Building Blocks of SaaS Application

It would be hard to imagine any company which is not using SaaS solutions to run their business and operations. SaaS solutions are among the fastest-growing segments in the public cloud offerings.?

The overall growth of the SaaS market is growing significantly year over year.?

• Nearly 78% of small businesses have already invested in SaaS solutions
• SaaS adoption in the healthcare industry grows at a rate of 20% per year
• 70% of CIOs claim that agility and scalability are two of the top motivators for using SaaS applications?

Gartner forecasts end-user spending on public cloud services to reach $396 billion in 2021—and grow 21.7% to reach $482 billion in 2022.

There are two emerging trends in SaaS Offering:?

• Horizontal Saas: Targeted to a wider audience such as Workday, Salesforce, Microsoft 365?
• Vertical SaaS: Targeted to a particular niche such as BioIQ, Veeva, RetailNext

As the adoption of SaaS applications increases, so do the challenges that come with it. Organizations need to put together building blocks to manage SaaS applications to their fullest potential and for the company's competitive advantage.??

List of building blocks I’ve identified to manage any SaaS application:?

1. Infrastructure

The biggest advantage any SaaS application offers is that they evolve faster than we blink. Hence, you must set up a dedicated environment at an early stage where you can test new features, capabilities, integrations, and changes before rolling to a larger audience. I’d suggest setting up at least three dedicated environments (Sandbox, Staging, and Production) which allow you to get your hands dirty by experimenting with new features and changes. Perhaps, it also ensures no changes are being rolled out without fully testing and confirming their impact.?

2. User Identity

Once you have set up your foundation, it is time to grant access. You must have a single source of truth. This will also ensure the right people have access at the right time. You must consider various aspects of the application, as this will have a direct impact on your onboarding, licensing, governance, security, and off-boring process,??

• Choose identity model (SSO Vs Cloud Identity)?
• Ensure your identity provider has deep integration with your SaaS apps
• Identify what information (name, email, title, phone) you’re going to open up which will be accessible by the SaaS application?
• Identify license provisioning requirements (Self-service Vs auto-provisioning)

3. Security

This is one of the most important building blocks. As Cyber threats are growing exponentially, it is companies' advantage to be proactive and vigilant. It is a widespread practice to implement MFA, but I would suggest going one step beyond and taking every measure possible, such as on-demand access, conditional access, leverage advance threat detection, etc.? Also, ensure that security follows wherever your data and information goes.

4. On-boarding

No company would like a lower user adoption and poor user experience. This is the first step to ensuring users are delighted by providing a seamless onboarding experience. Having a positive experience from the beginning will ensure users are excited and willing to use the solution.

• Define and implement how does overall onboarding experience look like?
• Provide training, assistance, and guidance to ensure users have a good understanding of the application and the value it offers

5. Governance & Administration

Depending on the SaaS application, its usage, scope, and business impact, I’d suggest going as granular as possible.? Ensure you’ve considered various aspects of the governance, such as admins, data retention policies, geo-locations requirements, support model, and legal & compliance requirements. If the pricing model is pay-as-you-go, ensure you have a well-defined and optimized usage model.

6. User Adoption & Change Management

It would be of no value if users are not getting the intended value out of the application. Hence, ensure you’ve targeted and tailored training for various groups of users. To get their buy-in you must identify use-cases for each specific group. This approach helps them to resonate with the product and provides help in understanding how it can help them to reduce their work.

7. Customization, Integration, and Automation

Another big advantage of SaaS applications is, that it offers various integration and customization options. Either in the form of third-party integration or customization. For instance, Slack and Microsoft Teams have integrations with a larger number of other SaaS apps. It helps to reduce context switching and allows users to access other applications from a single interface.?

8. Monitor and Measure

To understand the usefulness and impact any SaaS application has on your organization, you must identify and define key metrics at a very early stage. This will help you to stay focused and decide where to invest time and energy to have a big impact.?

9. Off-boarding

In the beginning, we have defined how we can make sure users have a flawless experience from the start and throughout various phases of the journey. The last phase of the journey is as important as the first. Define how and when users' access will be disabled. Automating these steps helps tremendously. Define the overall hand-off process, and ensure it is aligned with data retention, legal, compliance, and security policies.

Cheers,

Satish