Omnipresent Saves IT Time, Improves Compliance and Eliminates Wasteful Spend

Customer Profile 

Omnipresent helps businesses onboard new hires, retain, and offboard employees, no matter where they’re located. Companies use Omnipresent’s intelligent automation platform and expert support to generate compliant employment contracts, process international payrolls, manage localized benefits and more, freeing HR teams to focus on attracting and developing the best people.  

Challenges 

Businesses rely on Omnipresent to enable a great employee experience for onboarding, payroll and benefits, while also saving their HR teams time and money. But, when it came to Omnipresent’s internal processes for ensuring their own employees were quickly and cost-effectively onboarded and offboarded, one critical area created challenges: cloud applications.

SaaS management was largely manual and, as a result, error-prone and time-consuming. To onboard a new hire, Omnipresent’s IT team had to go into each required application one by one, create the user, paste their email address, and provide the right level of access. When Dimitri Isaev joined Omnipresent as Service Desk Technician, the company was hiring 5-7 people every week, requiring IT to devote about two hours for onboarding. “We were growing fast. By the end of the year we would hire about 250 employees. Manual onboarding wouldn’t be sustainable,” he said.

To offboard, the HR team created a Jira ticket a few days before the employee end date, if known, after which IT went into each app to remove access. But sometimes tickets weren’t created. IT might only find out someone needed to be offboarded after the InfoSecurity analyst discovered it later during their own security checks. This could put data at risk if former employees still had access, and also impact Omnipresent’s compliance with SOC 2 certification.

Omnipresent had no reliable way to discover cloud apps, including those acquired without IT’s knowledge. Not only did this make it difficult to ensure people were fully offboarded, but it also made it impossible to get a full picture of the company’s SaaS ecosystem. “We knew Shadow IT was likely proliferating, and with that, our spend and security risks might be, too. SaaS Management Platforms (SMPs) were emerging as a best practice tool for discovery, automation, and cost management, so we began exploring SMP options,” said Isaev.

Why Omnipresent Chose Torii 

Omnipresent evaluated several SMPs before choosing Torii. According to Isaev, “Torii had the broad range of features we needed at a good price point. Others were too expensive, and didn’t have enough capabilities. For a mid-sized company like ours, Torii was the best fit.”

Isaev pointed to Torii’s strong visibility, onboarding/offboarding automation, and self-service features such as its App Catalog and role-based access management. Omnipresent was also impressed with Torii’s finance, expense, and license usage capabilities. 

“Torii is a one-stop shop. And its user-friendly interface and clean, easy-to-understand dashboards were a big plus,” said Isaev. 

How Torii Helps 

Visibility + Security = Compliance

Torii’s value was apparent from the beginning. “We quickly discovered 400 cloud applications. This was quite a surprise as I was expecting 100 to 150,” said Isaev. Not only that, but Omnipresent now discovers about 4-5 newly acquired apps every week with Torii. 

Omnipresent used Torii’s workflow building blocks to create a new app discovery workflow. “I couldn’t believe how easy it was to automate without any code, using Torii’s pre-set templates,” said Isaev.

Now, each time Torii detects a new application, it immediately sends Slack alerts to IT and Infosecurity. Omnipresent’s security analyst then notes the app as being in “Review” in Torii, contacts the app vendor regarding security certificates, and decides whether to allow its usage. If not allowed, the analyst marks the app “closed” in Torii, which signifies that it cannot be used.

Isaev noted, “Security proactively uses Torii to detect new apps and see if they meet our security standards. They have much better visibility into app usage and can restrict undesired applications. With Torii’s help, we’re able to simplify SaaS compliance assessment and achieve SOC 2 certification.“ 

Single Source of SaaS Truth

Torii’s distributed SMP approach fits Omnipresent’s decentralized SaaS management reality, and makes it much easier for all stakeholders to collaborate. In addition to Omnipresent’s IT and security employees, the company’s finance and leadership teams and app owners, also benefit from the solution and its rich role-based access capabilities. 

“Torii is a unifying platform for all our departments – a single place for reliable information about apps, contracts, users, usage, app owners, and financial data. It enables me to equip all stakeholders with the information they need to do their jobs,” said Isaev. 

For instance, when management wants spend information, Isaev simply points them to a Torii dashboard that has all the data they need. 

Isaev also noted, “Our departments are largely responsible for managing their own apps. Torii’s App Owner role is perfect for this. I can assign each owner access to only their apps, where they can see users, upload contracts, and view and manage licenses and access. Owners also receive automated notifications 90, 60 and 30 days prior to contract renewals so they have time to review usage and determine whether to renew and if so, at what level.” 

Self-service Access & License Provisioning

Employees use Torii’s App Catalog to find and request licenses for sanctioned applications. Before, they would ask IT for access to existing apps – but most were owned outside of IT. Figuring out who owned them took time and delayed app provisioning. 

“Torii’s App Catalog gives everyone a clear, streamlined and fast way to request app access,” said Isaev. “Torii’s tagging feature is also super helpful as it suggests similar apps if someone searches for an app that isn’t in the catalog. This way they can evaluate existing apps before deciding whether to purchase a new one.”

Automated Onboarding & Offboarding

By integrating Omnipresent’s HR system, HiBob, with Torii and using workflows to automate many manual onboarding and offboarding tasks, Omnipresent speeds and simplifies these business-critical processes. 

Not only did Omnipresent reduce onboarding time by 80% and offboarding by 60%, but according to Isaev, “I’m quite confident that no one falls through the cracks. Torii discovers new hires and gives them access to applications according to their role. And when people leave the company, Torii immediately triggers workflows to suspend and remove user access to applications.” 

Improves Spend Management

Omnipresent is beginning to take advantage of Torii’s spend management capabilities, which are particularly important during these economically volatile times when reducing costs is top-of-mind for so many businesses.

They’re using Torii’s Chargeback functionality to understand costs by department for apps such as Notion. They also review unused licenses for reharvesting and adjusting contracts. “Torii makes it easy to visualize our spend data. It’s very precise,” said Isaev. He estimates that Omnipresent has already saved about 15% on Microsoft 365 licenses and tens of thousands of euros on Zoom.