We’ve landed in one of those economic cycles where everyone is looking for ways to save money. No matter what role you’re in, you’ve likely already been asked for ways you can reduce spend while maintaining productivity. Well, we’ve got good news for you. Your organization’s SaaS estate is happy hunting grounds for cost savings. 

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Here are five ways Nudge Security can help you identify and reduce wasteful spending.

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1. Identify unused SaaS accounts—at scale.

In most cases, if you want to identify SaaS accounts that are no longer needed and “right-size” your license counts, you’re in for a long and tedious process of seeking out each app owner and asking them to review user lists, last log-ins, ask around to figure out who still needs access, and compile a spreadsheet of which users can be deprovisioned. Anybody want to volunteer for this job? I didn’t think so.

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With Nudge Security, you can automate this process so you can manage it at scale. Our unique approach not only discovers all SaaS apps and accounts ever created for your org, but it gives you the ability to send “nudges” to app users (via email or Slack) asking them if they still need access to their account. Responses are compiled in a list that can be easily shared with app owners to take care of deprovisioning. And, by the way, Nudge Security shows you who the first user of each app was, so you know who to go to if the app is not centrally managed by the IT team.

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Here’s a quick walk-through showing how this works:

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2. Ensure all SaaS accounts are deprovisioned when employees leave the organization or change roles.

Here’s a dirty little secret when it comes to employee offboarding: most employees have signed up for apps outside the purview of IT, or even their department managers. When an employee leaves your organization, there will likely be a long tail of accounts still active—and still costing you money. Sure, you could wade through your expense system to find these, but then you still need to figure out what the app is for, whether it’s still needed, what might break if it’s shut down, etc.

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With Nudge Security, you can see every account ever signed up for by anyone using an email associated with your organization. This includes domain registrations, social media accounts, developer accounts, and other assets that are often overlooked. You can also see if those apps are connected to other apps via OAuth grants, so you can minimize the chance of something breaking. 

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Once again, being able to see who the first user was (and if it was the departing employee) also helps you identify if admin rights need to be reassigned in order to ensure  business continuity.

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See it in action here:

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3. Rein in cloud spending and rogue developer accounts.

Anyone who’s worked with cloud platforms like AWS, Azure, or GCP knows how easy it is for account sprawl to happen. You spin up an account to test something outside of the production environment, get busy with your next project, and forget to go back and shut it down. These costs can add up quickly—see our post about how much rogue AWS accounts could be costing your org.

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With Nudge Security, you can find all rogue, forgotten, and abandoned cloud accounts ever created for your organization, and see what they are costing your business. Plus, you can easily kick off workflows to enroll these accounts into central governance organizations, so you can make efficient use of your cloud credits (and discounts) and apply proper security controls. 

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Here’s what this looks like in our product:

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4. Identify opportunities to consolidate SaaS apps and renegotiate contracts.

According to our data, the average organization uses five different file-sharing applications. We see similar redundancies for virtually every other category of productivity software. Sometimes organizations know a particular app is in use, but have no visibility of how many employees are using it without upgrading to an enterprise plan that might not be cost-effective for them. 

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With Nudge Security, you’ll have a complete inventory of all SaaS applications, with automatic categorization to make it easy to identify apps with overlapping functionality. Once again, visibility into first and privileged users, as well as a list of all users, helps you understand how entrenched the app may be. And once again, you can easily nudge the app users to collect a real-time inventory of who is still actively using it.

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Even better, you can set up alerts so you’ll be notified immediately when new apps are introduced, and you can trigger a nudge to the individual using the app to understand what they plan to use it for, or suggest a similar alternative that is already used by others. It’s a whole lot easier to curb SaaS sprawl from the moment of adoption vs. trying to “put the toothpaste back in the tube” after entire teams have started using a particular app.

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Here’s an example of how this works:

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5. Drive additional value from existing IT investments.

Organizations often invest in essential IT governance technologies like single sign-on (SSO), and then struggle to deploy them widely. Without complete visibility into your organization’s SaaS footprint, it’s impossible to compile a full list of what can and should be onboarded to SSO, or understand your current SSO coverage. 

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With Nudge Security, you can maximize your investment in tools like Okta by tracking SSO status and eligibility across your entire SaaS estate. And, you can use our purpose-built playbook to automate and simplify SSO onboarding activities.

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Here’s how this works:

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Start saving with Nudge Security 

If your organization is looking for ways to reduce costs and ensure full utilization of existing IT investments (who isn’t?), we can almost guarantee that Nudge Security will help you identify many, many examples of low-hanging fruit.

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Curious to see what cost-savings opportunities are out there for your organization? Start a free trial now and find out.