Four Steps to Understand and Control SaaS Usage and Spend with Snow for Cloud
The rate of cloud adoption continues to soar, so much so that cloud computing has become the new normal. This has led to a world where the very thing that makes SaaS attractive, ease of purchase and deployment, can lead to significant overspend. This challenge is further complicated when business units and individuals deploy SaaS applications without the involvement of IT – leaving IT without visibility or control of their SaaS environment and a lack of transparency as to what is being used, where and by whom. This is creating a Disruption Gap, a gulf between what IT understands about technology usage and what is actually occurring.
To counter this we have continued to advance our solutions with a laser focus on customer needs in an ever-evolving technology landscape – particularly the increased investment in cloud technologies. And, as cloud overspend is estimated at 30-35%, organizations are struggling to understand and manage their cloud usage. Snow for Cloud is built to solve the challenge of effective use of cloud capabilities in four easy steps: Discover, Manage, Optimize and Govern.
Discover
Just two years ago, with the launch of Snow License Manager 8, I wrote about how the datacenter was one of the most challenging environments in which to manage and optimize software spend. While the datacenter remains a key area of license and investment confusion, public cloud adoption is rapidly eclipsing datacenter spend as organizations build out centralized cloud teams to take advantage of the rapid and flexible deployment options cloud provides.
Regardless of whether it is a SAM Manager or finance or senior leadership, the inherent challenge is to first discover what is being used across the entire organization. Snow for Cloud provides complete discovery and identification for more than 1,000 SaaS applications, enabling the first step in managing and controlling spend.
Manage
A key part of delivering or supporting Digital Transformation is visibility, knowing where the organization has invested, down to a departmental, user or application level. The ability to drill down to focus your management efforts on those subscriptions that are most extensively deployed or are most expensive enables management of your SaaS estate like never before.
Out of the box, Snow for Cloud provides automated entitlement import for the most critical SaaS vendors such as Office 365, SalesForce, Dropbox, Zendesk, Cisco WebEx, Box and Google G Suite.
Optimize
The third step in improving your cloud utilization is to eliminate waste. Snow for Cloud delivers deep analytics into who is using what, how often or whether they are using it at all. With intelligence into utilization, you’ll be able to:
- Automatically identify and harvest duplicate and unused subscriptions
- Right-size subscription costs and entitlements based on detailed usage analytics
- Proactively manage and negotiate SaaS renewals.
More than ever, Snow delivers a mature solution for bringing value to different stakeholders across the organization with role-specific dashboards and views, giving both technology guardians and decision makers the ability to optimize spend.
Govern
While identifying and remediating wasteful cloud usage is an essential step in nearly all organizations, what if there was a way to avoid such waste being created in the first place? With Snow for Cloud and Snow Automation Platform you can enable:
- Self-service access requests for SaaS applications with automated, approval-driven workflows
- Harvest and reassignment of unused SaaS subscriptions
- Examination of detailed, component-level usage information to automatically identify and downgrade overentitled SaaS subscriptions.
additional oracle and itsm enhancements
Our latest product isn’t all about Cloud, however. Most Oracle database knowledge and expertise resides with Oracle DBAs, so when it comes time to answer an audit letter or to simply manage license purchases and renewals, a lack of visibility and control makes the SAM Manager’s job extraordinarily difficult. With Oracle database licenses costing tens of thousands of dollars, a small number of errors can equal big dollars in licensing costs and audit fees. Snow Oracle Management Option provides complete visibility of Oracle databases and the type of environment in which they are deployed.
CMDB implementations fail at an 85% rate. A primary reason is a lack of accurate and current data. With inaccurate and expired asset data, even world class ITSM and Help Desk Managers will struggle to efficiently resolve even the simplest of help desk requests. Enhancements to Snow for ITSM include:
- Automated CMDB updates with accurate computer, user and software details
- Providing helpdesk operators with all the information they need to resolve tickets in a single view
CONCLUSION
Snow for Cloud is available today. Whether you are a SAM Manager, procurement manager, in IT or in finance, Snow for Cloud is focused on providing the information you need to understand and manage cloud services. The Software Asset Management world is evolving to meet the demands of the digital world and delivering value to stakeholders across the organization.
Snow for Cloud was created to give you the ability to discover, manage, optimize and govern your cloud environment. With discovery and identification of over 1,000 SaaS applications today and more being added each day, you can be confident that Snow is the solution of choice for you – as thousands of organizations worldwide have already seen.
To learn how to bridge the Disruption Gap and bring new value to the organization, read Snow’s guide: The Indispensable CIO. In addition, you might like to download your complimentary copy of the Gartner Report: Magic Quadrant for Software Asset Management Tools 2018 – just click on the image below.
Gartner, “Magic Quadrant for Software Asset Management Tools, 16 April 2018, Roger Williams | April Adams | Matt Corsi”“Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.”