IRONSCALES Views Spend Through a "Single Pane of Glass"

About IRONSCALES

IRONSCALES is the leading cloud email security platform for the enterprise that uses artificial intelligence and human insights to stop advanced phishing attacks that bypass traditional security solutions. The Atlanta-based tech company is ranked on the Deloitte Technology Fast 500™ and has more than 150 employees all over the world.

Alex Paquette, Chief Operating Officer at IRONSCALES, manages the company’s global operations. Prior to IRONSCALES, he led global success and support teams for enterprise-level companies. 

Mimi Huang, Program Manager at IRONSCALES, deploys efficient programs across the business, including managing and enforcing the company’s software procurement policy. 

The Challenge

Eliminate overspending and establish a procurement policy with more visibility

In a growth-stage cybersecurity organization, the team will make swift decisions in sacrifice of process so they can grow quickly. In the early days at IRONSCALES, this meant each department had full autonomy to purchase the software they needed in order to get their jobs done.

Company revenue notably grew 444% over three years, but the team struggled to keep track of spend across multiple teams in different countries. Their spreadsheet method wasn’t cutting it. The lack of full visibility into spend only magnified as the company grew, leading to overspend and duplicative tools.

“We had limited, disparate, and inaccurate visibility,” Paquette shared. “One of the big factors for wanting to move to a solution like Tropic is we needed visibility. We needed to know what we were using and have a process for approving purchases.” 

The Solution

Put software purchases through a single pane of glass

A better understanding of company spend starts with putting purchases through “a single pane of glass,” Paquette said.

Tropic now gives IRONSCALES one place to manage approaching $1M in annual software spend where they:

• Collect relevant information needed about a purchase upfront through an easy-to-use intake form
• Auto-route the request through the appropriate reviewers and approvers depending on the purchase type 
• Store contracts in one place and create a trackable renewal calendar with reminders and notifications

IRONSCALES team got a clearer picture of their spend, even uncovering a few point solutions that were previously unaccounted for. 

“The best way to get visibility into our spend was to put in processes, requests, and approvals in Tropic, “ Paquette said. “When we discovered there's a better way to do it, I think that opened our eyes to the inefficiencies we faced beforehand.”

Establish purpose when launching a new procurement process

For companies looking to build a scalable procurement process, Paquette advised that all relevant stakeholders need to be part of the initial planning process. At IRONSCALES, the finance, operations, and compliance teams came together and mapped out the steps needed to approve a purchase. 

“It forces the conversations for alignment across CFOs, COOs, and different department leaders,” Paquette added. “That's a good thing. For a company that's scaling quickly, those conversations get lost without a solution like Tropic.”

Mapping their procurement process for Tropic actually gave the team deeper insight into purchasing dynamics, according to Huang, who regularly tracks these purchases in Tropic.

“We have been able to get visibility into who's actually making the decisions behind purchasing platforms,” she added. “It's often the middle managers that put in the request and make the moves to purchase these platforms. That is helpful in understanding where the power is coming from.”

Once they determined their new procurement process, Paquette and team built their custom approval workflows in Tropic - using rules to assign review and approval tasks when needed. Tropic also makes it easy if the team decides to cancel a software contract by capturing documentation about the cancellation and notifying the appropriate stakeholders. 

“The sooner we get it into Tropic, it actually saves time over the long run,” Paquette added. “You're not going to get a million questions after the fact and stall it out at the last second.”

Use data to support budget planning and decision making

IRONSCALES has seen nearly a 3x return on investment for Tropic, trusting both the platform to get a hold on spend, and Tropic’s services team to handle in-depth purchase negotiations. 

At the beginning of each planning cycle, Tropic gives Paquette a view of current spend, which is broken down by department and type of tool. Stakeholders can identify gaps and look for ways to optimize existing spend. 

With a straightforward process now in place to capture new purchase requests and track renewals, the executive team is better equipped to plan for growth. 

“If you want to be able to programmatically drive any sort of cost effectiveness, Tropic will allow you to do that, especially for the price,” Paquette added. “It's a bit of a no brainer.”