While “setting and forgetting” may be a concept that works in some areas of business, the world of cloud applications is certainly not one of those. In fact, it’s critical that those who are in the thick of tech advancements for their organizations, such as IT procurement, constantly evaluate the cloud applications utilized across the enterprise. Due to this team’s unique access and insight into their organization’s technology infrastructure, conducting a monthly evaluation is a best practice.

According to Cisco research, the average enterprise now uses more than 1,200 individual cloud services across multiple departments. Conducting monthly evaluations prevents oversight of spend and utilization that may otherwise fly under the radar.

Why must IT procurement evaluate their technology stacks on such a frequent basis? What should these practitioners be looking for when reviewing their organization’s cloud subscriptions? We’ll review those questions and more in this article.

Monthly Cloud Technology Evaluations Are Necessary
It’s no secret that cloud usage continues to grow at an incredible rate. In fact, according to a recent Gartner report: “Cloud application services (SaaS) is forecast to grow 20.3% in 2016, to $37.7 billion. As software vendors shift their business models from on-premises licensed software to public cloud-based offerings, this trend will continue.”

Because of the staggering growth of the cloud and the rapid adoption of new tech within the enterprise ecosystem, traditional IT procurement often lacks visibility into the software that those across the organization are actually subscribing to and using. This has become largely due to decentralized purchasing where decisions are made outside of the procurement function at the departmental or even individual level.

Subscription costs can add up quickly and cause redundancy and overlap in unnecessary features. And with multiple purchasing points in an organization, many companies fail to fully leverage their entire spend volume with their suppliers at renewal time, resulting in point renewals rather than fully leveraged strategic negotiations.