Introduction
This article is not only about getting Google to develop a SaaS Management Platform, but also helps you to understand how such platforms work, what problems in organizations they solve and how in combination with a SaaS Center of Excellence (SCoE) helps organizations to make SaaS much more manageable.
What is a SaaS Management Solution (SMP)
SaaS Management Platforms (SMPs) are software platforms that help organizations manage their SaaS applications. SMPs provide a centralized repository of information about SaaS applications, including licensed usage, costs, and security settings. This information can be used for optimization of SaaS usage, cost reduction, and security enhancement.
SMPs offer a wide variety of features that can help organizations manage their SaaS applications in a more efficient manner. These features include
- Discovery: SMPs can automatically discover all SaaS applications in use within an organization. This can help identify unused or underutilized applications.
- Usage tracking: SMPs can track license usage and costs for all SaaS applications in use. This information can be used to optimize application usage and reduce costs.
- Cost management: SMPs can help organizations negotiate better renewal terms for their SaaS applications. They can also help identify and eliminate shadow IT costs.
- Security: SMPs can help organizations improve the security of their SaaS applications. They can do this by providing features such as single sign-on, data encryption and access control.
- Compliance: SMPs can help organizations comply with regulations such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). They can do this by providing features such as audit trails and data loss prevention.
SMPs can be a valuable tool for organizations using SaaS applications. They can help organizations save money, improve security, and comply with regulations.
Strong market opportunity
According to a recent study by Statista in 2023, the software as a service (SaaS) market is estimated to be worth approximately 197 billion U.S. dollars and estimated to reach 232 billion U.S. dollars by 2024. With the growth of SaaS the market for SaaS management solutions (SMP) is growing in the same manner year over year. This growth has been additionally fueled, in part, by the pandemic, which has led to a greater reliance on cloud-based tools as businesses have had to adapt to remote work. The strong funding received by companies in this space, such as BetterCloud ($ 187M ), Vendr ($ 216M), and LeanIX ($ 120M), is a testament to the demand for these solutions.
This market could be a chance for Google to compensate for their dwindling search revenues. And Google would also be able to handle this new development with its strong financial background.
Where to get the data?
As we have learned, a SaaS management platform has three main purposes that require data to achieve those.
- Finding which SaaS application is being used inside your organization
- How often and by how many users is the SaaS application used
- Is the SaaS application safe and does it comply with my local laws/regulations?
In this part I explain where to technical extract this data from.
SaaS Fingerprints – Which SaaS application is being used
There are two proven methods to get this data. The first method is to extract and process all surf data on the edge of the organization, which are normally protected by Cloud Access Security Brokers (CASB) like ZScaler. The second method is to install a plugin on the organizations browsers and extract, process or preprocess all surf data directly from the client. This surfing data must then be matched against a SaaS fingerprint database to determine which URLs contain real SaaS usage. The database must be able to clearly distinguish whether only the homepage was visited or whether the SaaS application was actually used. (e.g. app.docusign.com vs docusign.com). This recognition process is most often supported by AI pattern recognition. Nevertheless, it is often a painstakingly manual work to fill this fingerprint database.
SaaS Usage – How often and by how many users is the SaaS application being used
In this case there also exist two proven methods to get this data. Either the SaaS Management Platform (SMP) creates a SaaS application specific plugin that uses the SaaS applications API to extract usage data or the SaaS application is connected to the organizations Federated Authentications service, such as Okta, and usage data could be extracted via the API of the Federated Authentication service.
Risk/Compliance data – Is the SaaS application safe and does it comply with my local laws/regulations
This data is the most difficult to capture. A risk and compliance assessment from a SaaS application for e.g. ISO27001 compliance can currently only be reliably extracted from internet data through manual work by specialized teams (e.g. Netskope Cloud Confidence Index https://www.netskope.com/platform/third-party-risk). There is yet no automated way available and different regulations of different countries make this task even more challenging.
In the next parts of this article, I will try to explain why Google is the perfect candidate to overcome all the obstacles just mentioned with technology that they already have.
Why Google? The Chrome Browser + Chromium
As mentioned before the door to tap into any SaaS application is the browser. This is where Google technology play a crucial part. As the most widely used browser in the world, Chrome (and its open-source counterpart, Chromium) has a massive market share of over 63% according to StatCounter and is used by nearly every big organization. Since January 15, 2020, Microsoft’s Edge browser, which is trusted by almost all companies, is Chromium-based as well. A simple browser plugin for Chrome/Chromium could send surf data to the Google SaaS Management Platform for fingerprint analysis. The technology already built into Chrome would also allow organizations to set plugin rules and policies for data collection and privacy.
The first step towards a Google SaaS management platform would be done herewith.
Why Google? Fingerprints + Risk and Compliance Data
When it comes to SaaS URLs, who knows the web better than the Google search engine? As the world’s leading search engine, Google already has the most comprehensive URL database in the world, far exceeding any potential competitors. This expansive database could act as a robust fingerprint catalogue for detecting even the smallest or most unknown SaaS application.
When it comes to risk and compliance data, Google’s technological prowess comes to the fore once again. As one of the leading AI companies, Google has developed advanced machine learning models and algorithms that can be adept at extracting pertinent information from websites. These could be leveraged to automatically and accurately assess the safety and compliance of different SaaS applications.
In my opinion, Google would be the only company that would be able to provide this portion of the data in an automated way, according to the regulations of the country where the SaaS applications are used, and it would be the company with the highest detection rate.
Why Google? Technology to enrich a SaaS Management software
Google’s technologies cover all essential aspects of a SaaS Management Platform (SMP). In addition, Google offers a great user experience with highly available SaaS applications in all of its products and could easily adapt this experience for a newly developed SaaS Management Platform (SMP).
By leveraging Google Cloud (GCP) PaaS services, Google would even be able to enrich the SaaS management platform with integrated processes that help companies and their SaaS Centers of Excellence (SCoE) with processes around the SaaS lifecycle like:
- Cenrally storing contract data to every SaaS application and implementing approval flows inside the company
- Helping with automation on SaaS contract renewal management
- Help with changing legal bases for SaaS applications in use, e.g. in the event of amended contracts, amended user agreements or amended terms of use
- Automations that make it possible to create a SaaS governance process with approval steps
Finally, Google Cloud Predictions AI part of GCP as well could add another layer of intelligence to the SMP. This tool could analyze usage and behavior data to create actionable insights for companies. It could identify potential areas of underspend or overspend on SaaS applications and provide recommendations to optimize usage and expenditure.
Conclusion
In conclusion, Google’s extensive technological capabilities, comprehensive URL database, AI prowess, and user-centric design philosophy position it as a powerful contender to develop a revolutionary SaaS Management Platform (SMP). By harnessing its resources and expertise, Google could create an SMP that offers enhanced efficiency, improved security, actionable insights, and automated processes, thereby setting new standards in this growing SMP market.
What do you think?
Google employees, product owners, executives, scouts, if you’re reading this, get in touch with me to make this a reality.
If this does not come true. Is there still help?
Even if Google does not venture into the SaaS Management Platform market, rest assured, we are here to assist you in implementing any other existing SaaS Management Platform on the market to your company. In addition to this we help you build a SaaS Center of Excellence (SCoE) to get your SaaS enterprise-ready. Just visit us under:
torben.cloud 