This post was originally published on July 26, 2024 and was updated on September 24, 2024 with the release of new SaaS spend discovery capabilities. ‍

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As organizations continue to transition from the pandemic-era strategy of "growth at all costs" to a more balanced approach focused on "efficient growth," many are looking for opportunities to streamline and consolidate their SaaS estates in the effort to reduce spend, minimize risk, and drive greater operational efficiency.

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But, the key question is: How can you reduce your SaaS attack surface (and spend) without impacting productivity? Our new SaaS spend discovery capabilities, SaaS spend data, and dashboard with optimization insights make it easy to surface and assess opportunities for cost savings while considering security and usage insights, all in one place.

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With this data, IT and security teams can drive smarter, more efficient SaaS investment decisions while minimizing risk and maximizing productivity.

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Discover the cost of SaaS sprawl.

Can you recall every online service you've ever registered for? (Editor's note: Just keeping track of my active streaming subscriptions is a struggle.) Across entire organizations, the scope of SaaS sprawl can be enormous—Nudge Security has discovered over 50,000 unique SaaS apps in our customers' environments.

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As you can imagine, SaaS sprawl makes it challenging to get a handle on how much your organization is actually spending on SaaS. Even within finance and procurement software, SaaS subscription costs often aren't associated with specific apps, and credit card expenses can easily slip through the cracks, making it difficult to get a complete picture of SaaS spend.

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Nudge Security shows you the true cost of SaaS sprawl by discovering SaaS spend on Day One, without relying on financial software or tracking down answers from other departments. With a single integration to either Google Workspace or Microsoft 365, Nudge Security discovers your entire SaaS estate and analyzes invoices within your mailboxes to extract spend data such as invoice amounts, renewal dates, billing frequency, billing owners, cost centers, and more.

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Uncover wasted SaaS spend.

According to Gartner, a staggering 25% of all SaaS subscriptions are either underutilized or excessively deployed, resulting in significant opportunities for cost reduction. The tricky part is finding those opportunities for savings, which can take some serious digging that most IT and security teams don't have time for.

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Good news: we've done your homework for you.

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Nudge Security's new dashboard surfaces inactive and abandoned accounts associated with paid apps so you can reclaim costly licenses and redistribute them, or right-size your contract. There’s even an automated playbook to help you orchestrate account removals by enlisting app owners across the business in the clean up so you can scale SaaS governance efforts without drowning in manual tasks.

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And, Nudge Security will also show you a list of paid apps with just one single user that may have slipped under the radar in credit card statements so you can prioritize what are likely quick wins for reducing your SaaS footprint.

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Identify overlapping and redundant apps.

It’s one thing to know that your organization uses three different project management suites, but before you can reduce SaaS sprawl by trimming apps or licenses, you need to understand who is using which platform and for what purpose.

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Nudge Security makes this easy. For each app used in your organization, you can see a Venn diagram illustrating user overlap across similar apps, and you can click into the diagram to see the list of overlapping users across each combination of apps. The bigger the circle, the more accounts exist for that application. With this info, you can better understand which tools are heavily used and likely essential to productivity, and which would be candidates to be phased out.

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Manage SaaS costs proactively.

The new Spend dashboard shows you apps with upcoming renewal dates alongside up-to-date app usage information so you can plan accordingly for apps that can be phased out, or those where you can take advantage of volume discounts.

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Nudge Security also surfaces paid accounts associated with unapproved apps and can alert you as soon as they are created, so you can intervene as necessary to redirect the user to an approved alternative or ask for justification of use (via nudges, of course).

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And, Nudge Security helps you catch rogue AWS spend by flagging spend associated with AWS accounts that fall outside of your central AWS organization.

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Forecast SaaS spend.

Does your budget account for changes in SaaS adoption? App costs can vary over time based on factors like company growth or adoption across more departments than originally planned.

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Nudge Security helps you forecast SaaS expenses more accurately by enabling you to compare historical, budgeted, and forecasted spend to understand changes in app usage. For each app, Nudge Security also calculates the average cost per user to help you understand the impact of deployment and renewal decisions.

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Compare SaaS spend data.

Because Nudge Security discovers spend data for each app, you can gain an understanding of the relative cost of similar options and look for opportunities to reduce SaaS spend. While finance or procurement systems may have SaaS spend data, they lack the context on usage and security. Nudge Security brings together usage, spend and security data all in one place so you can assess and prioritize consolidation opportunities more easily.

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A scalable approach to SaaS governance

Reining in SaaS sprawl is no small feat without the right tool to bring usage, risk, and spend data together along with insights to help you surface and prioritize your consolidation efforts. Nudge Security’s SaaS spend data and cost optimization insights accelerate and automate this process, helping security and IT scale SaaS security and governance without getting in the way of productivity.

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Start a free 14-day trial today.