to Identify, Secure, and Manage SaaS Sprawl

About Braden Business Systems & Jon Fitzryk

Since 1989, Braden Business Systems has been committed to helping every customer achieve their business goals by providing the optimum combination of innovative technology, local decision­ making, and quality service.

Braden Business Systems proudly provide state-of-the-art office hardware and software, on-site service, and custom-designed workflow solutions for businesses of all sizes. But what truly sets them apart is their commitment to providing value, excellent service, and a wide range of skills for every client

Jon Fitzryk is the Director of IT Services at Braden. Jon brought his 20+ years of IT experience to help grow Braden Business Systems IT Services division two-fold in the past three years while increasing margins. Upon Joining Braden, he was responsible for rebuilding the service offerings, pricing, and delivery team from the ground up to produce a high-quality client experience.

Needs and Challenges

As a Managed Service Provider, Braden Business Systems ensures clients have the right tools and software to meet their business needs. However, as more and more businesses began adopting SaaS tools, Braden found it challenging to discover, manage, and secure them. With SaaS, businesses often have multiple applications managed and maintained by different vendors, making it challenging to track which applications are being used and by whom. Add into the mix that nearly 80% of SaaS is shadow IT, and solving the SaaS sprawl problem becomes very challenging.

Since SaaS sprawl and Shadow IT are problems that often stem from employees, Braden wanted to approach these topics in their strategic business reviews with their customers. This would create an alliance between the MSP and the client, allowing them to work together to solve the problem. With pre-built reporting in the platform, Auvik SaaS Management allowed Braden to introduce the SaaS Management topics in these strategic discussions and talk about security incidents, top shadow IT, and pre-built recommendations for their client’s ecosystems.

Furthermore, Braden could not support client operations inside their MSP around SaaS due to a lack of a SaaS inventory for client environments. Operations around employee lifecycles, such as onboarding and offboarding, were areas where automated reporting could reduce guesswork and increase efficiency.

Furthermore, automated assessments to discover the customer’s software inventory would immediately decrease the number of manual hours the Braden Business Systems team would have per client onboarding journey.

Solution in Detail

Automated Saas Discovery

Part of the challenge of discussing shadow IT is that, inherently, shadow IT is an IT resource that employees are using that IT cannot see. Braden Business System’s evaluated many vendors to solve this problem. Auvik SaaS Management was eventually selected as its unique discovery mechanism, which relies on three collectors and could get insights traditional SaaS management tools cannot.

Competitive offerings tend to only integrate into Office 365 or Google Workspace to discover. In contrast, Auvik Saas Management can discover on the device, in the browser, and in the cloud to bring a comprehensive list of all Saas being used. Since you cannot manage what you cannot see, evaluating how offerings approached discovery was critical. This discovery mechanism would displace countless hours of manual surveys that were often error-prone.

“Understanding where data resides is absolutely critical, from both a day-to-day security and operational standpoint, but also in the event of a major issue or security event. If we don’t know where our data is, that’s obviously a major problem. Using Auvik SaaS Management to identify that on a lot of different levels makes it an invaluable tool for us,” said Jon Fitrzyk.

Reporting for strategic discussions about Saas and business applications

“Where the ROI has come in is that our strategic consultants, who are expensive resources, are quickly able to pull data and then have those discussions with clients. It has cut down the time it takes to get that data by a lot, and from our point of view, all we have to sell is time. The fact that they’re spending less time preparing for meetings is a huge return for us.”

Managing SaaS applications takes time and is something that requires a business strategy. With the built-in customer business review functionality in Auvik SaaS Management, Braden can now quickly prepare a health report in the platform to share with the customer during their quarterly business review cycle. The report includes six key health metrics to be reviewed during the customer QBR. Braden can summarize their entire SaaS ecosystem in just a few minutes by discussing only the most critical things on a regular cadence.

More efficient client onboarding and employee off-boarding

As a managed service provider, the onboarding and offboarding benefits are valuable from an operational standpoint. Because Auvik SaaS Management provided those insights, it decreased the time needed to execute these previously manual tasks. “We don’t know what we don’t know, and Auvik SaaS Management closes that gap,” said Jon. With it, Braden could know everything customers touched from a software perspective and other user risks, such as shared & generic accounts. “Without it, it would be virtually impossible to know those things,” said Jon

Regarding user offboarding, Auvik SaaS Management gives Braden a two-click checklist of everything the user had access to. It lays out what Braden and the customer are responsible for terminating access to and what stakeholders within the organization are responsible for terminating said access. Braden uses that playbook rapidly without anyone internally or the client’s team being out of the loop. Before the Auvik SaaS Management reports, Braden would ask HR, “Did you remove that user’s timekeeping, payroll app, et cetera, that we don’t have access to?” Now they provide the report and have a clear line of demarcation. It is critical to check those boxes.

Especially if they’re subject to any compliance, they have to ensure these applications are offboarded. The chances of that getting missed or of realizing Braden didn’t cut access for six months because it was missed that doesn’t happen anymore.

The efficiency that results from not missing things helps save Braden time. The solution also reduces the amount of work done when onboarding users as they can quickly see what the person that previously had the role had access to. By having a checklist, fewer tickets would come in afterward for missed items during onboarding, resulting in lost time internally. “There are time savings there. It adds massive efficiency to our user onboarding and offboarding processes,” said Jon.