Auvik Networks Inc., a well-funded provider of cloud-based network management software, said today it’s lending its expertise to help companies deal with an increasingly troublesome problem known as software-as-a-service sprawl.

The company announced a new service called Auvik SaaS Management, which provides organizations with much greater visibility into their use of SaaS products and helps to improve governance and reduce wasted spending.

Auvik, which raised $250 million in funding in July 2021, made its name in cloud network management, offering software that helps enterprises keep their technology networks running smoothly. It automates network management to increase the efficiency and capacity of customers’ networks and reduce costs. Now, it’s applying the same expertise to SaaS.

The company explained that SaaS sprawl has become quite a problem as companies increase their reliance on subscription-based software. The problem is that SaaS tools generally aren’t deployed by centralized information technology teams, but instead sourced independently by various business teams. Their use of these products many times goes unreported, creating “shadow IT” that becomes difficult to manage, introducing risks around compliance and resulting in wasted spending on unnecessary licenses.

Making matters worse, most companies rely on simple Excel spreadsheets to manage their SaaS deployments and calculate costs, according to a December 2022 study by Gartner Inc.

“SaaS spend continues to grow by 15-20% annually, as organizations maintain an average of over 125 different SaaS applications totaling $1,040 per employee annually,” Gartner’s report noted. “25% of that software is typically underutilized or over-deployed, creating an environment where shadow IT accounts for 40% of IT expenditures. A 100-person company may be spending over one hundred thousand dollars in SaaS expenses, forty thousand of which could be shadow IT and twenty-five thousand of it may be potential waste.”

Auvik has been plotting to address these problems for some time. Last year, it acquired a SaaS discovery software provider called Saaslio LLC and has spent several months working to align that company’s capabilities with its own network monitoring and management expertise.

Chief Executive Doug Murray said the company’s core competency puts it in an ideal position to understand the challenges faced by companies as they transition to hybrid work. “Many of the same organizations grappling with network monitoring and management are coping with shadow IT, making SaaS management a natural extension of Auvik’s product suite as we evolve from a single product company to a platform approach,” he said.

Auvik SaaS Management is designed to help IT departments get a grip on their organization’s use of SaaS products. Companies can quickly discover all of the SaaS apps used within their organization across multiple business departments, the firm said. It also provides tools for managing and securing those apps, and eliminating unnecessary subscriptions.

SaaS Management uses Saaslio’s discovery tools to build an inventory of each client’s SaaS apps, in order to understand who is using what product and how many licenses the company is paying for. This increased visibility can help to reduce wasted IT spending.

On the security side, SaaS Management provides centralized governance tools and reporting of critical events, enabling teams to identify and fix vulnerabilities and other cyber risks associated with their use of SaaS. In terms of management, it provides detailed insights into application, client, employee and account lifecycles across every SaaS app.

Available now, SaaS Management is, perhaps ironically, a SaaS app itself, licensed per user on a monthly basis, the company said.

Images: Auvik