Think your SAM tool has everything under control? In reality, it might be missing half the apps your teams rely on—and that blind spot could cost you thousands. Traditional SAM tools rose to prominence in an on-prem world. They were built to track finite vendor agreements and ensure compliance with hefty licenses.
But the world has changed. Organizations run on a sprawling web of cloud apps across every department and region.
In this article, we’ll challenge the notion that SAM is good enough for today’s workplace and whether it’s time to update our assumptions. We’ll examine changes both to user behavior and industry requirements and finally, we’ll see how a SaaS Management Platform can help modernize your organization’s ITAM (ITAM meaning: Information Technology Asset Management) strategy.
Cloud Apps Change Everything
SaaS is easy to adopt and even easier to forget. Employees sign up in minutes, but the consequences can last for years. Shadow IT, hidden costs, and potential security nightmares haunt the corners of your organization. Meanwhile, your once-adequate SAM tool has zero insight into these unsanctioned apps. Its coverage is limited, and its data grows stale fast. You lose oversight and risk ugly surprises when renewal season hits.
Plus, remote and hybrid work magnifies the problem. People can be anywhere, so your solution must track everything in real-time. Otherwise, you can’t see which tools employees use—or whether they contain sensitive data. SAM wasn’t built for this new normal. Its rigid framework falls short in today’s agile, SaaS-first world. Professionals need an effective way to handle SaaS software asset management.
Gartner touched upon these risks in their 2022 Market Guide to SAM Tools:
“Organizations find it challenging for a SAM tool to support the modern demands of asset management. The biggest issue organizations face today are the vast number of SaaS applications utilized from a growing number of providers, requiring an approach that enables metering across each of those. […] [These challenges cause] significant expense and risk combined with unique and/or uniquely complex license management challenges.”
Note: Get your complimentary copy of Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for SaaS Management Platforms.
It’s time to confront a new reality: SAM alone can’t keep pace.
If your IT strategy still revolves around software asset management, it’s time to reassess your assumptions. While useful, it has several significant blind spots.
Exposing SAM’s Blind Spots
Software Asset Management tools are great at monitoring on-prem software. They excel at license tracking and compliance audits. But they stumble when it comes to the cloud. SaaS apps appear and disappear faster than any approval process can catch them.
Blind Spot #1: Limited Discovery
Most SAM tools rely on integrations or manual reporting. They miss the countless apps that teams adopt without IT’s knowledge. For this reason, their “discovery” is more like maintaining inventory. As a result, hidden risks, costs, and inefficiencies can flourish under the limited scope of SAM’s sight.
Blind Spot #2: Static Data
Traditional SAM solutions require frequent manual updates. This works for fixed on-prem deployments but falls short in a cloud-first world. By the time SAM data is refreshed, multiple new apps may have popped up, adding to more manual work and less trust in the data.
Blind Spot #3: Narrow Integration Catalog
SAM rarely connects to MDM systems, SSO tools, or financial data streams. But, without these links, you can’t see how apps overlap, how much they cost, or who actually uses them.
Blind Spot #4: Incomplete Security Coverage
SaaS usage often spans personal devices and remote offices. If your SAM tool can’t talk to endpoint management or security solutions, blind spots multiply—and so do vulnerabilities.
The result? Huge swaths of your tech stack remain in the dark, making optimizing spending or safeguarding data impossible. SAM was never designed for this level of flexibility and speed. That’s why it’s struggling to keep up today.
The Opposite Approach: SaaS Management
SaaS Management Platforms (SMPs) take a radically different approach. Instead of chasing down apps based on your knowledge of the company, SMPs continuously monitor and discover them—based on the assumption that you don’t know everything!
We built an SMP because you can’t manually track everything.
An SMP reveals every app—regardless of SSO status or procurement involvement—even those employees adopt without permission. And, by integrating with MDMs, security tools, IDPs, SSOs, contract management tools, and expense systems, SMPs create a single source of truth for every app you have (even local software!).
This opposite approach has a few major advantages.
Real-Time Visibility
SMPs monitor your entire app ecosystem 24/7, so you detect anomalous apps instantly and automatically update app usage data as it changes. You aren’t stuck with stale insights or uncertain user counts. Learn how you can tackle full app discovery.
Unified Data Streams (Single Source of Truth)
With direct links to expense systems, identity providers, and device management tools, SMPs reveal exactly who is using which apps, on what devices, and at what cost. Replace guessing with alignment.
Immediate Action
Another compelling advantage of an SMP is its automation capabilities. With Tools like Torii, you don’t just get alerts, you have prebuilt playbooks to handle different situations. Build workflows to handle anything from inactive license reclamation to unsanctioned signups on closed apps. Scale your governance policies in creative and powerful ways. This level of control slashes waste while enhancing security.
Risk Reduction
SMPs provide real-time alerts for suspicious activity. They also flag apps with questionable security practices, reducing the chance of a breach slipping through the cracks.
Shift, Not Upgrade
An SMP isn’t a replacement for SAM; it’s a shift in your app strategy. SAM tools still have a place for some companies (more on that below) but for most organizations, legacy tools based on old software models don’t make sense.
A SaaS Management Platform meets the pace of modern cloud adoption and ensures you stay in control, no matter how fast new apps appear. In today’s SaaS-driven world, you can’t afford blind spots—and SMPs are built to eliminate them.
Where SAM Still Fits
Despite its limitations, SAM isn’t completely obsolete. It continues to serve key needs, particularly for legacy on-prem software.
Primarily On-Premise. There are highly regulated industries with organizations that rely primarily upon on-premise tools and very limited SaaS tools. These kinds of organizations often have strict data residency requirements or rely on legacy systems and mainframes. For those teams, SAM is the pragmatic choice.
However, even in those industries, SaaS discovery is equally (if not) more important as it represents a massive regulatory threat. So, while a full-suite SaaS Management Platform would not make sense, the discovery portion of an SMP would be essential.
That’s why we offer a Torii Basic Plan which includes unlimited app discovery.
The New Standard for Modern IT
SaaS isn’t just another category of software. It’s how businesses operate now. Clinging to traditional SAM alone puts you at a disadvantage. You’ll miss hidden apps, waste money on unused licenses, and risk data leaks from unchecked endpoints.
SaaS Management Platforms align with the reality of agile cloud adoption. They integrate seamlessly with your existing tools, from SSO providers to expense systems, to give you instant, accurate visibility. They automate cost optimization, renewal tracking, and security alerts so your IT team can focus on strategic initiatives.
That’s the new standard. No more manual chasing. No more surprise fees. No more half-baked snapshots of what you own. Modern IT requires continuous monitoring and proactive control. SMPs make it possible and keep your entire organization on the same page.
Yes, you can keep a SAM tool for the traditional software you still use. But for everything else—especially cloud apps—SMPs are the only way forward. They don’t replace SAM; they surpass it. They deliver the real-time, holistic oversight you need in a post-on-prem world.
Ready to reclaim control of your tech stack? It’s time to embrace a full-scale solution. Out with the old. In with the new. Because when it comes to SaaS, seeing the whole picture is the only way to win.
