As more and more services and products are adopting a ‘Software as a Service’ (SaaS) model customers are increasingly choosing this solution and it has many well-documented benefits. Reducing the need to purchase, maintain and host equipment, manage and maintain servers either on-premise or through a 3rd party supplier, ensure DR plans are in place and security implications are highly attractive to organisations. Additionally, ensuring you are on the latest version of the product and benefiting from hosting resilience and fit for purposing security ??? are equally important. And so they should be.
However, an important issue that can creep up on you is the need to ensure you manage your monthly SaaS costs within your overall IT budget. What on the face of it seems a minimal monthly per-seat cost, can over time increasing significantly if not managed? £10 per month per seat could quickly become a growing operational cost as your business grows and by the time your business grows to 50 staff could be an annual cost of £6000.
In addition, it is important to ensure you have a sensible procurement process in place. If product selection is not centrally controlled, products can be purchased and rolled out across your business as departments sigh up for SaaS services without the necessary financial controls in place. A client of mine told me they had an IT Budget of around £50k but by the time I had completed a full review it was almost 10 times this figure.
Common questions to ask yourself include:
Do all users really need the product?
Are there different pricing models that could be applied based on individual needs (e.g. Email 365 Essentials vs Office 365 Premium)?
Do you already have a similar service in place through another supplier (e.g. Slack vs MS Teams)?
Have you a good understanding of what you are paying for (product add-on’s that you don’t actually use)?
Do you fully understand the service and its ability to meet your needs? (If you had a GDPR Data Subject Access Request – what is the SaaS SLA)
Please Call 01342 325 720 or Contact us on info@doublefelix.co.uk to arrange a no-obligation conversation regarding how best to manage your cloud product costs