1. An introduction to 1Password SaaS Manager
Every team has its favorite tools. That type of flexibility helps people be productive and accomplish great work, but the proliferation of SaaS and AI tools can also leave IT teams wondering what's everyone using, who has access to which resources, and how much exactly are we spending (including on tokens and API calls, not just seats)?
That's where 1Password SaaS Manager comes in, a SaaS management platform (SMP) that helps IT teams discover every app and AI tool in use, automate and revoke access, and optimize usage and spend to make better decisions about risk and cost.
If you have a 1Password Enterprise Password Manager account, then you already know that 1Password secures access to your most important credentials, making them easy to manage and share when needed. 1Password SaaS Manager builds on the same simplicity and security, expanding your view to the entire SaaS and AI ecosystem, letting you see every app, every user, and every license. Instead of managing access to each app separately, or discovering compliance issues after the fact, it empowers your team to automate workflows and proactively enforce access policies with full visibility.
Ultimately, 1Password SaaS Manager provides a single place to track usage, reduce risk, and unlock savings, helping you bring AI and SaaS sprawl back under control.
The new reality for IT
Accessing new software used to be a strict top-down affair where IT departments decided who could use which apps and services. Since productivity tools moved to the cloud, many teams work differently. Employees and business units can now sign up for new apps without involving IT at all.
While that independence is great for productivity, it also creates blind spots. Shadow IT purchased on company cards, redundant licenses, and unapproved apps can pile up quickly. Each new account represents another source of spend and a potential security vulnerability. AI tools that are adopted through personal accounts or expense reports are often priced by consumption rather than seat, which means costs can scale in ways a traditional software budget was never built to anticipate.
Manually monitoring AI and SaaS usage is unrealistic for most teams. The first challenge often isn’t deciding what to do with a new app, it’s discovering that it exists in the first place.
IT teams are juggling these challenges alongside the day-to-day work of onboarding, offboarding, and maintaining access across the business. Offboarding a single employee might require interacting with a dozen different systems. Managing true-ups or contract renewals can mean chasing usage reports in different apps and invoices across departments.
1Password SaaS Manager is built to bring order to that chaos. By bringing AI and SaaS discovery, access control, and spend optimization together in one place, the product gives you the tools and insight to support how people work today, fast, flexibly, and distributed, all while staying secure.
What this guide covers
In this guide, you’ll learn how 1Password SaaS Manager can streamline your workflows, strengthen your identity security strategy, and help with:
- Discovery and shadow AI & IT: Why visibility matters, and how 1Password SaaS Manager helps you see every app and AI tool in use across your organization.
- AI spend management: How to bring visibility and financial discipline to token-based AI spend SaaS apps.
- Employee onboarding and offboarding: How automated provisioning and deprovisioning saves time and prevents mistakes.
- Reducing IT tickets with access requests: How a self-serve catalog keeps employees moving and allows IT to trace and audit access decisions while focusing on higher-value work.
- Tracking and managing IT assets: Manage hardware alongside user accounts and app access for a comprehensive, user-centric view of access within the organization.
- Simplifying compliance with access reviews: Automate access reviews for high-risk apps and give auditors a clear record of every decision.
- Spend optimization: How usage insights help you control costs without slowing teams down.
Ready to dive in? In Chapter 2, we’ll walk through how IT teams can get full visibility over their entire SaaS ecosystem.