Why you need an all-in-one-SaaS management platform that does it all
Understanding why IT needs an all-in-one SaaS management platform stems from rapid SaaS adoption – mostly in the shadows — and the new IT challenges it created.
How’d we get here?
While SaaS adoption was rising prior to 2020, sudden remote-work mandates drove hockey stick growth. With no time to spare, without a strategy or plan, users added another SaaS app.
Over time, the growing number of apps and invoices led to an uncontrollable, insecure, and expensive SaaS stack—mirrored in IT by a flood of point solutions, each adding complexity rather than control.
Now into the last half of the decade, improved security, along with greater cost and IT efficiency are new imperatives. Even analysts agree.
According to the 2025 Gartner® Magic Quadrant
for SaaS Management Platforms (SMP) Report, organizations without centralized SaaS lifecycle management with a platform like BetterCloud:
- Are 5x more likely to suffer from data loss or other security incidents
- Will have a minimum of 25% of wasteful SaaS spending
An all-in-one SaaS management platform that manages users across the whole lifecycle, replaces multiple IT tools to become the workhorse of your IT department. With centralized SaaS visibility, automation, spend management, and security in one platform, an SMP’s value scales over time as you leverage and extend more of its capabilities.
However, if you don’t know what a fully featured SaaS management platform should truly be capable of, you can easily end up with a cobbled-together web of point solutions.
To learn what you need to know to make an optimal SaaS management platform decision for your IT department, let’s walk through the following:
What should an all-in-one SaaS management platform do?
To fully explain why every organization needs an all-in-one SaaS management platform, let’s quickly review the Gartner definition of an SMP and its core capabilities.
In their recent August 2025 Magic Quadrant for SaaS Management Platforms report, they define SMPs as stand-alone tools with a central admin dashboard that helps organizations manage the entire lifecycle of all their SaaS applications.
Delivered as a turnkey service within a single pane of glass, essential SMPs capabilities allow organizations to discover, optimize, automate, manage, and secure their SaaS environments. While IT tends to use them for security and operational issues, finance and accounting use them to optimize SaaS spending.
The graphic below shows all the functionality that a fully featured, all-in-one SMP like BetterCloud provides.
1. SaaS discovery and spend optimization
An SMP should serve as a single, centralized repository that pulls in data from various sources for full visibility of your IT environment, including all apps, licenses, users, vendors, and contracts.
Find and track all SaaS apps without requiring browser extensions
It should have robust discovery to surface and monitor all apps employees log into—even unauthorized apps, and any consumer or freemium apps that authenticate to your domain. This includes any native-AI apps, like ChatGPT, as well.
A tool can also use browser extensions, but agentless app discovery is superior because it has none of the browser extension disadvantages. Extensions introduce risks that can be difficult to manage and slow browser performance.
Finally, it’s nearly impossible to get 100% extension deployment across all of today’s common browsers for all your employees on all devices all the time. And unless you have 100% compliance, you’re still at risk for Shadow IT, runaway costs, and unknown SaaS risk.
Monitor SaaS usage by user and department
You should also be able to see the way each app is being accessed, such as OAuth or via SSO. The insights provided by an SMP should enable IT leaders to optimize their SaaS purchasing decisions.
Uncover SaaS spending waste for savings
Finally, your SMP should highlight opportunities to right-size SaaS apps, licenses, and usages to reduce wasted SaaS spending. This includes redundant applications and accounts, and reallocating unused or underutilized licenses.
2. Automating user management
From centrally managing all your SaaS apps without having to log in to each separately, to implementing role-based controls, an SMP should be a “one-stop shop” for all activities related to managing the SaaS user lifecycle. This includes critical and laborious tasks like employee onboarding, offboarding, internal job changes, and even contractor access and offboarding.
An SMP should include powerful automation and orchestration capabilities
To save time and reduce errors, an SMP’s automation and orchestration capabilities are crucial. Any member of your IT team should be able to use an SMP’s no-code builder to orchestrate workflows. templates, large libraries of triggers, actions, and integrations to develop and manage automations.
Your SMP should automate user lifecycle management and service desk ticket resolutions
The SMP you choose should also be able to automate simple help desk ticket resolutions, and do so completely without any manual intervention from IT. Using zero-touch automation, you can grant group, drive, and calendar access, and even grant temporary app license access, as well as license reclamation.
