The SaaS revolution started in 1999 when Marc Benioff based Salesforce.com. Salesforce went public in 2004 after attaining $96 million in annual gross sales. Sixteen years later, it was added to the Dow Jones Industrial Common after reporting revenues of $17.1 billion in fiscal 2020. SaaS is not a revolutionary idea. It’s been embraced as a foundational IT constructing block inside firms of all sizes, industries and geographies.
SaaS sprawl is a pure consequence of the SaaS revolution. An analysis of Okta’s 2020 customer database revealed that firms using 2,000 or extra people maintained a listing of 175 SaaS apps on common. A similar survey conducted by Blissfully in 2019 indicated that corporations using greater than 1,000 people used 288 SaaS apps on common. And eventually, two-thirds of the businesses included in Productiv’s 2021 SaaS Management survey employed 100 or extra SaaS apps.
By any measure, SaaS apps have turn into a conspicuous and pervasive part of each firm’s digital panorama.
The numbers quoted above fail to convey the true sprawl created by widespread SaaS adoption. SaaS definitions fluctuate from one firm to the subsequent and should embrace a mix of non-public productiveness instruments, enterprise purposes, knowledge companies, collaboration instruments, safety companies, AI/ML modeling platforms, and many others.
Customers with the best publicity to IT assets must be subjected to the strongest authentication procedures upon preliminary login and moreover be required to reply to step-up or steady authentication requests throughout prolonged work periods.
A number of consumer accounts are established for every SaaS service. Consumer identities should not restricted to full-time workers however will inevitably embrace all kinds of short-term workers, exterior contractors and repair suppliers, and even robots or units. Authorization insurance policies are instituted to manage the actions that customers can carry out inside their accounts on particular IT property. Consequently, the variety of SaaS apps employed inside an enterprise is simply the tip of a much bigger administrative iceberg created by the multiplicative sprawl of consumer identities, accounts and asset-specific insurance policies.
This text reviews the outcomes of a examine carried out earlier this 12 months for instance the a number of dimensions of SaaS sprawl. The information employed on this examine was supplied by Authomize, a safety firm that employs AI know-how to profile relationships between consumer identities, IT property and authorization insurance policies throughout an enterprise. The entire knowledge employed on this examine was supplied and dealt with on an anonymized foundation.
Methodology
The implications of SaaS sprawl had been initially evaluated in over a dozen enterprises. 4 had been in the end chosen for instance the knock-on results of SaaS adoption. The businesses mentioned on this article ranged in measurement from 700 to three,000 paid workers (subsequently known as PEs, which incorporates each full-time and part-time workers on an organization’s payroll).
These firms are based mostly within the U.S. and Europe and had been based 5 to 25 years in the past. They’ve skilled the SaaS revolution firsthand. Though they is probably not purely cloud native corporations, SaaS companies play a dominant function in supporting their every day enterprise operations. These firms function in 4 distinctively completely different industries: oil and fuel, edtech, monetary companies and enterprise software program. All through the rest of this text these 4 corporations will probably be known as “the examine firms.”
The knock-on results of SaaS sprawl
SaaS sprawl is often conceived to be a reference to the variety of cloud-based SaaS companies being employed by an enterprise. In actuality, it’s a a lot broader phenomenon.
Service sprawl
The variety of distinctive SaaS companies being accessed by the id supplier (IdP) databases inside the examine firms ranged from 310 to 994. That is considerably larger than the SaaS counts reported within the research cited above and certain contains cloud-based companies that might not be strictly categorized as enterprise purposes. This examine was based mostly on the broadest potential definition of SaaS companies, excluding solely IaaS distributors.
The ratio of distinctive SaaS companies to workers ranged from 1:1 within the smallest (700 PE) firm to 1:3 within the largest (3,000 PE) firm. Nonetheless, these ratios weren’t correlated with firm measurement. The two,500 PE agency included on this examine had a 1:8 ratio of companies to workers.
