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3 common SaaS problems businesses face — and how to solve them

For scaling businesses, Software as a Service (SaaS) solutions are the gift that keeps on giving. In recent years, the average company has incorporated over 100 applications into its tech stack to streamline business operations. Nowadays, anything from sales to recruitment is optimised by a dedicated piece of software.

But with the rapid rate of SaaS proliferation, companies are running into various obstacles that are hindering their growth, whether they realise it or not. Today, we’ll look at three of the most common SaaS challenges that you could face in your business and how to overcome them.

1. SaaS duplication

When an organisation takes on several different SaaS tools that perform the same function, it’s known as SaaS duplication. This typically occurs when purchasing power is provided to multiple parties within the company, leading to several tools being procured for the same purpose. One common case is in cloud storage, for example, if subscriptions are purchased to both OneDrive and Dropbox. SaaS duplication can cause many problems for businesses, including fragmented workflows and reduced overall productivity.

However, duplication can be avoided by gaining visibility on your entire SaaS stack and keeping records of the contracts that are taken on or terminated. Software purchasing platform Vertice explains that to gain visibility and reduce duplication, procurement teams should be tracking the following metrics:

• All of the software applications being subscribed to within your organisation
• The number of licences being paid for
• The price per licence
• The purpose of each application
• When these contracts are up for renewal
• The notice period for terminating each contract
• The annual cost
• The billing frequency
• Any other important contract terms

2. Data protection

Reputable vendors will have recovery plans and backup options in place to ensure the safety of your data. However, if you’re working with a wide range of suppliers when procuring tools, there’s a chance that your data may not be secure on their platform. Unexpected incidents, data security breaches or other circumstances can harm your sensitive data and leave you liable for the loss or leaking of data. In turn, these situations could open your business up to loss of income or legal costs.

To cover your business in these eventualities, the company software owner should make sure that they have a contingency plan in place for recovery and backup, and that a service-level agreement (SLA) has been signed with any third-party vendor. Software experts at ProProfs explain that an SLA is “a formal contract that dictates a set of deliverables that the service provider has agreed to provide to an end-user”.

Even if the vendor is well-regarded, it’s best to have a comprehensive agreement that states the services, maintenance and data protection that you can expect, so that there are no grey areas concerning the vendor’s duty to your business. Hopefully, you’ll never have to use it — but an SLA is one piece of documentation that you should understand and feel comfortable referring to in the event of a mishap.

3. Wasted spend

With so many SaaS tools in use across the average organisation, it’s not uncommon for certain applications or contracts to fall by the wayside. If a tool is going under-utilised, it can be easy to forget that a subscription is still there, draining resources, IT budgets, and providing little return on investment.

In fact, research from Flexera reports that nearly a third of SaaS spending is going under-utilised or wasted. And this doesn’t necessarily mean that the app is going completely unused, but instead, you might have signed on for a deal that is seeing just a fraction of the utilisation that you’re paying for.

To counter this, you should have a policy in place for procurement teams to regularly review company SaaS usage and contract terms. This way, you’ll be better equipped as an organisation to spot when apps have become under-utilised or entirely redundant, and rightsize your software portfolio accordingly. This could mean re-negotiating contract terms to better suit company needs, for example by reducing your allotted bandwidth or number of seats, or terminating the subscription altogether.