This blog summarizes some key evaluation points, so you can choose the right cloud management tools and pricing model for your organization.

Understanding cloud management functions and tooling characteristics

Cloud management tools enable organizations to effectively manage hybrid and multicloud environments, encompassing on-premises, public cloud, and other services. These tools provide governance, lifecycle management, brokering and automation for cloud infrastructure resources across various functional areas. The seven primary functional requirements for managing cloud deployments are:

• Provisioning and orchestration
• Cost management and resource optimization
• Cloud migration, backup and disaster recovery
• Identity, security and compliance
• Monitoring and observability
• Inventory and classification
• Service enablement

Four characteristics of effective cloud management tools

When selecting a cloud management tool, consider the four following key attributes:

1. Exposure to native cloud capabilities: Ensure the tool provides access to all the necessary native cloud capabilities required by your users.
2. Only pay for what you need: Opt for a tool that offers modularity, allowing you to choose and pay for the specific functions you need, rather than a bundled package.
3. SaaS deployment option: If possible, select a tool that offers a SaaS deployment model, eliminating the need for on-premises deployment and maintenance.
4. AI and ML integration: Look for tools that effectively utilize artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies where relevant, as this can enhance the tool’s capabilities.

What are the 6 key considerations when selecting a cloud management tool for your organization?

• Embrace cloud-native capabilities and modular design with AI/ML integration:
  • Look for tools that expose cloud-native capabilities and offer modular design, allowing you to leverage specific functions as needed.
  • Incorporating artificial intelligence (AI) and machine-learning (ML) capabilities can enhance the tool’s effectiveness.
• Evaluate cloud provider offerings:
  • Assess the tooling options available from your selected cloud providers. Many cloud vendors offer their own management tools that seamlessly integrate with their platforms. Choosing such tools can facilitate integration and potentially save costs.
• Assess your organization’s need for internal resources to operationalize the tooling:
  • Assess whether the tooling can be effectively managed by your internal resources or if external assistance is needed.
• Weigh “lift and shift” needs for the migration of workloads from on-premises to the cloud:
  • Consider the resources required to operationalize the tooling. If you plan to migrate existing workloads, look for tools that can assist with planning and moving virtual machines at scale.
• Consider SaaS management requirements:
  • Historically, the two tooling markets (i.e. IaaS/PaaS management and SaaS management) have been separated, but vendors are increasingly starting to combine the two in a unified IT asset management offering. SaaS management is the practice of managing SaaS applications to effectively improve security and optimize costs. Evaluate the tool’s potential capabilities for SaaS management, especially if it aligns with your business needs.
• Normalize pricing models:
  • During the evaluation process, ensure that you understand and normalize the pricing models of different vendors, as there may be variations. This will help you make accurate cost comparisons and avoid unexpected/hidden costs.

Considering your entire organization’s requirements and future plans

Before exploring third-party solutions, assess your organization’s requirements and evaluate the capabilities provided by your strategic cloud partners. The following questions will help guide your evaluation:

Cloud environment: Determine whether you operate in a single cloud or multicloud environment and consider future plans. Native tooling may be more suitable for a single cloud, while multicloud environments might benefit from third-party tools.

On-premises environment: Assess the size and significance of your on-premises environment. If you intend to utilize the same tooling as your cloud environment, native cloud tooling may present challenges.

Workload migration: If you plan to migrate workloads between cloud and/or on-premises environments, a third-party tool can help abstract complexities and bridge differences.

To learn more about reimagining your cloud management processes and tooling, download our in-depth guide.

The post How to Choose the Right Cloud Management Tool for Your Organization appeared first on Snow Software.

Snow Atlas customers can now identify critical software vulnerabilities.

• Identification of critical software vulnerabilities
• Discovery of applications that may expose personal data (PII, GDPR)
• Proactive evaluation of new software for critical risks before deployment

Check out the demo video below to find out more about how you can identify and remediate software vulnerabilities in your IT environment with Snow Risk Monitor.

