60% of IT Leaders Don’t Know Which Apps They Have: Torii SaaS report

SaaS Management

60% of IT Leaders Don’t Know Which Apps They Have: Torii SaaS report

25 October 2022

5 minute read

According to a new SaaS report from Torii which looks into the levels of collaboration between IT teams and the wider business, 60% of IT professionals are in the dark when it comes to understanding their cloud app ecosystem. Likewise, only a small fraction collaborate with other key teams on controlling costs, securing data, and responding to changing business conditions. It also finds tremendous dissonance between how well IT thinks they’re working with other teams to manage distributed SaaS, and how poorly they actually are.

Anarchy in the enterprise

The Torii SaaS report found that the decentralized nature of SaaS procurement makes it more difficult to:

collaborate with different departments (62%)
identify which apps are used (60%)
manage spending and contract renewals (50%)
revoke access privileges for former employees (32%)

Lack of collaboration

Collaboration is miles away from where people think it is – 90% of IT professionals believe their collaboration with other departments is “Good” or “Excellent,” – however, when pressed for details, the levels of collaboration with specific departments is much further from the mark. For example, only 11% of IT teams collaborate with Finance and Procurement “often.” What’s more, only 4% reported that they collaborate with finance and/or procurement on the four specific tasks that Torii cited as being necessary for managing SaaS investments effectively. The four tasks being:

Identifying underutilized apps
Finding wasted licenses
Identifying overlapping or redundant apps
Surfacing important app data for contract negotiations

Procurement and Finance are underutilized IT resources

Only 14% of IT leaders reported working frequently with finance and procurement teams. But ongoing collaboration and data sharing is essential for minimizing costs, eliminating under-utilized licenses, and surfacing the app usage and cost data needed for continuous spend management and successful contract negotiations.

Businesses aren’t being proactive enough against Shadow IT

Only 20% of respondents work with Security and/or Compliance often enough to help them discover and de-risk unknown applications. Without a complete view of their entire SaaS stack and users, businesses can’t secure sensitive data, ensure authorized access, or meet compliance requirements.

“SaaS is the ultimate team sport. Everyone from IT, procurement, and lines of business, to finance and security plays an important role in acquiring and managing cloud apps. But in many businesses, the team is dysfunctional. People operate in silos with limited information, no single source of truth, and woefully inadequate collaboration. The only possible outcomes from this are wasted money on apps and licenses, wasted time, and loss of agility. In today’s distributed, cloud-powered workplaces, businesses can’t afford substandard SaaS management. As Torii’s State of SaaS at Work report makes clear, a new approach to distributed SaaS management rooted in collaboration, transparency and empowerment is urgently needed.”
Uri Haramati, Torii CEO

Analysis from the ITAM Review

“This SaaS report from Torii highlights how governance has been slow to adapt to modern decentralized technology consumption and procurement. It isn’t just an ITAM problem but goes across all governance domains including IT Operations, Service Management, and Security. What ITAM Review finds is a great deal of overlap between tools and processes, caused by teams working in isolation. The key is to take a step back from wanting to own your piece of the pie (in this case SaaS) and recognize that a collaborative approach is the only approach which will work. SaaS Management professionals can provide data-driven insights to technology governance stakeholders and likewise can improve their governance by receiving insights from teams outside of IT such as Finance and Procurement. By working together we build certainty in our understanding of our technology estates and that certainty means we can make the right decisions at the right time.”
AJ Witt, SaaS Management analyst at ITAM Review

Download the full report, titled “State SaaS at Work: Collaboration in a Distributed Workplace” here.

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60% of IT Leaders Don’t Know Which Apps They Have: Torii SaaS report