Name: 5 Ways Tool Sprawl Quietly Breaks Your IT Org
Uploaded: 2026-02-11T21:15:05.110Z
Duration: 1 h 15 min
Description: 5 Ways Tool Sprawl Quietly Breaks Your IT Org

Transcript for "5 Ways Tool Sprawl Quietly Breaks Your IT Org": Alright, folks. People are coming on in. We're gonna give it just another minute or two. Let's let everyone get settled and join. But as you're coming in, welcome. Thank you so much for taking time out of your day to be here with us. I'm really excited about today's session. It's about something that most IT teams seem to be dealing with whether they have a name for it or not. And so tool sprawl is what we're going with today. The slow act, accumulation of tools that really start out, you know, in a helpful way, but then kind of eventually make everything about your IT world harder and harder, and then that spills into the rest of your business. So, we're gonna keep everything today, really conversational and practical. So, people are people are here. There's people. Let's do it. This is not gonna be a slide heavy presentation, but we really wanna have a a good discussion based on what we see IT teams dealing with every day. And we're we're gonna cover the five ways that tool sprawl quietly breaks IT organizations. And we're gonna then we're gonna really spend some time on talking about what you can actually do about it. So, you should walk away with some good ideas and and thoughts, because I am joined by two fantastic folks who get to see this kind of problem firsthand across all different kinds of environments. So whether you're a small business or an enterprise shop, my two friends here, Tyler and June, should have some some insightful stuff to to talk through. First, my my really good friend Tyler Coltas. Tyler works closely with tons of IT teams on their day to day operations, and he really has a front row seat to see how tool sprawl shows up in productivity, security, ownership challenges, stuff we'll be talking through. We also have June Salgado with us. June brings a strong perspective on system design, visibility, and how IT can move from like reactive firefighting to being much more strategic when they partner with the rest of organizations and the rest of their businesses. So as we go, leverage us. Definitely feel free to drop questions into the q and a. We've left time at the end for an open ended discussion. So we definitely wanna see those questions as they come up. I have some guys working in the background to make sure we get kind of the best questions seated to us, but we'll tackle everything we can. Let's dive in. I think the first question maybe, Tyler, let's level set. Right? Like, when we're talking about tool sprawl, what are we really talking about here? Yeah. Excited to be here and talking about all of this stuff with you guys. But tool sprawl is I think we've all seen it. It's just a slow accumulation of like all of these different point solutions, and it rarely comes from like bad decisions. It's like well intentioned tools that get added to quickly solve problems, maybe department by department or team by team. You know, we're all running fast. You get a point solution for each thing, but your process ends up suffering. That's what we're here to talk about today. Sounds good to me. June, why do you think this topic really hits such a such a nerve? Like, now I feel like in 2026, it's definitely kind of coming to a head in a way. Yeah. It's I mean, it varies from so many different perspectives from, you know, maintaining a good security posture to, you know, also having a budget friendly environment. I think not knowing what you're spending money on and when it comes to those audits, it can get pretty tricky. Yeah. Audits are everyone's favorite. I'm sure if anyone wants to chime in about their audit problems, feel free. Alright. Before we get too far in, let's go into the five specific ways that tool sprawl causes these problems. We're gonna step back for just a second and talk about how it starts because a lot of teams, you know, folks aren't waking up and saying we're gonna decide to build a messy tech stack. Right? So maybe, Tyler, let's let's start with you and your experience. How how does this sneak into organizations? How does it start? Yeah. It's a little bit of what I was saying before. Right? Like, see a problem, you look for a reasonable tool to solve it, because we're all running really fast here. And then this just kinda keeps happening, right? You're not looking at the bigger picture. So your team starts to grow, you adopt more SaaS tools, and then you need to add like a layer on top of that, an identity tool to consolidate management. You need a ticketing system so that people in different departments can let you know when they need access to certain things. You need a workflow automation tool to then like make all these things talk together. So it's like, though you start adopting point solutions to solve one problem, and then you adopt more tools to solve the connectivity problem, and then more tools to solve the