New Enhancements Bolster Cost Optimization and SaaS Security
PALO ALTO, Calif., Sept. 5, 2024 /PRNewswire/ -- Josys, the SaaS Management platform that simplifies how IT works, today announced a robust set of new features designed to eliminate wasteful SaaS spending, improve governance of unsanctioned application usage, and enforce policy-based privileged access management to strengthen SaaS security posture.
The License Optimization Dashboard provides valuable insights into total licenses, plan types, assigned and unassigned licenses, underutilized licenses, and shadow accounts, helping IT teams surface SaaS waste and cost optimization opportunities.
The Discovered Applications Dashboard surfaces shadow IT. Leveraging its integration with Netskope, Josys provides an assessment of each discovered app's risk level and compliance certificates, allowing IT teams to quickly move from risk identification to remediation.
Josys tracks each app's users, licenses, and defined roles, with a special focus on privileged access roles. This gives IT the ability to audit and modify roles directly within Josys, without needing to access the native application, saving IT admins time as they keep their organization and its data secure.
To highlight the importance of practicing SaaS Management, Josys performed a robust license analysis of its 500 global customers, uncovering that 25% of total SaaS spend is wasted on underutilized, unassigned, and shadow licenses. Notably, some of the worst offenders are the most widely used apps across the industry. On average, organizations fail to use 35% of their Zoom licenses and leave 25% of their Salesforce licenses unassigned. This is just the tip of the iceberg for most organizations that typically deploy 30-50 SaaS applications. This analysis confirms that most organizations have substantial license waste and significant opportunities for cost savings.
Empowering IT teams to easily identify SaaS waste, Josys has expanded and enhanced the number of applications it supports. For apps like Slack, Box, Miro, and more, IT admins, along with procurement and finance teams, can view key data in one dashboard—covering total licenses, plan types, assigned and unassigned licenses, underutilized licenses, and shadow accounts. Without leaving the Josys console, IT admins can now downgrade users to lower-tier plans when their current licenses are underutilized, such as moving from a paid to a free plan. Additionally, Josys has refined its app categorization system, organizing SaaS apps into 42 categories. This new framework simplifies the process of identifying redundant applications, helping organizations reduce overlap across their SaaS stack.
Beyond managing runaway SaaS costs that are impacting organizations' bottom lines, it is imperative that IT and security leaders also gain a better grasp of SaaS sprawl security blindspots. In the 2024 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for SaaS Management Platforms, Gartner predicts that "through 2027, organizations that fail to centrally manage SaaS life cycles will remain five times more susceptible to a cyber incident or data loss due to incomplete visibility into SaaS usage and configuration."1
To boost overall visibility across an organization's SaaS landscape, Josys offers a variety of techniques to track SaaS utilization. One approach is the Josys Browser Extension, which offers IT admins a seamless approach to track which business applications employees are accessing from their Chromium browsers. Josys has recently launched remote activation for the Extension, which allows IT admins to use their existing MDM or RMM solutions or their Google Workspace Admin console for streamlined deployment without requiring intervention from end users.
Whether apps are discovered via browser, sign-in activity, or access logs, Josys has engaged with Netskope to instantly assign every app a corresponding risk level and compliance standing to help IT admins spotlight risky apps and prioritize them for deeper investigation. Josys leverages the Netskope Cloud Confidence Index (CCI)™ to provide a reliable assessment of app risk levels based on industry-leading standards. The Netskope CCI measures an app's enterprise-readiness, taking into account the app's security, audit-ability, and business continuity. Currently, Josys has risk and compliance scoring for over 14,500 apps to help IT and security teams quickly move from identification to remediation. Josys has also added a new Status Categories to help IT teams streamline their app vetting workflow. Options include unclassified, under review, approved, and unapproved, making it easier to turn shadow IT into known, governable assets.
When managing the security of an organization's most used SaaS apps, it's critical to actively monitor application access and develop a comprehensive view of privileged access users. To help streamline this audit, Josys has created a simple method for surfacing each user's defined role per app, with a special focus on privileged roles. IT admins can quickly identify misconfigurations and modify roles directly within Josys, without needing to access the native application. This approach for privileged access reviews, saves IT admins considerable time as they try and keep the organization and its data safe.
"The sheer volume of hidden SaaS waste in the IT world is mind-blowing," said Josys CTO and Co-Founder Sanjay Rajasekhar. "Now that we are able to visualize the problem areas so clearly, there is no turning back. With advanced analytics and automation, our rapidly evolving platform is going to make it increasingly easier for IT leaders to sustainably control costs and eliminate the risks associated with SaaS sprawl."
All of the features mentioned above are generally available today. If you are interested in learning more about these capabilities and starting your own 30-day Josys trial, please contact us here.
1 Gartner, Magic Quadrant for SaaS Management Platforms, By Tom Cipolla, Yolanda Harris, Jaswant Kalay, Dan Wilson, Ron Blair, Lina Al Dana, 22 July 2024. GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark and MAGIC QUADRANT is a trademark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and is used herein with permission. All rights reserved.
About Josys Josys is the SaaS Management Platform that simplifies how IT works. Our holistic approach equips IT teams with 360-degree control over their SaaS applications by making it easier to visualize user access, analyze utilization trends, and automate provisioning processes that will make IT operations run more efficiently. Learn more at: https://josys.com/.
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