Fouad Matin

@fouadmatin

Finance just said you need to cut a SaaS contract by 20-30% because “only half the users logged in the last month”. But, you know that as soon as you cut it, everyone’s going to ask for it back because they still use it occasionally.

What do you do?

The easiest thing to do might seem to be cutting the seats anyway and letting people figure it out.

Unused and underutilized licenses add up fast. For the following common examples, 100 extra seats cost your organization:

• Salesforce — $1k/year per seat ($100k loss)
• Netsuite – $1.2k/year per seat ($120k loss)
• LaunchDarkly –$900/year per seat ($90k loss)

When users lose access it’s generally because of three scenarios:

1. During an access audit where the reviewer didn’t know why they had the access in the first place
2. Part of response to an incident, where access is revoked broadly to reduce impact
3. Finance request to deactivate low use accounts because of budget

For users, it doesn't really matter "why" they lost access. They know they had the access and want it back to do their work.

It often means IT is asked to sort it out. Alternatively the user bypasses the loss of access by delegating work or borrowing credentials. Neither of those situations are good from a productivity, security, or compliance perspective.

So, how do you minimize unused and underutilized licenses without compromising security, compliance, or productivity?

By making the licenses available on-demand and auto-expiring.

With Indent, you can let users request access as they need it. Think of it like a digital library. Users can check out access for a set amount of time. When they’re done, the access to that resource automatically expires. If they need access again, they can just request again through that centralized system.

When you manage licenses in this way, occasional users can share them. This means you need fewer licenses, while still having them available to everyone.

Users and Finance are happy. Security and Compliance are happy.

People aren’t sharing credentials to make this all work. Users are still getting access with their own credentials through your identity provider.

By granting users time-bound, role-based access (that can be automatically approved based on factors like team membership, seniority, situation, etc) — you can be confident that you’re getting the most out of every product you’re paying for.

Want to see a personalized demo? You can schedule a demo in seconds. Or you can talk to our team if you have any questions.