Remote SaaSOps: 5 Tips to Take SaaSOps Remote

We wanted to write this blog post to encourage people. To let you see the bright side of this craziness. Because we agree that remote has many challenges, but it also has a bright side that is probably bigger than you think. And we want to tell you about it.

Remote work is here to (in some way) stay. According to Chris Herd, remote work activist and CEO of Firstbase, companies are cutting office space by 40-60% and 90% of workforces never want to be in an office again full-time. And not only that, thanks to commute-less work, amazing things can happen, like reducing ~108 tones of CO2 emissions a year and improving life quality to millions of people.

Another one: this week, Sifted published an article on how Y Combinator was forced to explore European startup opportunities for the first time due to its migration to remote. How great is that for European startups? And this is only one of the multiple things that have happened and didn’t in the precovid world.

So there is a bright side. And we want to take this to SaaSOps. Because we want you to know how helpful it can be to take it remote.

SaaSOps**

Most of the people reading this probably know already what SaaS Operations is and why it is so important for modern businesses. Especially in tech and finance teams, this is not something you can afford to avoid.

This is the third post of a SaaSOps series of posts. If you want to inform yourself a bit more before continuing the read, feel free to check them out: “What is SaaS Operations?” and “SaaSOps is the new IT”. They are easy to read and quite useful if you are not sure about what SaaSOps is about.

Remote SaaSOps**

Like all remote work, SaaSOps also needs a different approach than in the physical world. And even though it has its challenges, a remote SaaSOps system can save you a lot of time and money. As remote workspaces crowd with SaaS apps, the inefficiency of manual activities related to these apps becomes unmanageable. Hence the importance of developing a SaaSOps solution that lets you deliver those tasks in an automated fashion.

And we want to share the top five pillars upon which you need to build such a system for it to work effectively.

A good remote SaaSOps system needs to be:

1. Collaborative: in a world where you can’t stand up and walk across the room to ask your mate next door, it is prime that the system is well equipped for cloud collaboration. Otherwise, it will create a lot of misunderstandings and discussions.
2. Frictionless: this is essential. SaaSOps is something that can be quite annoying if it causes friction with employees’ daily routines. Nobody wants extra work. It’s more a matter of making software purchase and cancellation easy and safe.
3. Easy to use: your SaaSOps tool needs to be accessible to all employees in your company. Otherwise, it does not make sense to build one. You can’t control your software if half of it lives outside of your system. It’s that simple. So make it so easy to use that everybody wants to use it. Cledara customers often do this by not reimbursing the software subscriptions that happen outside Cledara. This is quite effective, but it’s up to you to implement it.
4. Fast: you don’t want your employees getting frustrated for a bureaucratic system that does not let them purchase software and get things done. Frustration has always been a top priority for HR to tackle, especially in COVID times. So make everything possible to avoid it.
5. Safe: Above all, SaaSOps systems are built to improve security over your software. There is a lot of data stored in SaaS apps, hence the need to manage them proactively. And SaaSOps is the way of doing this.

Our recommendations**

There is the option of building your own internal SaaSOps system, but we don’t advise it. Building a tool like that is tedious and time-consuming. Our SaaSOps tool is made to make SaaS discovery, purchase, management and cancellation easy and safe. Because we truly believe that every team has great potential, and it is our duty to unleash it.