hhpberlin Eliminates Shadow IT, Saves Over 500,000 Euros, & Proves Compliance

Customer Profile 

For over twenty years, hhpberlin has been pioneering the next generation of fire engineering. With their team of over 200 experts and suite of customized fire protection concepts, hhpberlin provides customers with safer, more sustainable engineering methods to build with confidence.

Challenges 

Having traditionally leveraged expensive and high-maintenance on-premise tools, hhpberlin sought to make their company more agile by adopting SaaS applications. Unfortunately, without a scalable SaaS management process in place, their IT team quickly found themselves struggling to manually track their SaaS ecosystem. 

Working closely with Finance, IT would manually parse through financial statements to find and record the cost of every SaaS application within a spreadsheet. Not only was this process time-consuming and error-prone, but it revealed two core SaaS management problems.

Shadow IT Fuels Wasted Spend

First, IT had no reliable way of discovering Shadow IT apps as they were adopted. Their manual discovery method of parsing financial statements meant that IT was always the last to know about a new app. Additionally, it failed to detect freemium apps which also posed significant security threats. This delayed and incomplete discovery method contributed towards visibility gaps that hurt other processes like employee offboarding. 

Reactive IT Strategy

Secondly, IT was forced to become reactive decision-makers. Spending most of their time  responding to erroneous SaaS costs and risks, IT had no bandwidth to focus on more strategic initiatives. This left them unable to create a scalable SaaS management process to continuously optimize and secure their SaaS stack. 

In short, IT was stuck in an inefficient and unreliable SaaS management cycle.

These problems only worsened in March of 2020 when Coronavirus moved their 200-plus employee workforce fully online. Employees began rapidly adopting SaaS applications without IT’s knowledge. The spreadsheet that served as hhpberlin’s application inventory, quickly fell completely out of date. 

Stefan Truthän, the CEO of hhpberlin, recounts this experience, “We needed a tool to manage our SaaS environment. Without it, it was nearly impossible to manage SaaS discovery and costs. We tried tracking everything manually with an Excel sheet, but our SaaS ecosystem changed so quickly that it was impossible to keep up.”

Taking stock of their SaaS challenges, Stefan began the hunt for a SaaS management platform with discovery and cost optimization in mind. That’s when he found Torii. 

Why hhpberlin Chose Torii 

Truthän said, “As soon as I saw Torii’s platform, I knew it was the right match for us. It was my goal to find a solution that would help me discover and manage all of my cloud applications. After seeing Torii’s end-to-end capabilities I was confident I found what I was looking for.”

With Torii’s robust discovery, optimization, and automation capabilities Truthän was confident hhpberlin would be able to:

• Eliminate Shadow IT using Torii’s AI discovery and mapping and secure browser extension to reveal SaaS apps as soon as they’re adopted

• Optimize SaaS costs with Torii’s spend alerts, robust cost-saving insights, and one-click recommendations

• Secure their tech stack by automatically offboarding past employees from all SaaS apps, including Shadow IT
• Prove compliance with Torii’s robust audit logs of all SaaS apps, users, usage, and onboarding and offboarding processes

Today, Torii has become hhpberlin’s single source of truth for SaaS management. Not only does Torii reveal their entire tech stack, but it also eliminates the manual and redundant tasks that kept IT busy. Now, hppberlin’s IT team is able to focus on optimizing and securing their SaaS infrastructure.

“Now, with Torii, I don’t only get a record of all my SaaS apps, but I can decide who is the app owner for them, see how many users they have, how often they’re used, and rest easy knowing this data is accurate because it’s cross-referenced across two, four, or even five different sources,” said Truthän. 

How Torii Helps 

Shining a Light on Shadow IT 

One of hhpberlin’s main goals was to reveal their actual SaaS stack and its costs. While their IT team had been manually tracking SaaS apps that appeared on their financial statements, they were shocked to see how many unaccounted-for Shadow IT apps were revealed once they implemented Torii’s browser extension. 

“Torii’s browser extension was key,” remarked Truthän. “We originally thought we had about 80 apps in our SaaS ecosystem but found over 180 of them once we deployed Torii’s extension. I was shocked.” 

