Enterprise adoption of SaaS applications
There is very little doubt that enterprise adoption of SaaS applications is growing at an accelerating pace. There’s already a long line of legacy applications that are looking to transform themselves into cloud-native avatars. Business leaders everywhere swear by the economy, scalability, accessibility, and flexibility they get by turning to SaaS applications. To add to that, users get access to the latest updates and feature upgrades instantly with the rest of the application-using world. In many cases, these applications also prove to be easier to use, with more intuitive interfaces and UIs. That doesn’t mean that CIOs are universally in love with the new SaaS world though.
In many cases where we help enterprises manage their IT ecosystem, CIOs have expressed real concerns about the growing influence of SaaS applications in their setups. One of the biggest challenges for them is how business leaders make independent decisions to jump aboard function-specific SaaS applications leading to the emergence of what is now called “Shadow IT”. This parallel IT ecosystem is out of the control (and sometimes, even out of view) of the enterprise IT team. This has obvious shortcomings beyond just the loss of control. These systems could well be incompatible with other enterprise systems. They could introduce security risks into controlled environments. They also drive up costs and make everything from data storage to cloud management messier and more prone to cost overruns and errors. This also has real implications on compliance, transparency and reporting, and standards and certification processes.
That’s why in many cases, conducting a thorough audit of the enterprise IT landscape to identify, isolate, and control SaaS applications is often the first step of our application lifecycle management engagements. SaaS applications are extremely powerful tools but they need to be used responsibly and that starts with a thorough and complete understanding of what these applications are and how they are being used.