
An average enterprise utilizes over one hundred seventy-seven software applications, while at least sixty-five percent of those applications were never approved by the central IT group.
This practice puts your enterprise at a high risk for a security breach, but more than that the number of “approved” applications can leak a tremendous amount of operating expense budget dollars on an ongoing basis each and every month for you. Industry benchmarks indicate that approximately thirty percent of all paid software seats sit inactive.
If your company is not actively addressing these unutilized software solutions, you will pay for something you aren't using.
The buyers are tired of the unanticipated costs associated with software and the lack of clarity in vendor mergers and acquisitions. Buyers want to know, not getting loose commitments, what the actual timelines are to launch a SaaS management platform, what the real limitations for integrations are, and whether or not the system collects and tracks the data necessary to pass either SOC 2 or GDPR audits.
If a system takes six months to deploy, that system will be ineffective to support you in your next budget review.
What You Must Consider Before You Purchase a SaaS Management Platform
Before you decide to sign a contract, you must see outside of the typical sales pitch of the vendor.
How It Actually Connects to Your Systems
If the system cannot read your specific HR data, it doesn't matter if the AI (artificial intelligence) is simply making lofty promises. You should demand to see evidence that the system can integrate with your exact setup without needing costly custom code to accomplish the integration.
For example, if you utilize Microsoft Entra ID for your identity management and Workday for your employee data, the system you choose needs to integrate with those products correctly from the first day you implement it.
You should not accept vague assurances that a vendor has thousands of supported applications.
If a vendor states they can integrate with your financial system (such as NetSuite or QuickBooks), request a demonstration of how the data will flow between the two systems. You should verify that the vendor can perform a full offboarding process within two weeks of implementing the software. If a vendor cannot demonstrate this capability for you immediately, do not waste any more time with them.
Transparent Cost Structure
Many vendors keep their pricing around software very much hidden until you are on a high-pressure sales call to force you into making an immediate decision. Only a handful of new-age vendors show you actual numbers for pricing before you speak to their sales representatives.
There are many ways a vendor can calculate your total monthly bill (e.g., # of employees or total # of applications or flat monthly rate). You should ensure that there are no hidden charges for basic API access, premium support channels or advanced data exports.
Picking the Best SaaS Management Platform for Your Tech Stack
To find the right system, you should evaluate each vendor's capabilities and strengths relative to your largest internal challenges or problems. Be wary of just selecting the most popular brand and hoping that it will solve your problems for you.
A complete overview of the most important tools available now:
1. Zylo
Designed for large enterprises, Zylo's primary use case is managing the company's overall spending.
This is done by focusing on each organisation and its financials, connecting directly to the financial software application. The Tolerate, Invest, Migrate, Eliminate model allows Zylo to drive forced decisions about the tools you have active. If you are an enterprise with 5,000 employees and working to consolidate 200 apps, then Zylo gives you the information you need to renegotiate contracts for the vendors you most frequently use.
Zylo provides your procurement team with usage data that will allow them to push back on price increases and eliminate duplicate services.
2. Josys
Josys automates access reviews and provides information about unused accounts and suggestions for their removal quickly.
They remove the manual effort from your support team enabling them to focus on resolving technical issues. Josys works well with compliance-focused organisations needing strict compliance reporting for vendor audits.
Josys generates all the reports needed for ISO 27001 or GDPR audits.
The Josys system also tracks who logs in so that if an account is idle for an extended period, it sends a notification to the user to ensure accountability from department heads for approving or denying requests. This simple change eliminates many hours spent communicating with departments to gain approvals.
3. Torii
Torii distinguishes itself from the competition through its policy of not concealing any of its prices behind a standard contact form.
At Torii, the emphasis is on helping you get an immediate return on investment, as well as allowing you to identify waste through the entire organization within a few days or hours instead of months. In a matter of days (or hours), once you have set up Torii, the software can quickly read your environment and suggest cuts to your technology spending before you even launch your first offboarding project.
This service is perfect for an IT operations manager at a tech company of 300 employees who needs to reduce unused software licenses prior to a quarterly review.
4. Vendr
Vendr provides a complete end-to-end procurement service rather than just a software tracking tool. Vendr is about much more than just tracking usage, it is about actively negotiating pricing with vendors.
Vendr has large databases of hidden pricing benchmarks that they use to provide leverage during renewal negotiations. When you reach your renewal date for your largest software contracts, Vendr can tell you exactly what other companies of similar size are paying for those same contracts.
The transparency provided by Vendr fundamentally alters how you negotiate with the sales teams of the software you are purchasing. Instead of having to rely solely on guesswork to establish a fair price, you now have actual market pricing data in front of you to rely on during your negotiations. Vendr can assist you in consolidating your redundant software applications and, therefore, in reducing your overall software spending.
5. Lumos
Lumos serves as a bridge between the basic tracking of software and deep identity security.
Lumos performs their own autonomous access reviews to help keep your security team happy and ready for audits. Lumos enforces a strict policy of the least privilege for every employee in your company in order to prevent the leakage of sensitive information. If you are the security lead of a fast-paced startup in the financial industry, Lumos will help you demonstrate compliance with SOC 2 regulations quickly and efficiently.
They identify exactly who has access to what, and stop access immediately when project completion occurs.