Beta programs: Cloud cost visibility and containers

Good news for any Snow customers interested in getting a sneak peek of—and value from—our upcoming product features. We currently have two beta programs focused on getting visibility to assets in the cloud.

Current Snow Atlas customers will automatically see these new features. On-premises customers interested in beta testing can fill out this form or reach out to their Snow Account Manager or partner.

Snow Atlas uptime visibility

Providing customers, partners and users with visibility into their IT landscapes is at the heart of Snow’s mission. A new feature in Snow Atlas, Snow’s technology intelligence platform, shines a light on ourselves.

Snow Atlas customers and partners now have access to the status of all major Snow Atlas regions, providing full transparency into Snow Atlas uptime. This new capability will enable greater efficiency and peace of mind.

Expanded control over Snow Atlas access

Snow Atlas customers are gaining more control and visibility to users accessing the platform to improve overall security.

Customer administrators can now set a time limit for how long a partner and Snow Support users have access to the Snow Atlas partner console.

Partners and customers will enjoy increased visibility to all authorized end users and the ability to audit or investigate users provisioned over time, lowering their risk profile.

Friendly Lenovo models out of the box

Years ago, for their machine naming, IBM decided to use both a model number and a more user-friendly model name. Lenovo took over not only that data model but also the pesky habit of storing these pieces of data in different parts of the Windows registry. We are happy to report that Snow now brings together this information and, by default, displays the user-friendly model name instead of the model number. Customers that previously created customizations to display the model name can retire them and get back to an out-of-the box configuration. See a few examples of model name vs. wmic # and get the full release notes.

Recognition of Java applications

We’ve leveled up our inventory scanning capabilities for Java applications distributed as JAR files. Now, our agent for Windows scans the metadata information to populate vendor and version information. This enables a number of benefits including more complete software recognition and helps Snow Risk Monitor to provide more complete reporting regarding software threats from JAR files. Get the full release notes and more details here.

Cloud financial management

To effectively manage cloud costs, Snow Cloud Cost offers full visibility into public cloud consumption, real-time monitoring, accurate forecasting and tailored savings recommendations. Recent improvements enhance business mappings to improve cost allocation and provide a better understanding of cloud consumption.

Users can now easily map multi-cloud and Kubernetes spend. Business mapping allows users to accurately tag multi-cloud and Kubernetes spend data, assign shared costs equitably, and report cloud spend to drive FinOps collaboration. Recent updates have made mappings easier than ever to build and manage.

This includes allowing users to better understand cost allocations prior to viewing within the Cost and Usage Explorer. In addition, detailed rules and operators have been expanded to support values such as purchase option and line type. These updates offer users the ability to create the precise granularity they need.

You can also now gain better understanding of cloud consumption. Snow Cloud Cost’s Cost and Usage Explorer allows stakeholders to generate reports to analyze and manage cloud consumption.

Our latest update provides improved accuracy of amortized costs with AWS savings plans. Also, better usability for troubleshooting, warnings and errors enables stakeholders to make smarter cloud-investment decisions.

Improved user workflow for faster connector setup in Snow SaaS Management

SaaS Management on Snow Atlas users can now enjoy faster time to value with several workflow enhancements around API connector setup, including:

• The available connectors are now separated into two sections to show which connectors have been enabled for quick and easy reference.
• The connector discover page side panel now includes a description of specific data pulled by each connector, so users can quickly understand connector utility.
• The connector table now includes the ability to take actions such as run, test connection, edit, enable, disable and delete connector directly from the table.
• A new help button has been added to the connector discovery page to streamline actions to take in case the desired connector(s) are missing from the available connector list.

What’s next?

We have more product updates and innovations coming. Subscribe to our blog, so you don’t miss a thing.

Not a customer yet? Schedule a demo of Snow to see the power of Technology Intelligence.

The post What’s New at Snow Software: April 2023 appeared first on Snow Software.

