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 can also leave IT teams wondering: what’s everyone using, who has access to which resources, and how much exactly are we spending?

That’s where 1Password SaaS Manager comes in – a SaaS management platform (SMP) that helps IT teams discover every app in use, automate and revoke access, and optimize usage and spend. 

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 ethos of simplicity and security, expanding your view to the entire SaaS 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 SaaS sprawl back under control. 

The new reality for IT

Accessing new software used to be a strict top-down affair: 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 in minutes, often without involving IT at all. 

While that independence is great for productivity, it can also create blind spots. Tools purchased on company cards, redundant licenses, and unapproved apps – otherwise known as shadow IT – can pile up quickly. Each new account represents another source of spend and a potential security vulnerability. 

Manually monitoring 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. Once it surfaces, IT then has to determine whether to approve it, replace it, or let it be. 

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 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 IT: Why visibility matters, and how 1Password SaaS Manager helps you see every app in use across your organization.
• 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.