Tech businesses move quickly, taking their products and services to the market and aiming for hypergrowth. Regardless of size, these scaling organizations must have the right formula to help them reach their goals, and a critical component of the equation is cost management. Once considered a mere afterthought when things start to become messy, many prioritize it now.
Your investments—including software-as-a-service platforms—must always generate a return. If not, you’ll fail to earn a profit and enough money to sustain your operations. So the question is, how do you decrease your SaaS spend? While there are many ways to go about it, one method that’s proven to be effective is role-based access control or RBAC.
Role-based access control—what is it?
As its name implies, role-based access control refers to the control over access and groups based on specifically defined roles. Rudimentary types of RBAC had been implemented ad hoc in many forms on various systems since the early seventies. However, more formal models weren’t proposed until the nineties.
Role-based access control can decrease SaaS expenditure by restricting access to specific applications and processes. As a result, organizations may conserve or use their resources more cost-effectively, like storage, memory, and bandwidth.
What are the benefits of RBAC?
The role of RBAC isn’t limited solely to cost reduction, and there are a number of ways in which it can benefit a business.
- Aids in compliance. Much like how license management software can help an organization stay on top of and remain compliant with all of their software licenses, RBAC can help companies meet their regulator and statutory requirements for confidentiality and privacy since executives, and IT professionals can manage the way all data is used and accessed. This is especially vital for financial and healthcare institutions that tend to manage a considerable volume of data like PCI and PHI.
- Boosts operational efficiency. Beyond compliance, role-based access control presents a more streamlined approach. Instead of spending time administering access control to the lower levels, it makes alignment of all roles to the business structure possible. As a result, users will be able to fulfill their duties more autonomously and efficiently, leading to a higher level of productivity in turn.
- Reduces IT support and administrative work.With RBAC, your organization can minimize the need for admin duties and IT support like password changes and paperwork whenever employees are recruited or their roles are changed. Instead, role-based access control can switch or add functions immediately, implementing them across all platforms, applications, and operating systems. Moreover, it minimizes the occurrence of human error when it comes to assigning permissions. It can also help in the integration of third-party users to the network by setting the roles.
Conclusion
One of the core functions of a business is cost reduction. After all, the expenditure of an organization determines the profit it makes. With role-based access control, it’s possible to keep your SaaS expenditure lower and benefit the organization in many other ways.