3. Protecting data with file security and governance
From insider threats to data loss prevention, an SMP should help you monitor for unusual user activity and login issues, as well as secure your IT environment in multiple ways.
Using data files pulled in from connected apps, the SMP scans and locates sensitive or proprietary data
Once identified, it gives you valuable insight into the app where it’s located and who owns the file.
An SMP should also send you accurate, real-time security alerts
You should get alerts when files are shared with outsiders (such as competitors) and other improper file sharing. An SMP should alert you when too many administrative-level accounts have been created. It should be able to detect SaaS misconfigurations and when unauthorized SaaS apps are added to your domain.
SMPs should enable automated remediation or file sharing revocation
Security-related workflows created in the SMP should automatically remediate policy violations to enable your IT environment to heal itself.
Remember, though, we’re only scratching the surface on the deep capabilities of a fully featured, all-in-one SaaS management platform. When evaluating whether an SMP is a good fit for your IT department, you should make sure the platform truly delivers everything Gartner says it should.
Improve compliance
An SMP should reduce your compliance burdens in multiple ways, as well. First, it should have audit logs that never expire, enabling you to prove your offboarding workflows executed in accordance with security policy.
Second, an SMP makes it easy to track SaaS compliance certification and expiration dates to ensure compliance with industry standards.
How does an all-in-one SMP compare to other key IT tech stack tools?
Every IT environment experiences the challenges of SaaS management in different ways. Security and compliance requirements can also greatly affect IT’s choice in what solutions they can and should use.
The graphic below shows where the functions of a SaaS management platform sit in relation to other platforms and the services they provide.
How do SMPs compare to Software Asset Managers?
Like most Software Asset Managers (SAMs), an all-in-one SMP provides a centralized way to see all the apps in your environment, enabling you to optimize spend by right-sizing license allocation.
What are Software Asset Managers?
SAMs have been around since the 1980s and the old, client-server-based software days. Back then, the job was largely for manual tracking of software, including inventorying CDs, matching serial numbers to purchase orders, and tracking annual maintenance software upgrades. The focus for the job was ensuring license compliance, proactively staying prepared for audits to avoid costly fines or legal issues.
Of course, SAMs have evolved since then, but they’re generally to help organizations manage on-prem software assets and SaaS apps by ensuring license compliance.
Why SMPs are more suitable than SAMs for the SaaS environment
However, an SMP should provide far more than just a way to just track licenses. To go a step further and ensure licenses are always reclaimed quickly and accurately, an SMP can orchestrate complex workflows that automate account removal and creation. SMPs should also help secure your IT environment by allowing you to uncover risky apps and automatically revoke their access.
SAM advantages
- On-prem perpetual software license focus
- License optimization
- Vendor audit preparation
SAM disadvantages
- Poor SaaS visibility and Shadow IT discovery
- Limited usage data and real-time insights
- No automation capabilities
- Manual tracking of renewal data
- Manual security and compliance risk controls
- Poor scalability in the SaaS environment
- No SaaS contract pricing benchmark data
How do all-in-one SMPs compare to Cloud Access Security Brokers?
Cloud Access Security Brokers (CASBs) are another SaaS security option. According to Gartner, CASBs are deployed either on-premise, or as cloud-based security policy enforcement points. They sit between cloud service users and providers to enforce enterprise security policies as cloud resources are accessed.
CASBs are deployed in all cloud computing models including SaaS where they’re used for data security, asset encryption, inline blocking of shared assets, and network security.
CASB and SMPs are important to SaaS security, but in different ways
The role of CASBs extends well beyond SaaS, and unlike SaaS-focused SMPs, their response to a security threat tends to be less nuanced.
Admins using CASBs can set triggers (such as when a new user appears on the network), but lacking the intelligence and granularity of SMPs, CASBs are prone to over-enforcing such triggers. When this occurs, it brings access and workflow to a halt.
Contrast this to all-in-one SMPs – they offer smarter, workflow-friendly solutions without impeding employee productivity nor sacrificing security measures.
Most organizations need only an SMP for security
Most mid-market and small organizations do not need any additional platforms to create and enforce a robust set of IT security policies.
Larger organizations, companies with significant on-prem infrastructure, or those with very high compliance requirements, sometimes deploy a CASB alongside an SMP to create a single control point for SaaS application data flow.