reporting problem. It's just like tools beget tools in the modern ecosystem. Yeah. Kinda make me feel like it's not necessarily like these big decisions folks are making. It's more like small stuff that they're solving little bit by bit. Right? Yeah. Yeah. 100%. Like it's it's small choices. Problems get small, get solved at like the department level. And then, you know, decision makers have their own preferences for tools, like their little pet projects. So, you know, making stuff talk to each other as people add in their own pet projects and pet tools becomes the really big challenge here. What about June? Maybe from your perspective, like at what point do these decisions compound, you know, into, like, real operational pains? Yep. No. Truly, the tipping point's like when the tools overlap and no one knows which one is the source of truth. This is the boiling frog stage, if you will, of IT IT management. Everything looks green on the uptime dashboards, but the underlying complexity is silently eroding your efficiency. Yeah. It's like hard to deal with, like, something that's getting updated and changed along the way, but suddenly there's a ton of things happening like that. It's definitely a pain. So for all the folks listening in, if this is starting to sound familiar, you're definitely not alone. Most IT stacks go through this at some point. We'd love to hear in the chat about your current experiences or how you've struggled with this in the past. Tyler and June, mean, sounds like tool sprawl isn't caused by bad decisions or careless teams. It's definitely not intentional like we're talking through. It's more like a byproduct of moving fast without a full system level view. So with that in context, let's talk about the ways this shows up day to day for teams. The first one is productivity. IT and productivity really do go hand in hand. We obsess over it. So whether it's enabling teams or departments or leveling up IT across your entire org or maybe it's like focusing on how we spend our own time as IT and, like, how we get our own IT stuff done. Most teams I've been a part of and I've talked to throughout the years are busy all day, every day, and a problem that often gets lost in the sauce, so to speak, is how much effort it takes to get even the really simple things done. So, Tyler, like, when IT teams tell you they're constantly busy but still falling behind, what's really going on under their hood, right? Yeah, I think a lot of teams get caught in this reactive cycle. So there's just things that you have to get done to keep your business running. It can be simple stuff like literally giving people their stuff, their devices, their applications, access to the network. And then when things break, right, you're under the microscope inside of IT to get this stuff working as quickly as possible. So I think at its core, people are just like building processes outside of the tools. It's like spreadsheets, it's tickets, it's post it notes, you know, whatever your chosen form is. But you know, I've seen companies with thousands of employees that are running off of spreadsheets that are old enough to vote. Right? So it's just a lot of manual processes that keep you stuck in that reactive cycle. What does like routine tasks look like when you've got a ton of tools involved? It's just, we're talking tool sprawl, but it's like people sprawl. It's scope scope crawl sprawl. There's multiple people. There's multiple departments and tickets to make these, like, easy things happen. Right? Or some serious middleware, like ingenuity to make these things talk to each other. But even that is a job in and of itself. Routine tasks become complicated by the people, the tools, everything that goes in hand with solving them. Spider webs of IT worlds. It's really hard to see and measure. Right? Like, it because it's everywhere. It's when it when it when it's everywhere in your in your tech stack, it it becomes really hard to see. For everybody listening, if a task, you know, if it should take five minutes, like, and it regularly turns into a half hour because you're bouncing between systems, this is really what we're talking about and where the value of, like, a system like Ripley and IT comes in, and we'll talk a little bit more about that in a bit. But the the core here is productivity doesn't really collapse overnight. It just keeps eroding through context switching and duplicate work and manual processes and things that no one planned for because, you know, they thought they were solving a problem with another tool. Right? So let's talk about where risk kinda comes in and security and compliance. We mentioned audits a minute ago, but this is the part that really keeps like IT leaders and managers and sys admin up at night, security. So our number two way is security. What makes tool sprawl especially tricky here is that the biggest risks are not really obvious typically. So, Tyler, where do you see security issues showing up when all this is happening and tools are fragmented all over the place? Yeah. I