6. Tropic
Tropic is an additional robust option in the procurement market that shares actual numbers with buyers. Their service is geared toward tracking renewals so clients will never lose track of the narrow cancellation period again. They are automating the purchase process so clients have complete control over finance regarding cash flow.
Tropic highlights the actual risks of vendor lock-in before clients commit to anything.
Tropic will guide clients to look at alternative vendors that may fit their needs before blindly renewing a bad contract. Tropic provides a financial guardrail for rapidly growing companies whose purchasing behaviours generally result in their purchasing of software too quickly. Tropic ensures that every purchase gets the right level of approval before a client commits to it.
7. BetterCloud
BetterCloud is the dominant player for the automation workflow portion of the market.
They are the standard vendor when it comes to companies that require stringent and reliable offboarding steps for employees who have left the company. BetterCloud will instantly revoke access across all connected systems as soon as the employee provides their resignation. BetterCloud connects into Google Workspace and Microsoft systems to ensure there are no remnants of the terminated employee's data still accessible.
This type of automation saves IT teams hundreds of hours of manually performing similar tasks each month, as well as closing gaps in security that may expose the company to potential harm.
8. Zluri
Zluri bridges the gap that exists for mid-sized and enterprise-level businesses that face the problem of tool sprawl.
The Zluri team conducts deep audits of your business to provide a complete understanding of where money from your technology budget is being wasted. Zluri has a strong focus on licence optimisation for current use and eliminating waste from your technology budget. By examining active usage minute by minute, Zluri identifies which teams should in fact be using premium tiers.
They also identify which teams can easily downgrade to the free tier without jeopardising productivity. Zluri’s quantitative approach to the emotional arguments made between departments about certain software makes it easier for management to remove favoured but unused tools.
Zluri relies heavily on utilising detailed sales data to develop comprehensive market intelligence profiles for their customers.
9. Sastrify
Sastrify is a dominant player in the strict European market.
They operate heavily around data security regulations and are very aggressive in their negotiation process with vendors. They understand how to interpret the complex European data protection regulations (GDPR) as they were created.
In addition, because of their international reach, Sastrify ensures that your software stack is compliant in all countries in which you are doing business.
Lastly, Sastrify acts as a direct partner of your internal finance department and advocates against poor contract terms.
10. SailPoint
SailPoint recently acquired Intello, bringing together software inventory with a large enterprise identity governance platform. SailPoint is specifically built for large complex firms who have strict security policies. SailPoint views all applications as security entry points that require strict access controls.
Therefore, if an employee changes departments, all their access rights are automatically changed to align with the new department's job title.
As a result, SailPoint makes the entire access management process entirely automated, thereby eliminating human error. Therefore, your IT help desk will never need to manually change the permissions of an employee due only to an internal promotion, as this is completely automated. The system is responsible for managing an organization's entire identity life cycle in the background of a company.
11. 1Password
Acquiring Trelica allows 1Password to provide secure identity management and allows those who are not typically capable of purchasing enterprise software the ability to use advanced identity management capabilities down to the mid-market to small business levels.
They have made it incredibly easy for smaller IT teams to discover and monitor unapproved software installed within their organization. It's the absolute best tool for an agency founder running a 60-person agency that needs an immediate response. When the founder finds out that the firm is paying for 12 different project management tools, 1Password will perform an immediate audit on all 12 at once.
They have combined standard password management with a straightforward software tracking system and provide one clean dashboard for both.
12. Precoro
Precoro looks at the issue of software purely from a "hard" finance and accounting perspective.
They are one of the only significant accounting tools that provide pricing transparency directly on their website. Precoro connects into key accounting platforms such as SAP and QuickBooks to follow the actual cash flow incurred from the software purchased.
Precoro's advantage is that they do not just track empty seats; they also monitor the financial impact of all software purchases for your business.
They provide your CFO with one screen to effectively forecast the company's overall spend. This gives your leadership team the ability to be accountable for the company's headcount budget since they will know exactly where every dollar of the company's cash is being spent. Every department is required to justify their monthly software bills.
How to Get Started and Next Steps
Buying the tools is only part of the equation.
If you purchase a new SaaS management platform and do not change your internal processes and behaviors, you just spent a large amount of money on a fancy dashboard that tells you how much of your technology budget you're wasting. You need to develop a timeline and methodology for cleaning up the current state of the mess you are in. Allow 90 days for your team to identify every application that interacts with the network.
Begin by reviewing your identity provider's security logs against the employee expense report.
There are a lot of cases where employees purchased software with their personal credit cards, thus circumventing the normal IT purchasing guidelines. Have your finance group request a list of all recurring charges under $50 on company credit cards. This will be where you will find the greatest amount of "shadow" IT that is hidden from your view.
Final Decision: Stop the Outflow of Cash
The era of an open-ended budget for software purchases and zero accountability for executives is no more.
You are losing 30%+ of your technology budget to duplicate tools, empty seats, and ghost user accounts for people who left months ago. It is impossible to properly clean up a mess of this size using a simple manual spreadsheet. Find a SaaS management platform that fits your current business size and make sure you have tangible evidence that it will integrate with your existing systems.
Make sure to have your selected vendor guarantee you a speedy setup time in writing before you sign any paperwork.
If you wait too long to implement one of these management solutions, you will continue to bleed cash on software products your employees never access. Take control of your IT ecosystem, secure your access controls, and stop wasting money on products that you do not use. Your next financial audit will depend on what you do right now.