Technology leaders need a cloud architecture that will meet performance requirements, achieve faster time to market, and quickly scale up or down as the business demands. It’s common for cloud bills to run over budget in the process. Fortunately, it’s also easily preventable with the following guidelines for  avoiding surprise cloud bills and keeping track of cloud costs.

The price you really pay

When a company receives its first bills from a public cloud provider, they typically experience sticker shock. To start, the bills are often well above budget. On top of that, Cloud services bills are cloud-friendly, but not necessarily business-friendly. Usually, these bills are categorized according to public cloud vendor services and not to the service they provide for the business. They contain multiple sections, thousands of lines and many types of charges.

This makes it a challenge to associate each charge with its purpose, allocate costs to end users or properly calculate the return on investment. This has led many companies to put a “just-in-case” cushion in their budget to pay for unexpected cloud bill expenses. Further complicating matters, there are four major unpredictable variables that usually impact planning for cloud project costs:

• Compute – virtual server instances
• Storage – amount that is provisioned in gigabytes
• Networking – inbound and outbound data transfer traffic
• Databases – building, deploying, and managing

These are the kinds of challenges that have led many CIOs to wonder what they can do to better understand and optimize cloud costs.

Making it work

From a business standpoint, enterprise technology leaders should go for the reserved capacity (instance) or committed use options whenever they can. These options are both cheaper and more predictable. They can also work on policies and procedures to ensure there are no untagged resources in the system. This will enable these leaders to see exactly what each application or workload is costing. Organizations can also establish a FinOps discipline where everyone takes ownership of their respective cloud usage. Moreover, they can adopt third-party cloud cost optimization tools to support these policies, procedures and disciplines and help solve the most complex problems associated with the cloud.

Also known as cloud financial management or cloud optimization tools, the best-of-breed software in this category features:

• Visibility and reporting to track costs across business units, applications, teams and other custom views
  
• Easy-to-implement savings recommendations which allow organizations to easily reduce cloud spend by up to 20-40%
  
• Forecasting and budgeting insights to improve planning and reduce wastage
  
• Anomaly detection in real-time using AI/ML-powered algorithms to react to unplanned spikes
  
• Ability to allocate costs and track chargeback/showback cloud costs based on end user or team consumption for improved accountability
  
• Container cost insights that allow you to obtain big picture details of cost by pod, namespace, etc., to guide your future optimization decisions

Proactively monitoring, managing and optimizing costs with such cloud cost optimization software allows organizations to better plan and forecast for growth in the cloud.

Maximizing cloud investments

The right cloud cost optimization software makes cloud bills clearer and more predictable. These tools provide insight and intelligence to substantially reduce cloud costs which will allow enterprises to fully take advantage of public cloud services. Many organizations have easily realized savings of 20% or more on their cloud spending just by using cloud optimization software and following best practices.

Cloud cost optimization isn’t a one-time action. It’s part of a journey in which you constantly focus and re-focus on optimizing the value of your enterprise’s cloud investment. Take the first step in your own journey toward maximizing your cloud investments and request a demo of Snow Cloud Cost.

The post Uncovering Hidden Cloud Costs: Tips for Maximizing Your Cloud Investment and Optimizing Cloud Spend appeared first on Snow Software.

To learn more, Snow’s latest survey polled more than 500 IT leaders from organizations with over 500 employees in the United States and United Kingdom. We found that while 68% of IT leaders have a hybrid cloud strategy consisting of both public and private clouds, these organizations are now experiencing an array of cloud and infrastructure management challenges as the reality of these investments’ kicks in. While cloud was positioned as a faster, more secure and ultimately more affordable alternative to on-prem infrastructure, IT leaders are quickly realizing that cloud is just one piece of the IT management puzzle and not a one-size-fits-all solution.