Now, IT no longer has to wait for SaaS costs to appear on financial statements to begin piecing together the true state of their SaaS ecosystem. Instead, Torii’s advanced AI discovery and mapping immediately reveals SaaS apps used across hhpberlin’s organization, alerting IT as soon as they’re adopted. These proactive insights allow IT to tackle Shadow IT, wasted spend, and SaaS risks at their source, immediately reaching out to app owners to understand the app’s intended usage and costs, and triggering an app review. 

Torii’s ability to capture granular user, adoption, and usage data, has provided hhpberlin with an always up-to-date SaaS system of record. 

“I trust that Torii detects 100% of SaaS applications in our organization and provides the granular user and usage data I need to optimize our SaaS stack,” said Truthän. “Torii is now a mandatory tool that helps detect applications in our organization and its ability to easily create custom applications also allows me to track on-premise tools alongside my SaaS apps, providing me a single place to see and manage all of my tools.”

Optimizing SaaS Spend

With Torii providing a SaaS source of truth, hhpberlin uncovered all of their SaaS spend while analyzing rich cost-saving insights and recommendations to rationalize their SaaS stack. 

hhpberlin always knew their SaaS spending was drastically increasing since pivoting from a mostly on-premise to SaaS-based organization. Even so, their older process of manually tracking spend per application within a spreadsheet prevented them from gaining a holistic view of their SaaS costs as well as the user, adoption, and usage insights needed to properly rationalize their tech stack.

Originally, believing hhpberlin’s SaaS spend to be no more than a couple hundred thousand Euros, Truthän was surprised to see that Torii revealed substantially higher costs:

“With Torii, we saw that hhpberlin was spending close to 1.5 million Euros on SaaS apps by 2021. We knew that there was room for optimization and relied on Torii’s insights to get started,” said Truthän, “For example, we were able to easily identify all of our paid for SaaS apps with little to no users or usage, providing a shortlist of apps to close for immediate savings. That was really impactful.”

In 2022 alone, hhpberlin saved over a half million Euros by closing unused and redundant SaaS applications.

Even after addressing the core causes of their wasted spend, namely Shadow IT subscriptions and surprise renewals, hhpberlin kept realizing continuous savings by leveraging Torii to reclaim unused and past user licenses, right-size SaaS renewals, and eliminate surprise renewals. 

“Now, in 2023, we’ve been able to continue optimizing our already-rationalized tech stack, saving over 40,000 Euros across just five SaaS apps,” said Truthän. “It’s easy to say that Torii has paid for itself and then some!” 

Slashing Time Spent on IT Tasks

In addition to saving hundreds of thousands of Euros, hhpberlin was also able to drastically cut IT’s time spent on employee onboarding and offboarding with Torii’s advanced workflows.

By analyzing application usage by department, IT could determine which tools were mission-critical for different parts of their organization and preconfigure an onboarding workflow to automatically grant users access to key SaaS apps based on their role.

Now, instead of waiting for IT to approve each application request, new hires can get up and running with the tools they need as soon as they’ve joined the company.

hhpberlin was also able to fully automate and secure their offboarding process.

Torii’s AI discovery and mapping ensures employees are offboarded from their SaaS apps, including Shadow IT apps. 

But that’s not all. Torii’s advanced automation allows hhpberlin to customize their offboarding workflows to fit their company’s policies. Now, managers can approve employee offboarding and automatically receive past employee data and emails as soon as the process is complete. This way, hhpberlin can prevent data loss while ensuring no ongoing initiatives are stagnated. 

“Everyone’s SaaS landscape is always changing but Torii remains my north star in controlling it. With Torii we could detect all of our SaaS apps, optimize them, and prove compliance—all in one place. Torii provides the structure we need,” said Truthän.

Proving Compliance

Another benefit of hhpberlin’s newly gained SaaS source of truth is the ability to easily prove compliance.

Torii’s always up-to-date records of SaaS apps, users, licenses, and robust audit logs eliminates the manual labor and guesswork traditionally associated with proving compliance. Now, IT can simply send any required information to auditors with only a few clicks of a button.

“With Torii, hhpberlin was able to get ISO 27001 certified,” said Truthän. “One of the questions the auditor asked was how we were able to control and maintain our SaaS ecosystem. I showed them our Torii platform, walking them through our discovery capabilities, application list, and audit logs, and they were shocked how easily we could access everything we needed. They thought it was great. I would say Torii is definitely the main element in gaining and maintaining our ISO certification.”