think the obvious answer is like offboarding. Right? When somebody has access to corporate resources when they shouldn't, that is bad for pretty obvious reasons. But the more pervasive challenge is like around authorization that I've seen. So managing what groups somebody is a part of inside of the system, what data you're privy to. By extension, the more tools that you have, the harder this problem gets. So when we're talking about sprawl, it's just a compounding issue. So when you've got multiple admins that are granting access to things on an ad hoc basis, things just get bad really fast. And even if you're doing your quarterly access reviews, like it's a manual process and there's quite a bit of time in between those quarters where people errantly have access to these things. So like, obviously off boarding is bad, but, but what I see most is like, I have access to the files that I shouldn't. I'm an administrator when I shouldn't be. Like, that's that's what keeps me up at night. Yeah. Do you think there's like a single moment or like scenario where this this is, like, even more risky than usual? I mean, we're talking about kinda like it sounds like it's all the time, but are are there are there moments or or things to keep keep an eye on? Yeah. Well, like, off board like, there's employee events. Right? Like off boarding change management flows, you just get promoted. Those are I think where people realize that there's issues. But there's also like I hired a new security person or even worse, you're doing an audit, Right? Somebody comes in and they're just like, show me your stuff. And then you have a ton of problems, that's terrible. Yeah. But like risks are always there and audits are just shining a light on it. There's a quote that one of my CTOs early in my career said, paranoia is not retroactive. And that's like always stuck with me because like you need to build these security controls well in advance of when you're going through these audits. Because you can't like there's a million different metaphors here, but once the genie is out of the bottle, once the box is open, you know, Pandora, you can't put this stuff back in. So like, fix this now when there's still time. June, you look like you got something to say about audits and compliance in these environments. What do you think? Yeah. Yeah. No. Audits do tend to become a nightmare because sprawl destroys identity control altogether. Without a centralized kill switch, IT must manually pull user lists from dozens of fragmented consoles to prove ex employees can't access data. This often reveals ghost users or of orphaned accounts, instant red flags that prove your off boarding process is broken. So it ultimately shatters data lineage, making it impossible to track where sensitive information lives when data moves through unvetted shadow apps. The chain of custody is lost and security policies like MFA become inconsistently applied. It's kind of like an invisible threat to a lot of people in the business too. Right? I mean, what, what, what do you think about that? Is that dangerous? Like in that context, the idea that folks just don't even know what's going on? Yeah. And I've seen it quite a few times, especially the number of startups that I've worked for. Like, the sheer volume of software leads to vendor risk fatigue, chasing security certifications for, you know, 50 niche tools instead of 10 core vendors become overwhelming. The complexity the complexity hides cascading permissions where a single vulnerability in a minor forgotten app can provide a backdoor for a major security breach, turning routine routine compliance check into a high stakes crisis. Yeah, for sure. And like thinking about offboarding, think about your own offboarding folks like but I mean, I know like, I've been in scenarios where even when I like, worked really hard to automate offboarding, know, with with kind of like script kiddie ways and stuff like you always have like, tools that folks never told you about or you forgot about. Right? So for everybody listening, if if offboarding or access reviews feel stressful every single time, this this is why. Like what we're talking about is why that offboarding moment is really painful. So Tyler and June, the risk isn't one bad tool. It's what falls through the cracks between everything. Right? So let's talk about the next way. Number three, ownership. So on the quiet side of one of the pause. Alright. Let's talk about the next problem tools sprawl creates, ownership. So one of the quiet effects of this sprawl is that ownership starts to disappear. So tools get added, but responsibilities and, like, the right kind of role based access isn't everywhere. It's it's kinda like a a crapshoot as to who owns what. Right? So oops. Sorry. Tools get added, but responsibility doesn't always come with them. So, June, in a sprawl heavy environment, who who owns the tools? Yeah. Ownership is usually decentralized and fragmented. While IT might technically own the infrastructure and core suite, the vast majority of the sprawl