Cloud is a growing necessity

Over the last 12 months, nearly seven out of 10 (71%) of all respondents had increased overall cloud spend. This figure rose to 72% in the US while only marginally lower in UK at 68%. This is a 26.7% increase compared to the 2020 findings, with 56% of IT leaders in 2020 expecting to increase their cloud spend. And it is no wonder, as nearly half of all IT leaders (46%) claim cloud services have been critical to operations during the pandemic.

Another 70% of IT leaders have increased the use of public cloud platforms, including AWS, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure, while one-third of IT leaders (33%) have added an additional 26-50% capacity to their organizations’ cloud resources in the past year. This figure rose to 35% when looking at the UK alone.

When asked about the main reasons for relying on cloud computing, scalability and flexibility was cited by 22% of organizations, with another 17% of IT executives stating it is the best environment to develop, test and launch products and services.

Meanwhile, 44% of IT leaders believe they will add to cloud services to support demand as hybrid working becomes the norm. This figure was significantly higher in the US (52% of organizations) compared to 36% in the UK.

Additionally, IT leaders plan to move less workloads to private cloud in 2021 compared to last year. In 2020, 21% of respondents said they were bringing cloud workloads back on-premises whereas this year only three percent of US IT leaders and less than one percent of UK IT leaders plan to move workloads to private cloud.

But it hasn’t been all smooth sailing. Despite the hype surrounding the promise of cloud, many organizations are struggling to reap the full benefits.

Expectation vs. reality

Indeed, it seems that the expectation of cloud investments is not quite matching the reality, and there is more to be done to unlock the power of cloud. One area where this is particularly apparent is when it comes to cybersecurity. While 11% of IT executives rely on cloud computing for built-in and tested cybersecurity protections, approximately one-third (33%) of IT leaders stated that mounting cybersecurity threats are their greatest infrastructure management challenge. This disparity highlights that despite being a core driver for cloud adoption, cybersecurity protection is also a key concern for those integrating cloud. After all, applications are where vulnerabilities are most likely to occur. Many IT departments are not equipped with the right staff/skillset to adapt their security approach accordingly.

Lack of integration between new and old infrastructure technologies (26%), meeting governance and compliance requirements (25%) and managing spend (24%) closely followed as additional challenges. For the UK, in particular, managing spend was reported by 28% as a key challenge. Perhaps unsurprisingly, mitigating concerns about cybersecurity protections (24%) is at the top of IT leaders’ list of cloud management challenges they’d wish to solve in the blink of an eye – along with a lack of skilled IT staff (18%) and lack of cloud standardization (14%).

Could knowledge gaps be stifling cloud success?

It is clear the sheer acceleration of cloud infrastructure over the last 12 months has unearthed several management challenges for organizations, and a lack of skills and knowledge gaps between business leaders and IT management could be adding to this. There are some notable disparities when it comes to knowledge levels across the enterprise. Our research found C-level IT executives to be the most confident in their knowledge of cloud. In fact, 63% of those in this category rated themselves as experts in their knowledge of the different types of cloud (private, public and hybrid), along with three-quarters of company owners.

On the flip side, only 20% of IT managers, and just under one-third of IT directors (32%), rated themselves as experts – highlighting that greater education is needed for mid-level executives in order for them to manage cloud infrastructure effectively.

These figures become even more worrying when it comes to managing spend. While 71% of respondents claimed leadership is familiar with cloud investment, a quarter (25%) say leadership gets updates but do not question spend. Although there is no need for leadership to get involved if cloud spend is coming in within budget, we’ve often seen, cloud investments can sometimes bring unexpected (and pricey) costs. At that stage, leadership will jump in to understand the budget demands, but this can be tricky if they haven’t previously been engaged.

Cloud investments are showing no sign of slowing down, and while the benefits cannot be denied, without the necessary training, education and visibility to effectively implement and manage cloud, organizations could be limiting their ROI.

Learn more about how IT leaders can gain transparency surrounding cloud investments with Snow Commander.

The post Study: Reaping the Benefits of Cloud Begins With Facing the Realities appeared first on Snow Software.

