Is it time to tidy up your SaaS subscriptions?

Summer has finally arrived here in the northern hemisphere and while you may be thinking of summer holidays and getaways to far flung places, the review season is truly underway.

So, if we could divert your attention from sandy beaches and palm trees for a short while, imagine the kudos and relief of knowing at least one of your Oracle environments is nicely wrapped up in this busy season? Because Inoapps and the licensing team would like to suggest a review  of the smorgasbord that is Software as a Service (SaaS).

What’s it all about?

There is a common misconception that SaaS cannot be under or oversubscribed because it is cloud-based. This is simply not true.

You can consume more of the service than you subscribe to in SaaS much as you can in the on-premises alternatives. Meaning you must either buy more to match consumption, or reduce how much you use it. Equally you can just as easily subscribe to large amounts of a service and only use a fraction of it—meaning you’re paying for a license subscription you possibly don’t need.

A SaaS review creates visibility of these scenarios and is really simple to start.

All you need is two pieces of information:

1. A drill-through report from your SaaS environment
2. Your subscription data

The benefits far outweigh the effort of getting that together, because after that we do all the hard work of analysis and explanations. We also give you step-by-step suggestions on what, if anything, you need to do to ensure the SaaS estate is within its subscription grant.

What do we look at?

Like most SaaS customers, you probably have many roles in your environment. Some have been customized from pre-defined out-of-the-box roles that Oracle supply as default.  This easily leads to confusion, duplication and—sometimes—adding privileges that incur unplanned usage.

Our review identifies:

• Pre-defined roles
• Custom roles
• Role duplications
• Roles consuming privileges you haven’t subscribed to
• Where you have more users than purchased licenses

This is followed by step-by-step actions to improve your subscription usage or remediate if needed.

We also give you a holistic view of all of your SaaS products, so you can manipulate data and see what each user has access to and where specific roles are allocated.

How does it help?

• Business intelligence. The review process naturally extracts insights into your business processes, like where groups of users are given access to a role through internal mechanisms, or how you manage role transitions. This allows you to pinpoint potential issues in your procedures and processes.
• Segregation of duties/Security. This is important for both subscriptions and to ensure appropriateness of task vs role among multiple employees or departments. Increased visibility greatly reduces your security risks and misappropriation of business-critical data.
• Subscription management. When you know what your estate looks like, you can see where you have over or under consumption and respond accordingly. You may have more subscriptions in hand than you thought, or you may create a way to flexibly manage future spend.
• Housekeeping. Identifying role duplications allows you to remove them, categorize required primary roles, and prevent a recurrence of duplicates. Future management of roles then becomes transparent and efficient.
• Unexpected usage. This is a term Oracle uses to make you aware of usage of services you have not subscribed to. Our SaaS review finds those, identifies the roles using them, and helps you understand how to remediate or defend.

Conclusion

SaaS is fast becoming the area we are most asked about. SaaS is a rapidly growing platform with many available services and it can sometimes feel a little daunting when viewed via drill-through reports.

This Inoapps service is here to take away that resource intensive data analysis and provide clarity and guidance.

Ready to tidy up SaaS subscriptions? Find out about our offer here!

Have a look, and if you’d like to go ahead and tidy up your SaaS environment, our next steps is to sign an NDA to protect mutual confidentiality. Then send us your drill-through report and provide some information on your SaaS subscriptions…and that’s it, let us do the rest.