is owned by individual business units or even single employees. Yeah. What happens then, like when ownership's unclear? Like, do you see like common problems from that? Yeah. If poorly defined or shared too broadly, the environment shifts from decentralized to operationally paralyzed. Without a clear single point of contact, the responsibility for the tool's health falls into a gap where everyone assumes someone else is handling it. Tyler, how does this show up when something actually breaks or like you're in the middle of needing to change some operational stuff? Yeah. I I mean, building off of what June was saying, like, it takes a long time to figure out who actually can solve one of these problems. And, you know, my personal horror story is sometimes I find out that I was the person that needed to solve the problem. I didn't know that I had that access and I wasn't super familiar. Like I set up a tool years ago. Right? And I didn't know I was the only remaining super admin inside of this. So, I think they the answer here is like role based access control and just really defining, from the get go, like, who is going to own this and have a good reason for why as well. It just shows up when like when stuff breaks and you need to plan in advance for for how you're going to address this. So like, at the end of the day, it's really like tons of slower response times and more firefighting, not only by the IT team, but like, kind of could be anybody who owns a tool. Right? So Yeah. 100%. It's it's just gonna lead to more more people, more cooks in the kitchen, and then unclear ownership, like June was saying. Like if you don't have a directly responsible individual, you're just wasting time, before you actually can solve the problem to like figure out who owns the problem. Yeah. So, for everybody out there, if you've ever heard or said, I thought someone else owned that, this this is kinda what we're talking about when ownership breaks down and how everything starts to slow down just because of that that fact in and of itself. So let's move on to the next one. Number four, we're gonna talk about cost and not really the kind that shows up neatly in a spreadsheet or like, you know, something the CFO calls out explicitly or talking about licensing costs because that's where most people will kinda like think right away. Right? Like tons of tools cost tons of money. But I think that's rarely the realest or biggest problem. Right? So, Tyler, why do you think IT teams feel understaffed even as their budgets are growing and stuff like that? Partly because they are a lot of the time, IT teams are the glue that holds like this whole SaaS ecosystem together. Like licensing costs are really easy to forecast, But the operational costs of like making all of this work together is a black box. And the problems that like IT has to solve, they aren't isolated to just IT. You have to make sure that like everything works. So more tools, more problems, and people just don't really think about like everyone is trying to solve their little point solution and it just falls on IT a lot of the time to like make this a co a cohesive data flow that solves actual business problems. What kinds of work then end up consuming time that like no one planned for in that scenario? Yeah. I mean, I'm seeing savvy buyers kind of address this in the buying cycle more and more often now. A lot of the time it's in the wake of like a failed implementation or just like a project that never got off the ground with other vendors. Because you need to budget time how to like learn how to effectively manage these new tools that you're buying. You need to, like understand how it's going to interact with this larger ecosystem of tools and build that integration structure. And then, like beyond all the technical stuff, you have to get buy in from all of these people. Like IT almost ends up being this like project manager for something they didn't even buy in the first place to to understand how it's supposed to work. So like internal project management and like effective onboarding and this integration overhead really get over overlooked when you're in these buying cycles from what I've seen. What about June? What's your perspective on like some costs that leaders either underestimate or like miss entirely? Yeah. And I mentioned this earlier, but complexity compounding is is essentially triggered. A silent drain in which hidden costs such as integration labor, human middleware, far outweighs SaaS sticker prices. This digital sludge creates an integrations axe, forcing engineers to maintain brittle connections instead of innovating, and context switching tacks that can waste up to 20% of an employee's daily focus. Beyond lost productivity, Sprawl adds a massive security surcharge, turning routine audits into months long forensic hunts for ghost users and fragmented data. Why are these costs like really hard to see? Like, it's hard to see or visualize them until they've compounded. Right? Yeah. So they remain hidden because they manifest as