CASB advantages
- Robust data loss protection (DLP)
- Built in anomaly detection
- Visibility into data in transit
- Security for broader range of cloud environments
- Compliance enforcement to security policies
CASB disadvantages
- Complex and expensive to deploy and maintain
- Less suitable for SaaS security because of its frequent feature and API updates and new releases
- Slower user productivity
- No full SaaS ecosystem protection
- Limited file sharing security
How do SMPs compare to Identity Governance and Administration tools and Identity Access Management software?
Identity Access Management (IAM) tools provide the operational framework for access, as well as Single Sign-On (SSO) capabilities The primary use case for these solutions is identity and access management to authenticate users into multiple SaaS applications with a single set of credentials.
Meanwhile, Identity Governance and Administration (IGA) adds the oversight and policy enforcement to ensure access is secure, has the proper approvals, and is compliant over time.
Some organizations leverage either or both IGAs and IAMs to determine whether a new user can have access to an application based on company-specific policies.
IAM/SSO/IGA advantages
- Many pre-built integrations
- Can automate basic tasks like deprovisioning for apps, email accounts, calendars, groups
IAM/SSO/IGA disadvantages
- Not purpose-built for automating user lifecycle management
- Need many more workflow steps to automate the same task compared to other tools, like SaaS management platforms
- Require more programming skill to create automations as they tend to be more low-code platforms, as opposed to no-code builders that any IT member can easily use
- License subscription tiers don’t offer unlimited numbers of workflows
- Free or inexpensive entry tiers include a low number of workflow (e.g., like five)
- Both parent and child workflows count in subscription limits
- Price increases a lot as you move up from entry tiers
- High number of workflows executions make it very expensive
- A small IT workflow management team is best to prevent spiraling costs, so can’t build skills for the whole team
How do SMPs compare to an Integration Platform as a Service (iPaaS)?
Their primary use case is to enable applications to use data living throughout your infrastructure. This includes multiple SaaS apps, on-premises applications, and databases, as well as cloud infrastructure.
Residing in an enterprise’s data stack, iPaaS tools are very strong in point-to-point integrations for data sharing. They’re made of pre-built connectors, business rules, mapping, and transformations for developing and orchestrating data integration flows.
iPaaS tools are often capable of automating some of the granular SaaS management tasks that an SMP can. However, because iPaaS don’t ingest and analyze data, orchestrating a lengthy automated onboarding or offboarding process leads to incredibly long, complex workflows. Since workflows tend to be more complicated, they often require a developer, specialized skills, or expensive consultants to manage.
iPaaS advantages
- Can automate basic app deprovisioning
- Have many SaaS app integrations
iPaaS disadvantages
- Because of how an iPaaS Ingests and analyzes app data, it needs both more automation steps and database queries to access user info
- Each database query must be added as a workflows step when writing workflows, requiring more time to both build and manage them
- As offboarding workflows scale to include more apps and tasks, iPaaS workflows tend to become very complicated
- Database queries needlessly eat up bandwidth and exceed API call limits
- No never-expiring logs for auditing activity
- No error handling notifications, so you don’t know if a workflow executed
Why does your IT team need an all-in-one SaaS management platform?
Like we reviewed above, the marketplace for ways to solve many of SaaS management challenges is overflowing with both providers and acronyms.
You may find yourself in an IT department that already has a point solution in place, thinking you may not need everything an all-in-one SMP offers.
However, there’s a different reality when relying on multiple point solutions.
Five reasons why point solutions fall short
As organizations continue to scale their SaaS footprint, the limitations of using disconnected, single-function tools become increasingly apparent. Quite simply, they usually fail to deliver the comprehensive control, visibility, and efficiency required to manage SaaS effectively at scale.
Instead of solving the problem, they often introduce new ones.
1. Fragmented visibility and data silos
Unless very tightly integrated, most point solutions operate in isolation. While each tool may lend visibility into parts of the SaaS stack, you don’t get a unified, end-to-end view. The consequences? Disjointed insights, incomplete reporting, and blind spots across your SaaS environment that make it difficult to track usage, optimize spend, or proactively manage risk.
2. Operational complexity and inefficiency
Managing multiple standalone tools creates unnecessary IT complexity. First, you have to take time and money to integrate, learn, and maintain each tool. And then you end up juggling various interfaces, logins, vendors, and support contracts, all of which make you less agile.
