As an employee, I feel an inherent sense of empowerment knowing that my employer will make available the right resources and services for me to do my job. I wanted to share a few data points from our partners to set the stage of what’s required to realize this goal:

• Skyhigh Networks’ Q2-2015 Cloud Adoption & Risk Report noted that the average employee uses 28 distinct cloud services, and the average organization now uses 1,083 cloud services.
• Netskope’s Summer 2015 Cloud Report noted that the average number of cloud apps per enterprise has declined slightly… a direct result of efforts to consolidate on sanctioned corporate apps. But, whopping 91.9% of all apps are not enterprise-ready.

My discussions with enterprises have revealed that many operational challenges can be synthesized to a common premise- how to manage across each “lifecycle” as the organization transitions to new, often line-of-business specific, SaaS applications. Additionally, IT faces a new set of tasks including directory consolidation, cloud app integration, user provisioning, security and governance compliance, etc. Each of these processes is necessary to enable the hundreds, if not thousands, of new services and onboard all their users. These services each span a set of lifecycle processes that can be associated with producing something, marketing something, selling something, supporting something, or even managing something (e.g. an employee’s career). Below is a subset of cloud applications by domain or lifecycle that one might expect to see within their organization:

Domain	Description	Example SaaS Services
Applicant Tracking Systems	Candidate recruiting lifecycle	Greenhouse Jazz (formerly Resumator)
Human Capital Management	Employee career and benefits lifecycle	Workday SuccessFactors
IT Service Management	IT service lifecycle	ServiceNow BMC Remedyforce Samanage
Office Productivity	Business productivity lifecycle	Office365 Google Apps for Work
File Share/Synch	Content collaboration and storage lifecycle	Box DropBox Egnyte
Marketing Automation	Lead and prospect lifecycle	Marketo Oracle Eloqua
Customer Relationship Management	Opportunity and customer lifecycle	SalesForce SugarCRM
Expense Management	Expense tracking lifecycle	SAP Concur Expensify

Note: All of these applications are SAML-enabled with connectors available from OneLogin’s app catalog. You can read more about The Power of Standards and the Momentum of SAML and SAML’s 10 Year Milestone. Also, see SAMLtool.com and Developers.onelogin.com.

As LoB’s continue investing in these SaaS applications with the promise of removing complexities and delivering greater efficiencies, the employees, their identities, and the processes that embody how these users access these cloud applications (i.e. the user experience) becomes the underlying drivers for success.