organizational friction rather than line item expenses. This creates a delayed feedback loop in which, the true weight of technical debt becomes visible only during a crisis, such as a failed audit or security breach long after the complexity has become structural. I held a webinar a couple months ago that talked about it really focused on, like, IT burnout. And some of the stuff some of the stuff y'all are bringing up makes me think so hard about, like, the the whole IT stack is, like, approaching burnout. So I just keep laughing about that in the back of my mind. So for anyone who's wondering why onboarding takes longer or tickets never seem to slow down, what we're talking about is a huge reason why. Right? The the real cost of this tool sprawl and spread out of all your stuff is time, focus, and energy being completely sucked up by, like, learning new tools or addressing an update for all these different things that have happened. But let's talk about the long term impact this has on IT and and the IT teams as a function and as a whole. I think IT really loses their strategic leverage when all this starts to happen. So our our last little way that that all your spread out tools impact you the most is how IT is perceived across the business. June, I wanna go back to you, like, how does how does this then push IT and keep them in that reactive role? Yeah. So IT is in a state of tactical churn due to sprawl where the sheer volume of fragmented apps forces teams to prioritize low volume firefighting over strategic innovation. Instead of building new capabilities, engineers become human middleware. This constant reactive pressure eats the innovation budget. It turns IT into a bottleneck as they're too busy patching the gaps between disconnected tools to focus on proactive security or long term infrastructure. Kinda sounds just like every day is chaos. Tyler, what do you think about IT's ability to drive bigger initiatives or improvements? I mean, that seems like something you should be doing, right? Yeah. I mean, it's a killer. Like, when you're stuck in this constant state of break fix, there's we're talking about all of these operational problems and just like never coming up for air, but it's even hard to keep morale up on the team. Like if you're never looking at the bigger picture, you're solving systemic problems. It just isn't any fun to work there and unfortunately it can lead to more turnover for otherwise great IT admins. What do you think gets sacrificed the most when you're stuck in that mode? I mean, it's a lot of things. Right? It kinda depends on your business. AI is the hottest craze right now, and I think IT people are pretty uniquely technical to build some actually cool stuff that isn't just like summarizing text. Right? Like to build some of that greater automation, but it could be a digital transformation, like finally getting rid of that domain controller that you've been wanting to get rid of for a decade now. Or like, again, the people themselves, like it's just no fun being in maintenance mode and it becomes much harder to keep talent when you can't do the cool parts of our job. Yeah. So to sum it up, folks, I mean, I think if IT feels more like just a service desk and you're not really getting those moments where you you and your team feel like a strategic partner in the business, this is often why. So tool and system sprawl doesn't just slow your IT teams down. It limits what you can become. So with that in mind, let's talk about the fixes and what teams can really start to do to turn this around. I want you to walk out of this meeting having some some action items and thoughts. So keep the questions and comments flowing because we've talked through those five ways that, you know, this all breaks IT, but we're gonna talk now about all the practical stuff. So if you're thinking, yikes, this is us, you know, what does fixing it really look like? First, the fix one what does fixing this all actually look like? So, Tyler, let's start with productivity. How does rippling IT help reduce the day to day friction that we talked about that earlier? I don't think anyone is surprised on the rippling webinar. The answer is rippling IT. Rippling IT, like, it does give you one place to manage all of these different things. Users, devices, applications, security policies. And like there's a lot to be said for just like not context switching, not bouncing around these systems. But there's also this like workflow automation engine under the covers that removes a lot of wasted effort. So, know, having one system to do all of this just like removes a lot of the noise that we've been talking about. I've been in the rippling world for several years now. And thinking back on like having and working with a separate identity tool and a separate MDM tool just seems like the stone ages to me now. So it's really interesting to kinda like really put myself back in that mindset and kinda think outside of the box where it can be all together. So what's an example of work that disappears when all