3. Higher and hidden Total Cost of Ownership (TCO)
Individually, point solutions may appear less expensive. But add them all up, almost guaranteed to be a higher total cost of ownership. Organizations end up paying for:
- Overlapping or redundant features across tools
- Costly custom integrations and training
- Ongoing admin, development, and support
Worse, you operate suboptimal processes that only reduce ROI from SaaS investments, anyway.
4. Inconsistent security and compliance
Security and compliance require consistency — something point solutions and the dynamic role of SaaS can’t offer. When governance is scattered across multiple tools, good luck enforcing uniform security policies, access controls, and compliance standards. The result is greater risk, failed audits, and possible regulatory penalties.
5. Poor scalability and inflexibility
As your organization grows, so does your SaaS environment, in both size and complexity. Point solutions often lack the flexibility to adapt to changing needs or scale efficiently. Integrating new applications, onboarding users, or enforcing new policies becomes a manual, error-prone process that slows growth rather than enabling it.
The strong case for an all-in-one SaaS management platform
An all-in-one SaaS management platform eliminates these pain points by consolidating critical capabilities into a single, centralized solution that is both easier to manage and reduces your TCO.
In today’s SaaS-first world, piecing together SaaS management from fragmented tools is inefficient and unsustainable.
A true all-in-one SMP is purpose-built for managing across the lifecycle of SaaS applications
These increasingly crucial tools help organizations to simultaneously achieve 3 important goals:
- Provide visibility together with key business stakeholders to optimize SaaS purchasing and renewals
- Address urgent IT operational challenges
- Limit security risk and enhance SaaS security posture and
Many of today’s point solutions are built to primarily benefit specific types of users. For example, SAMs were created primarily for heads of finance and accounting. Most iPaaS are meant to save developers time, not automate user lifecycle management.
By leaving a fully featured SMP out of the mix, you miss out on key opportunities for SaaS spending optimization. Worse, you could be leaving your company’s data vulnerable to misuse or theft.
Extremely detailed spend tracking can save money, but so does reclaiming licenses immediately after an employee departs and goes unused for a certain amount of time. Quickly revoking access to all those apps and shared resources also protects sensitive data and makes it easier for your security team to pass compliance audits.
But optimizing spending alone is not enough. It still leaves your SaaS environment vulnerable to well-meaning employees that log in to risky apps with their work credentials or share proprietary information with outsiders. And then without the ability to easily orchestrate complex workflows, your IT team will still spend far too much time as manual “ticket-takers.”
To keep your environment as secure and efficient as possible, it is important that you
have the power to address pressing security, user, and cost challenges in a single tool. Nothing does this better than an all-in-one SMP.
How can IT leaders leverage an all-in-one SMP to drive value?
When BetterCloud customers take full advantage of everything it has to offer across the spectrum of an all-in-one SaaS management tool, they can drive tremendous value in their company.
Let’s walk through the benefits experienced by just one customer, a growing company with 1,200 employees that is saving over $1.12 million annually.
- After their IT team saw all their apps in one place, they gained important insights into what was and wasn’t being used. They are now saving $140,000 per year through license optimization.
- They used BetterCloud’s zero-touch automation capabilities to create a self-service SaaS access portal. As a result, they realized productivity gains of $796,000 annually as employees no longer had to wait for IT to manually grant app access.
- By automating their onboarding, offboarding, and mid-lifecycle change processes, they save $184,000 annually in IT staff time.
- Their operational efficiency improved so much that two full-time employees could refocus their responsibilities to support go-to-market efficiency and revenue growth.
- The company’s sensitive and proprietary data is now being protected with proactive monitoring and automated remediation policies on over 4,000,000 files.
- They identified and revoked OAuth access to 312 risky apps that did not meet security standards.
- To implement a least privilege access model, they reduced the number of users with super admin access from 15 to 3.
While not every BetterCloud customer realizes over $1 million in savings, the stats above highlight all the different ways a SMP can deliver value.
From efficiency to security, a powerful, fully featured SMP is a single platform that provides multiple, far-reaching benefits for IT and the entire organization.
To get a sneak peek at the value you can expect from BetterCloud, a Gartner® Magic Quadrant Leader for SaaS Management Platforms, and consistent G2 Grid Leader, including Fall 2025, use our free ROI calculator, take an interactive tour or request a demo today.
Editor’s Note: This is an update from a March 2022 post.