This was the theme of a recent virtual event Snow participated in, the National Cloud Transformation Summit with Apex Assembly. Our session, “How Much Cloud Flexibility is too Much: Choosing Between Cloud Portability and Vendor Lock-in” focused on critical areas to consider when planning greater cloud reliance.

1. Identify how much cloud flexibility you need

When it comes to cloud flexibility, how much is too much? In theory, having an abundance of choice is a good thing. But it can lead to poor decision making. When considering your cloud architecture though, too much flexibility can lead to poor, unintended consequences. There is always a trade-off between portability and integration. Over-emphasis on portability can lead to wasted time and overly complex architectures that have too many unnecessary abstraction layers. On the other hand, ignoring portability can lead to costly vendor lock-in.

In agile development, there is the concept of ‘Last Responsible Moment’ which simply means the strategy is to not make a premature decision but instead, delay commitment until the cost of not making the decision becomes more than making it. But how do you determine when that is?

2. Define your cloud strategy and supporting terms

Popular cloud terms very often mean different things to different people. To ensure your cloud strategy is off to a strong start, get everyone within your organization on the same page for cloud concepts, including:

• Multi-cloud portfolio vs. multi-cloud application
• Hybrid as an end-state vs. hybrid as a stepping-stone on your way to a full cloud architecture
• Cloud as an extension of your data center or is it a paradigm shift and transformation catalyst
• Private cloud vs. public cloud

Clarify these terms for your organization and it will also help guide your conversations with vendors at a significant cost savings to you.

3. Take stock of your needs

Another foundational step in your cloud transformation process is to take stock of your current circumstance and clearly define what you’re looking to accomplish with cloud services. Key considerations very often include:

• Data privacy. Are there GDPR concerns? Are you operating in a geographic region that has privacy or data sovereignty concerns? If we must run our workloads within certain geographic or industry boundaries, this will significantly impact the cloud technologies and architecture we choose.
• Features/benefits. Does one cloud provider offer unique capabilities that matter to you?
• Existing agreements. Do you have commercial licensing agreements in place that make one cloud provider more attractive than another? So that you don’t double pay for licenses, get SAM and procurement involved in these conversations.
• Employee skills. Advanced cloud concepts require people with specialized skills. What skills do you currently have in-house and what will you need to acquire? Before adopting a provider, make sure you have the skills today or that you have the means to acquire them.

A transformation to the cloud means a change in the way your organization operates with a heavy dose of automation, infrastructure of code, and a full embrace of modern security processes. Without this comprehensive retooling, it can be a very painful process and you will miss out on many of the benefits cloud can offer.

Snow delivers a single pane of glass for technology intelligence including software, hardware and the cloud. We are also cloud vendor agnostic. For optimizing visibility, spend and governance across your cloud environment, take a look at the cloud management platform, Snow Commander.

The post 3 Key Considerations for Planning Your Cloud Transformation appeared first on Snow Software.

• 24 new applications including Access, Bookings, Delve, Forms, GroupMe, Kaizala, Lens, Lists, OneDrive, OneNote Class Notebook, Planner, Power Apps, Power Automate, Power BI, Publisher, SharePoint, Staff Hub, Stream, Sway, Teams, To-Do, Visio, Whiteboard and Yammer.
• 1,400 new features and capabilities.

Looking at Microsoft 365’s roadmap and launched improvements, the following products have the most recent enhancements:

The price increase which goes into effect in March 2022, varies 9-25% depending on the offering. While Microsoft certainly is justified with all the functionality improvements, no one really likes price increases. So, what can you do now to avoid increasing your budget for funding your Microsoft stack?

Understand usage to rightsize now

Before paying an even bigger price for your E3 or E5 licenses, now is a great time to determine if everyone with those licenses needs all the functionality included or if some of your staff can downgrade to an E1 license. To make this determination, you will want to understand how your team is accessing these applications (e.g. browser-only or installed) and which application components they are using on a frequent basis.