that's centralized? Yeah. Like, it's the stuff that nobody wants to do. There's fewer tickets. There's fewer emails. Like, you get rid of these spreadsheets. And a lot of this stuff isn't, like, glamorous, but, like, it feels so good when you don't have to do these things anymore. And you can tell I'm a rippling cheerleader, I'm bought into this stuff on client and center. Rippling is built on stuff that happens to you as an employee. Like I'm being hired, I'm being promoted, I'm moving. We know all the things that need to happen as a part of that change across your whole business, right? Like documents, devices, applications, benefits, everything. It's just it's a really cool thing to see. I agree. June, what about the second big issue we talked about was security. How does Rippling IT help close those gaps, between tools there? Yeah. Rippling IT, ties identity and access directly to the employee life cycle. When someone joins, moves, or leaves, access changes automatically across systems, which reduces the risk that things get missed. When you're automating identity via the employee life cycle, it replaces security lag with a universal kill switch. It eliminates the human error inherent in manual checklists. Managing access tool by tool creates a fragmented defense where IT must touch dozens of consoles inevitably inevitably leaving a ghost account active in niche apps long after a user departs. By centralizing permissions, you shift from a best effort posture to a guaranteed revocation, ensuring that access reflects employment status in real time rather than being a backlog of unfinished administrative tickets. I think, something I'm always impressed by is like the idea of approvals, like as, as departments and orgs grow, like it always becomes something that is on your to do list to like really lock in the way approvals work. So, having that all really consolidated and happening automatically is super cool. The third issue we talked about y'all was ownership. Tyler, what does Ripley and IT do to help restore clear accountability in that kind of scenario? Yeah. Like, the system of record for all things IT, we're centralizing administration. It's just one place to know, like, who is the admin for Google? Who is the admin for Slack? Why do these people have access? And you actually bring up an interesting point with approvals as well. Like it's one pane of glass and there is like centralized or clear ownership, but you can build any sort of checks and balances that you want inside of the system, with those approval flows. Right? Like before you deliver a device, maybe IT needs to sign off on it. But before somebody, you know, gets a big raise, that has to go to the finance team. Right? So it's like centralized ownership or a centralized place to manage ownership in whatever way makes sense for your business. How do you think that kind of changes incident response or like, you know, audits is definitely going be top of mind for a lot of the people in the audience, I think? Yeah. You are fortunate enough to have gone through audits, the hardest part is just proving why people have the access that they do and that you are actually following through on the controls that you've put in place. And so that single pane of glass to actually prove all of these things and do your reports and audit controls, sorry bug, is like a huge benefit when you're going through that. Like an auditor can just look at Rippling and be like, Oh, that actually makes sense. So, and then incidents as well, same sort of idea. Right. June, we talked a lot about costs that don't show up like on a budget. How does Rippling IT help reduce that invisible work? Yeah. You you'll hear this say you'll hear us say this all the time when it comes to Rippling IT automates provisioning, offboarding, and device workflows that usually require manual effort across tools that saves time without removing flexibility. Alright. Last one. Y'all can flip a coin for this one. But how does using Rippling help IT teams move out of reactive mode and back into strategic roles? Sure. I could take this one. Like when the basics are automated, consistently, like they run automatically, and consistently, you just get that time back. It allows you to focus on your security posture. You can build out a better employee experience, and really just focus on long term planning instead of maintenance. It just breaks the cycle entirely. What do you think changes in like how the rest of the business views IT when all that starts to happen? Yeah. You become a strategic partner, like June was saying instead. I think every IT person has heard the joke, Nothing is working. What do I pay you for? Or, Everything is working. What do I pay you for? It's like a thankless job to some degree. But I think you can challenge that second part. Like, when you surprise your employees with this awesome experience, like when they get onboarded or how easy their promotion was, it not only feels good for you, it feels good for the company. And people are happier, your business