Triaging new business applications
You should aim to assign a status to all discovered applications. Regularly reviewing applications will keep your inventory accurate and give you the most complete view on the software in use.
The starting point for a review is the Application inventory. We recommend filtering to New business apps and then sorting the columns to prioritize.
The objective of this process is to mark applications as In review (or potentially jump straight to Managed or Accepted).
Application list filtered to "New business apps", sorted by "Spend" largest to smallest
Have any of the new applications detected come from your finance system?
If there is spend data then the application is likely to be formally managed and you will get a sense from the amount spent as to how wide-spread usage is. e.g. is it a small purchase that got expensed, or is a larger one-off amount?
Next steps:
- Investigate transaction details by clicking through to the application and view the Spend tab. This will give you a sense of when the application started being paid for, (and likely used).
- If you recognize the application and can assign a Business owner then mark the application as Managed.
- If you need to do more research, then move the application to In review.
Most other application discoveries will come from your Identity Provider, particularly if you use Google Workspace.
These applications tend to fall into four main categories:
Category | Detail | Next steps |
Personal Productivity tools
e.g. Evernote | Typically free or maybe someone pays for themselves. | Mark as Accepted, so long as they're recognizable and from a reputable supplier. |
Google Workspace Marketplace apps
e.g. ZIP Extractor | Click through to view the Trelica library data to see what the application does - often these are productivity related. | Check access risk and if it's low or the scopes requested seem acceptable then mark as Accepted |
Free trials | People often sign up for applications using "Sign in with Google" (or Microsoft) to trial some new software. | Mark as In review. |
New business applications | Click through to view the Trelica library data to see what the application does. Potentially a number of users might have signed up at the same time, indicating a team starting to use a new product. | Mark as In review, and check related applications to see if there's overlap with similar applications. |
If you have a lot of applications to review, consider adding the Created date column to your list and sorting based on this to see most recent or oldest applications discovered.
Last modified 1yr ago