Auvik Solution Aims to Eliminate Shadow IT with Capabilities to Discover, Manage and Secure SaaS Environments

Auvik, an provider of cloud-based network management software announced a new solution to provide deep visibility into an organization’s growing SaaS environment. Auvik SaaS Management (ASM) is designed to provide IT professionals with greater security, operational efficiency, and cost management capabilities as organizations become more dependent on SaaS.

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“Visibility and management tools such as ASM are designed to address the challenges these organizations face, balancing the needs of an agile hybrid workforce with the demand for security and efficient resource allocation.”

“Auvik’s core competency in network management places us in an ideal position to understand the challenges organizations face when transitioning to hybrid work,” said Doug Murray, CEO, Auvik. “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.”

The Rising Threat of SaaS Sprawl
Employees with small and medium sized businesses have increasingly adopted cloud and SaaS tools. In fact, in the first quarter of 2023 Auvik SaaS Management has recorded 559.2% growth in usage of ChatGPT. The fast rise of popular generative AI tools such as ChatGPT have contributed to this trend. These tools are typically not deployed through central IT teams and instead are sourced directly by business stakeholders, often going unreported. The resulting “shadow IT” is challenging to centralize and manage, introducing business risk.

Most businesses rely on manual spreadsheets, employee questionnaires, and web history analysis for managing SaaS, which is often error-prone. According to Gartner® : “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,” and 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.

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*Gartner Market Guide for SaaS Management Platforms, Dec. 2022

“Organizations rely on the flexibility, security, and centralized management capabilities of cloud and SaaS to support an increasingly complex and dynamic IT landscape,” noted Frank Della Rosa, research vice president, SaaS, Business Platforms, and Industry Cloud, at market intelligence firm IDC. “Visibility and management tools such as ASM are designed to address the challenges these organizations face, balancing the needs of an agile hybrid workforce with the demand for security and efficient resource allocation.”

ASM: Delivering the Benefits of SaaS Management
To address this problem, in 2022 Auvik acquired Saaslio, a leading SaaS discovery solution enabling managed service providers (MSPs) to securely manage applications. The company has invested in engineering and product development to align SaaS management with Auvik’s network monitoring and management capabilities.

“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 incident,” said Jon Fitzryk, Director of IT Services, at Braden, an Auvik customer. “If we don’t know where our data is, that’s obviously a major problem. Using ASM to identify that on a lot of different levels makes it an invaluable tool for us.”

ASM offers a more accurate, automated approach for MSPs and internal IT departments to gain greater control over their SaaS use. ASM allows organizations to easily discover, manage and secure SaaS environments.

• Security: Shadow IT, User Access, and Software + Account Inventory Management for every environment with alerting on critical events. ASM has been used to analyze 25 million security logs, resulting in 2.9 million SaaS security recommendations.
• Management: ASM provides application, client, employee, and account lifecycle insights across all business applications.
• Discovery: Discovery is essential for management and security. ASM currently manages 2.6 million business applications across all of its users. ASM builds an organization’s SaaS inventory based on the way employees work, providing data to elevate SaaS management, reducing IT risk, eliminating wasted SaaS licenses, and enabling more efficient routine SaaS operations. Auvik has discovered more than 125,000 applications with ASM.

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