is more secure, and then you can focus on the big picture. So instead of slamming through tickets, you become this strategic partner, not a bottleneck. It's a beautiful thing when people want to loop IT in because they're really good at solving problems instead of just, you know, always reacting to the next thing that, that broke or the next thing you can't log into. Yeah. Totally agree. So across those five things that we've discussed today, productivity, security, ownership, cost, and strategy, the theme is really the same. I mean, Rippling gives IT teams a foundation that reduces sprawl without forcing disruption. I I really wanna thank Tyler and June for joining us today. I know that they they have to run to another meeting, so cheers, guys. Thank you so much for for hanging out and talking about this with me. Any any last comments, Tyler, June? Y'all y'all wanna say bye to everybody? Yeah. Thanks for having us. Yeah. This was a fun one. Hope it was helpful. Thanks, everybody. Awesome, guys. I really appreciate everybody joining us today. Lots of stuff to talk about and consider for sure. Thanks for submitting your questions. You should have seen a poll pop up, so I hope everybody got a chance to respond to that with, with any comments. And if you wanna see Ripley live, like Tyler's team, and June is on that team, they meet with people every single day and talk about what Ripley looks like in those environments. So if you wanna know exactly what this kind of stuff looks like in your environment and things that you can, like, instantly impact changes with, hit and ask for a, a live demo because they're they're good folks to talk to about that stuff. So you you'll definitely walk away with some more information than you had before. Cheers. I hope everybody has a great day. Bye. Hey, folks. Thanks for tuning in. We have some good questions. We're gonna go through those in just a moment. But real quick call out for our next webinar is going to be a really good talk with the head of IT from Notion, Edgar Cecito. He and Michael have a really good conversation about, like, the shift between when you start to become that that leader and become someone who has more of a voice in your organization and kind of how to prepare for that and things you can be thinking of to to make sure that that transition is not painful and kinda benefits your entire IT team and your stack. So awesome. Real quick, thanks for joining. Ripley sponsored this webinar today. We are a unified IT platform that's not are we we're still good? That's that's really unique in the sense that it binds your MDM solution as the same as your identity solution, as the same as your full inventory solution, not just warehousing of things, but, like, automatic destruction of devices and things like that. There's a lot to talk through. So if you're interested in booking a demo, we're gonna throw a a point a across your screen to sign up for a full demo where someone will be able to talk deeply about your specific stack and then what it would look like to put this kind of solution in place. I think there's another slide just kind of showing that all that data is being tied together, and that's really the unique thing at Rippling where when you off board someone, you can say they're being terminated on this day, but they're gonna have their system access for only another few hours. And offboarding rules that where Google stuff can all happen and take care of your Microsoft Office, you know, by mail forwarding and, like, who owns data, all built into, like, automated offboardings where IT has set up the rules but doesn't have to be there every single moment of the way. Final slide here is just that idea of all that data that can kinda be referenced and updated across your system stack using attribute mapping. So, like, if someone's job changes, it's gonna update that information in Google and Microsoft, and it might give them more password access in 1Password or our own internal password manager. So lots to consider. You heard about it today. So we're gonna announce the winner of the $500 gift card. But first, I wanna do I do wanna answer a couple of these questions that have come in. So Paul Faleo asked a couple of really good questions about, like, when cloud assets multiply in chaotic ways at larger scale. I think there are solutions out there. In in a rippling world, when you bind a new tool, you get really good optics into accounts that you have that are active active in your real environment versus, you know, these accounts are orphaned in this app that you've hooked up. So if you hooked up Google for the first time and you suddenly have a list of, like, all these Google accounts that don't have matching people in your organization, that's a good way to kinda, take a look at that kind of information. It kinda varies from, app to app, integration to integration, the the depth of the good information you can get across. Also had a question about what is what what if there's too much for new hires to, like, grasp? Can they still become