2017 and Beyond: How Digital Innovation Will Impact the World
Most software-as-a-service (Saas) applications get subscribed to first by a line of business manager who, before too long, winds up dumping the management of that application back on the internal IT department. That internal IT organization can then find itself managing hundreds of SaaS applications that each have their own management consoles.
To make it simpler to adjust to that new SaaS application reality, BetterCloud has unfurled a namesake management platform that is itself delivered as a SaaS application. Initially, BetterCloud supports G Suite, Slack, Zendesk and Dropbox cloud services. In 2017, BetterCloud CEO David Politis says, additional support will be provided for a dozen more applications, including Salesforce.com.
Politis says that the company’s own research suggests that IT organizations on average will be invoking 52 different SaaS applications. The BetterCloud platform provides a means to manage SaaS applications without requiring IT organizations to set up dedicated IT infrastructure.
“Our goal is to surface the operational intelligence the IT organization needs,” says Politis.
Each SaaS application typically exposes an open application programming interface (API). But exposing an API is one thing; finding a way to consume that data available via an API is another. BetterCloud, says Politis, provides that mechanism for IT organizations to discover user assets, files and privileges associated with multiple SaaS applications. That approach eliminates the need to deploy and master multiple SaaS application consoles to manage SaaS applications or audit usage, says Politis.
Politis says BetterCloud also includes an automation engine that IT organizations can employ to simplify the management of processes spanning multiple SaaS applications.
The amount of pain that IT organizations are experiencing when it comes to managing SaaS applications varies widely. But whatever the approach, the one thing that most IT organizations have in common is that the management of those SaaS applications is nowhere near as efficient as it could be.