Understand usage to argue a smaller increase

Within the application stack, is your organization using all the functionality? Have you decided to use Zoom, Slack or Webex and don’t require Team’s functionality to run your business? Has your organization chosen to leverage Tableau instead of Power BI?

Consider further application rationalization

As you can imagine from the many dozens of enhancements, Microsoft has made significant investments in Microsoft 365, and the maturity of some of these applications today is far different than 2 years ago. Now might be the time to look at your application catalog across the board and perform an analysis of redundant applications in your organization. For example, do you need more than one project software, video conferencing technology or file sharing application? In performing this analysis, you might determine it might be worth it to standardize on Microsoft for some of these capabilities since you’ll be paying for them anyway.

Analyze current and projected use of other Microsoft technologies

To get your arms around this, you need visibility to all areas of spend – on-premises software, cloud infrastructure and SaaS application usage.

Maybe you are underutilizing licenses for Microsoft 365 today but have plans to grow your Azure infrastructure footprint in the near term. You might not be able to reduce your overall bill with Microsoft, but you might be able to get more capabilities than you have today, and a bigger bang for your buck.

The post Microsoft 365 Price Increase and How to Prepare for Your Renewal Conversation appeared first on Snow Software.

The power of automation

Automation can be a powerful tool for modern IT organizations looking to deliver higher-quality services more efficiently. Eliminating repetitive tasks and manual process approvals through automation can help organizations ensure best practices are being followed and deliver services more predictably.

Regardless of where your organization is on the journey to the cloud, what type of applications you have deployed, or what type of infrastructure you have in use, automation can drive improvements across the entire IT organization. But the challenge lies in knowing where to start using automation.

Start with self-service IT

Automated self-service access to technology enables IT to deliver the technologies their stakeholders rely on more quickly, while at the same time maintaining control and decreasing human error. It’s a win-win. It also creates a flexible but stable technology environment that can quickly respond and adapt to changing business needs, such as those brought on by the recent shifts in the way we work – first with a drastic shift to remote work, and now, transitioning to a hybrid workforce.

Within a hybrid workforce, it is paramount that employees are able to access the technologies they need to do their jobs, from anywhere, and self-service IT enables that. Employees can request and gain access to the resources they need when they need them, from home or the office. Without a self-service model, it can take IT days or even weeks to meet requests for new services, and because users require these services to get work done, productivity is significantly hampered when the wait time is that long.

Self-service IT provides IT teams with one of the most valuable resources of all – time.

Time is money, and when IT teams are constantly bogged down with manual processes, they don’t have time to focus on more important business priorities, like leveraging technology to innovate and create differentiators that drive revenue growth.

Deliver a seamless self-service experience with a hybrid cloud management platform

One way IT can deliver on automated, self-service IT is by leveraging a hybrid cloud management platform, like Snow Commander. Hybrid cloud management platforms can simplify cloud management by transforming IT departments into agile, efficient Managed Service Providers (MSPs) that provide self-service access to technology via a comprehensive portal, fueled by a powerful workflow engine.

The self-service portal

A comprehensive, self-service portal allows users to request new VMs or cloud instances, or request changes to their existing setups. It saves time and reduces errors. A portal also provides IT stakeholders, who don’t have an account with the cloud provider, a real-time view of their infrastructure usage and spend.

You may hear objections such as, “Won’t a portal slow me down?” But the beauty of a well-designed hybrid cloud management platform is that it can track usage for users that go through the portal, as well as development teams that need to go direct to the cloud, so even the most agile development teams won’t miss a beat.

The workflow engine

The other integral component of a hybrid cloud management platform for enabling self-service IT is the workflow engine, which serves as the backbone of an organization’s infrastructure automation strategy. Snow Commander supports powerful workflows that can help eliminate manual processes and automate faster provisioning and orchestration of hybrid cloud infrastructure to support seamless self-service delivery and management of infrastructure and application resources.