productive? And what about, like, DX, like, the digital employee experience, I assume is what Paul's talking about here, and, like, metrics around, are people really taking advantage of the tools that you give them? That's where you wanna be running reports about, like, last login time versus who has access to what and be able to, like, kinda see really clear optics about who's using what and how frequently, things like that. Oscar asks, how do you quantify tool sprawl in a way that gets executive buy in? I like this answer. I think I think being able to make sure that if someone leaves the company or someone or you have a same day term or something sensitive like that going on, that you do have the ability, you know, for the right people to be able to trigger that kind of event effectively. It's it's not a good situation to be in where someone's on vacation and they're the only person who controls access on or off of a platform. Right? If you can't reach that person, that's not a good look. I think that's the quickest way to get, affected by in there is to to make that point. Florence asked, what's the biggest mistake companies make when trying to consolidate their stack? Oh, man. I see a lot of stuff, but I think you have to start with, like, a good inventory of your users. You have to have good data going in. Right? So, like, doing an audit in an internal way before you were to suddenly purchase a tool and jump in, like, really knowing exactly what all you need to control and having a good relationship with your org your your entire org and making sure that you know the leaders in the sales org and you know the leaders in marketing and what tools they're using And being able to have that in an honest conversation where no one's, like, hiding a random, you know, Adobe Creative license over here and someone's not hiding access to, like, story lane over here, like, behind guardrails. I think that's where, like, true teamwork and kind of leadership actually comes in. Henry asks, where do the most dangerous security gaps typically hide in fragmented stacks? Yeah. I saw someone talking today about, like, even the idea of a computer maybe that is getting recycled and gonna be used for a new hire, and it wasn't fully recycled the right way. It wasn't, you know, wiped the right way. And whoever set it back up for someone didn't have any processes in place, and it was used by someone who had more access before them. And that access had somehow been given, you know, maybe thinking like a Microsoft stack at a device level. And suddenly, this new person had, like, full blown admin access because their device had been given, like, certain access in certain ways. That kind of thing, when you don't have, like, processes in place, I mean, I think that's the the biggest kind of security gap. But the idea of, like, shadow IT to me is always gonna be, like, the scariest one. It's like if you don't actually trust your people and, like, know what people are using, that's that's a a huge pain moment. Last little question we have here is from John. How do you prevent tool sprawl from creeping back up after you clean it up? Yeah. I I think maybe, like, when you it depends on how, like, organizations purchase stuff. So, like, if you're using if if you're using software that's locked down, you're locked down. But if you have the ability to, like, buy stuff for your sub department with a corporate card and there are no guardrails on that, I think that's extremely painful because suddenly there's not approval process for, like, buying software. So the idea that, like, again, you have a good communication channel open with everybody, and they understand that if they need to talk to IT about purchasing software, it's not gonna be this painful process. It's gonna be something that can be easily stood up and gone through the right channels because it's easier for you to take care of that in a way that, like, you set up if they want automated approvals. Or if they want only, you know, Joe Blow to be the guy who answers the approvals, like, you can set it up exactly how they want easily if you've got everything on lock. So when when you make it easy for people, I think you can prevent a lot of further sprawl, at least from outside the IT org. Awesome. Today's raffle winner is Brian Bethelmi from Manncon. Awesome, dude. That's that's some good video games, or I think I'd buy a new Staub pot. I'd buy a new kitchen utensil probably. I love kitchen utensils. Awesome. Well, I really appreciate everybody joining us today. It was a good conversation. I hope I hope you learned something or at least got you thinking about different stuff. Remember to request a demo if you wanna talk to a solutions consultant at Ripley and really get in the weeds about exactly what you can, you know, consider with this kind of product. There's a there's a lot going on, and inventory management is now available kind of in any capacity. So, that's a totally new thing to kinda consider. Awesome. Wednesday. I hope you all have a great one. Cheers.