In today’s fast-paced business environment, innovation is the key to staying ahead of the competition. But focusing solely on acceleration and growth isn’t the solution: As you add staff, partners, and tools, you may be taking on additional security and compliance risks, creating bottlenecks in your processes ultimately hindering your own path to success
That’s where governance frameworks come in. Governance frameworks — which establish processes and policies to strategically and safely manage your SaaS portfolio — can mitigate security risks, ensure the business stays in legal compliance, and improve operational efficiency. With them, your teams can still work quickly and use the tools that allow them to collaborate and innovate, while admins maintain their peace of mind.
Below, we break down how to implement a SaaS governance framework that can scale with your organization, so you can stay ahead of the innovation curve without compromising on security and compliance.
Assess your current SaaS ecosystem
First, map and evaluate the tools and processes in your existing SaaS portfolio. This will reveal where you might have functionality issues, duplicative or ineffective tools slowing down your business, or processes that may need to be adjusted to meet data protection, security, and compliance standards.
A SaaS inventory should also include an evaluation of your data footprint. This will help you create better policies for how to safely store, manage, and back up data, project future data storage needs and costs, and ensure you’re in compliance with regulations. International standards for data security like ISO 27001 can help you get started.
Establish governance goals aligned with your business
Governance goals aligned with your overall business strategy and that are informed by the findings of your SaaS inventory will set you up for success.
For instance, your company might realize that you took on too many new SaaS tools in the previous year, and now you need to simplify by focusing on increasing efficiency and reducing cost. Another may go in the opposite direction by investing in a more robust SaaS portfolio to support product innovation. Others might decide that it’s not the SaaS tools, but internal practices, like data security safeguards or employee training, that need improvement.
Your governance goals may include:
- Mitigate risk: To protect sensitive data and safeguard against cybersecurity threats, implement security measures like encryption and user access protocols — and don’t forget to include employee education and training to ensure your teams know how to properly use them.
- Save time and resources: To benefit from more efficient operations, follow best practices for SaaS tool usage, integrations, data management, and performance monitoring. This keeps the business running smoothly, and can reduce administrative costs as well as your environmental impact. By eliminating redundant tools and vetting new tools with your organizational goals in mind, you can fully maximize the value of your investments.
- Minimize human error: Avoid the errors that can lead to data breaches, compliance issues, and costly reputational damage by outlining clear process guidelines, offering employee training, and implementing accountability and oversight measures. On top of that, automating what you can to further reduce the chance of human error. All these checks and balances will allow your business to perform at its best.
- Empower teams to innovate: Taking the time to implement a solid governance framework isn’t just meeting regulatory requirements — it also empowers teams to use the SaaS tools and technology at their disposal to innovate and improve performance, potentially unlocking new use cases that propel the business forward.
Set intelligent policies
Now that you’ve assessed your SaaS portfolio and established some goals, your team is ready to set governance policies. These policies codify guidelines, protocols, and regulatory requirements to follow going forward, so your team can consistently and safely use your SaaS applications.
If you want to craft effective governance policies, you should involve stakeholders from across the organization, including IT, security, data privacy, and legal. Companies that process data at a large scale should consider hiring Data Protection Officers, who have expertise in data security and compliance and can assist in developing, implementing, and monitoring your governance policies.
Be sure to include practical guidelines for specific departments and functions. For example, if your governance goal is to streamline the organization’s content lifecycle management process, one helpful policy might be to create best practices for content retention and disposal by classification level, time period, and team.
Select trustworthy partners
The governance framework you’ve created can now be used to vet SaaS partners with confidence. Select reliable partners that align with your governance goals and meet the standards outlined in your policies — and are transparent about their own. Look for features related to:
- Cost optimization: Many SaaS platforms offer expense and usage tracking so you can easily optimize your SaaS budget and subscription spending.
- Security and risk management: SaaS partners should have built-in protections to help you stay in compliance, like automatically securing sensitive data and offering encryption keys for user access.
- Application integration: As your SaaS portfolio grows, SaaS applications that easily connect with others make it easier for you to streamline SaaS admin and maintain governance across your organization.
For instance, here at Miro, capabilities like Enterprise Guard provide an additional layer of security and governance controls by automatically finding and securing sensitive data, managing the lifecycle of content at scale and supporting legal discovery and preservation needs.
Commit to continuous improvement
Creating a governance framework isn’t a one-and-done task. It requires assessing the effectiveness of your policies on a regular basis with ongoing performance monitoring, continuous process improvement, and compliance audits. Tracking performance metrics aligned with your governance goals will help you make data-driven decisions and pinpoint opportunities for growth.
It’s also important to keep a pulse on new trends and technology, like AI-powered tools that improve enterprise security, so you can adjust policies or adopt new applications that keep your data safe and secure.
Propel innovation forward with good governance
Don’t let faulty or complicated processes interrupt your business and put your data at risk. By taking the time to assess your SaaS portfolio, establish strategic governance goals and policies, work with trusted partners, and commit to continuous improvement, you’ll have a solid governance framework that keeps your processes in check.
As you continue to grow, you won’t be held back by bottlenecks or security and compliance risks — instead, you’ll be able to push innovation forward.