Tasks perfectly suited for such automation are discrete, well understood, tedious to perform manually and require a high level of standardization and governance. With an industry-leading hybrid cloud management platform like Snow Commander, you can use the workflow engine to automate tasks across the full lifecycle of your infrastructure resources, from the initial service request and associated approval process to the provisioning of the requested resource, changes to the resource and more.

The post Boost Agility and Efficiency with Automated Self-Service IT appeared first on Snow Software.

In this new era of hybrid work, the announcement of Microsoft’s Windows 365 will provide organizations with greater flexibility and a more secure way to empower the workforce, regardless of location.

Windows 365 is designed to make it easy for the non-IT workforce to enable employees to access their business with a predictable cost model. It offers organizations a fixed-price monthly subscription to a cloud PC that is dedicated to a single user and can be managed with the same tools as a traditional Windows PC.

Exploring Windows 365 Cloud PC

Just as applications were brought to the operating system with SaaS, Microsoft is now bringing the operating system to the cloud with Windows 365. The operating system itself becomes hybrid — accessible on the device and on the Cloud.

Today, every business wants to be able to scale up and down quickly. Shifting control to the end users or business units allows for rapid, secure deployment of OS and Office software through the click of a button within a portal.

While virtual desktops (VDI’s) and Microsoft’s Cloud PC offering have been around for some time, Windows 365 has made these offerings available as part of the Microsoft 365 subscription. With this launch, Microsoft is targeting both the enterprise and the business world with a product focused on simplicity and cost predictability.

One of the key benefits to Windows 365 is that it makes deploying these machines a lot easier for corporate customers that don’t necessarily have the skillsets for traditional VDI’s. Deploying Windows 365 virtual desktops is designed to be extremely easy and manageable.

As Windows 365 launches, here are some of the biggest changes we could see for businesses and employees:

1. Rapid employee onboarding

With Windows 365, organizations can onboard new employees with IT equipment, regardless of location, within a matter of hours. Employees can continue using technology they’re familiar with on their own devices and organizations can ensure that their data remains safe in the environment.

2. Savings on hardware lifecycle process

Hardware could become increasingly less important for organizations. Since employees will be able to run the Microsoft operating system and applications on any device, from anywhere, organizations may be able to save on traditional hardware lifecycle costs for their workforce. While businesses will still need to buy equipment, machines won’t need to be as powerful as before and employees will have more choice around what device they’d like to use. Since the desktop can be managed centrally and employees can access it from any device of their choosing, anything with a browser can be treated as a Cloud PC. As a result, businesses will likely buy more into Microsoft’s platform experience as equipment becomes less of a priority.

3. Increased security

Organizations won’t have to worry about what devices employees are using. They no longer have to worry about locking down the end points and having to deal with problems when employees are using their own devices for work. Instead, they can control everything in the Cloud. Users can securely stream a powerful windows PC including apps, content, settings and storage, from the Microsoft cloud to any device. Personalized Cloud PCs will enable employees, even designers or editors working with large collaborative files, to pick up right where they left off with their full Windows desktop on their virtual device, whether that is a tablet, a PC or a Mac.

How can ITAM prepare for the transformation?

While this announcement presents many changes for organizations and employees, IT teams will be uniquely impacted in the coming months. As businesses try new things and buy further into the Microsoft platform experience, IT Asset Managers (ITAM) will need to keep a keen eye on consumption and cost. Plus, instead of managing local Windows installations on expensive hardware, IT will be tasked with exploring how they can get by with simpler hardware.

It’s important for ITAM to ask questions like:

• Which users are accessing applications only through the browser?
• What is the cost impact for the business?
• How can this reduce my overall costs YoY?
• How do I track if it’s being used once provisioned?
• What is the impact of over-provisioned desktops?
• How could I help boost business uptime and scalability around busy seasons?
• How do I ensure that my workforce has a machine that is powerful enough for the work they do?

