Survey Confirms Growing Reliance on SaaS Tools in the Enterprise, Taxing IT Professionals

Survey Confirms Growing Reliance on SaaS Tools in the Enterprise, Taxing IT Professionals

Managing multiple tools makes it harder to ensure a quality user experience.

The exponential growth of enterprise tools-from unified communications and collaboration (UC&C) to unified communications and collaboration as a service (UCaaS) and software as a service (SaaS)-has dramatically increased the job complexity of IT professionals responsible for ensuring network performance and security. With all of these services and applications in use, the probability that users will be adversely impacted when issues arise on the network has put tremendous pressure on the IT teams tasked with supporting them.

This year's NETSCOUT survey has been expanded beyond UC&C and UCaaS to include SaaS in recognition of this growing trend. SaaS tools share and impact the transport network, creating complexities that influence user experience and the efforts by IT to ensure the best performance.

Taking into account the expanding adoption of SaaS makes good sense. The SaaS market in 2023 was valued at approximately $197 billion and was projected to reach $232 billion this year, according to one report. With so many tools in use, IT must figure out how to better manage user experience enterprise-wide. Vendor management and problem-solving issues with these services could prove particularly challenging for IT organizations. This is especially true when it involves important applications-for example, a customer relationship management app such as Salesforce or an electronic medical record application such as Epic, which can directly impact revenue or swift delivery of patient care.

High-Quality User Experience Is Paramount

It goes without saying, that making sure users have the best experience is the single most important measure of any tool's effectiveness. This is validated by the NETSCOUT survey, which found that 95 percent of respondents feel that user experience issues impact the value of a SaaS platform. With SaaS tools becoming ever-more prevalent in today's enterprise environments, ensuring a high-quality user experience is vital.

Diving a little deeper, the survey revealed that 76 percent of companies increased the number of SaaS tools and applications they used over the past year, with 90 percent of companies reporting they had six or more SaaS tools and applications. In fact, the survey found that 59 percent of enterprise-level companies support 11 or more of such tools and applications, while a small but sizeable minority of enterprises (18 percent) manage more than 20.

On a side note, 87 percent of companies with 10 or more UCaaS platforms have increased the number of SaaS tools and apps they used over the last year, adding to the complexity of the challenge for IT in assuring performance and user experience.

The survey also confirmed the rather intuitive assumption that the larger the enterprise, the more likely it is to report managing higher numbers of SaaS tools and applications. 53 percent of companies with $10 billion or more in revenue supported more than 16 SaaS applications.

The Greater the Tool Sprawl, the Greater the Need for Visibility

With so many SaaS and UCaaS tools in play, IT faces tremendous complexity to ensure everything is working at peak performance. In short, the more platforms employees use, the more platforms there are for IT to monitor and support. With multiple platforms, from multiple vendors, and with users all over the world-often in noncorporate settings-rapid troubleshooting to protect performance and user experience can be particularly challenging.

This is where NETSCOUT's independent vendor approach can make a real difference. By leveraging packet monitoring at scale, IT is able to gain deeper visibility into platform performance, which allows teams to identify potential issues and speed up time to repair. Independent third-party monitoring of all SaaS tools makes it possible to more effectively manage critical applications, ensuring a superior user experience, which is absolutely vital to the health of the business.

Learn more in our comprehensive report "UCaaS and Today's Enterprise: The True Cost of Outages and Help Desk Support."