Companies are managing hundreds and hundreds of SaaS solutions, but how can you ensure that you are getting the most out of your investment?
As part of our CIO Newsletter, Mark Settle, 7x CIO and author, interviews CIO’s from some of the top IT companies. This month Mark talks to Sylvie Veilleux, CIO of Dropbox, a leading cloud storage service company.
At Dropbox, all operations are supported by hundreds of SaaS applications, tools and platforms. Veilleux discusses what it truly means to have SaaS at scale, and shares important insights and challenges that come with navigating the complex environment.
Key Takeaways:
- Veilleux recommends managing the enterprise repository of your applications so you can see productivity usage in order to drive value and optimization. When you analyze your applications, you’ll most likely see that some of the applications in your tech stack overlap and some are vastly underutilized.
- When dealing with a large number of SaaS applications, Veilleux posits that you must take risk as a top priority. This includes privacy, security cost, and managing the data effectively in an ever-changing landscape.
- Veilleux believes that having a best-of-breed SaaS environment at scale allows you to bring in tools that let you do your best work and stay competitive.
- There’s an administrative and management portion when it comes to dealing with SaaS at scale. It affects not just the IT team, but legal, finance, procurement and various functions in the organization.
- Veilleux suggests building a team that manages the business of IT. These people should understand data movement and business processes (ie. a Business Systems or Business Technology Team).
“SaaS at scale is about management, governance and adoption.”