How Snow can help

If you’re looking to move from desktop environments towards Microsoft 365 or Windows 365, Snow can show you usage of specific application components including details such as who is using them and how they are using them — whether that’s via online access from a laptop/phone or an installed version. With this visibility, you can ensure you’re assigning the right types of licenses and reduce spend as you migrate to these cloud implementations.

If you are already using Microsoft 365 and considering utilizing Windows 365, Snow can help you understand how employees and contractors are using Microsoft 365 applications against current subscriptions allocated so that you can right size before migrating to the new offering.

Learn more about Snow’s solutions designed to help users gain visibility and control over their Microsoft 365 spend.

The post 3 Ways Windows 365 Cloud PC Will Impact ITAM Professionals appeared first on Snow Software.

As Vishal, Snow’s President and CEO recently shared, the release of Snow Atlas represents a significant milestone for Snow and a launching pad for future technology innovations. The new platform, available now in early access, will allow us to address changing market forces more quickly and respond to trends impacting customers and partners with cutting-edge technology solutions.

Let’s take a closer look at Snow Atlas to see how it was built and how it can help you.

What is Snow Atlas?

The vision behind Snow Atlas is to provide hybrid enterprises with the tools they need to discover, monitor and optimize their technology assets, both on-premises and in the cloud. That is the same vision we have for our offerings, but with Snow Atlas we will be able to provide you with a new delivery model as well as a more integrated roadmap across all technologies. The introduction of the platform is the next step in Snow’s journey to enable organizations to realize the full potential of technology intelligence.

3 ways Snow Atlas can help you with ITAM

The first solutions on Snow Atlas will be software asset management (SAM), SaaS management and ITSM integration delivered as a service. With SaaS deployment, Snow Atlas offers an easier way for you to discover, manage and optimize all of your IT assets.

1. Gain visibility into what technology is being used, and how. With SAM on Snow Atlas, you can gain visibility into blind spots in your technology environment such as desktop installs, datacenter activities and SaaS sprawl. Rather than relying on multiple point solutions, Snow provides an agent-based platform that gives organizations an accurate inventory of assets across the ecosystem. This visibility can provide a better understanding of your technology usage and spend, enabling you to make informed decisions around subscription levels, renewals or new digital initiatives.

2. Identify cost-reduction opportunities and optimize your environment. Once visibility is established, SAM on Snow Atlas recognizes and suggests remediation for some of the most challenging areas of wasted spend:

• Unused accounts
• Microsoft365
• Bring Your Own License (BYOL)
• Redundant applications

3. Protect company data and reduce risks. Leverage the value of holistic, accurate and timely technology asset data by sharing it with other systems and teams such as ITSM, security and more. Unavailable with any other IT operations management (ITOM) applications, SAM on Snow Atlas can provide you with visibility of all devices, users and applications along with a detailed account of which users have access to which applications and cloud services, and how they are used. Easily identify potential software vulnerabilities or which applications hold personal data to minimize cybersecurity and compliance risks.

Platform features and functionality

Snow Atlas is the foundation on which our new solutions will be delivered. Built on a microservices architecture and with standardized APIs, it offers a host of additional functionality and opportunities for innovation. Here are just a few of the things our customers will have access to with Snow Atlas.

SaaS portal

Snow Atlas has an easy-to-use dashboard highlighting focus areas to help users better navigate priority areas of interest as well as a unified view of cloud infrastructure, cloud applications, licenses overview, reports and user information.

Self-healing

One of the biggest challenges for IT administrators is ensuring that systems are running properly and remain available for their key stakeholders. Snow Atlas addresses this with self-healing technology that continually monitors the system to ensure uptime. When problems are discovered, they are automatically mitigated and the system availability is brought back online with no manual intervention required from IT teams.

User self-service

Snow Atlas provides IT teams with the freedom to move faster. Advanced administration and self-service capabilities empower admins to add new users and configure new accounts or organization structures without having to rely on a time-consuming request to consultants or technical resources.

Real-time agent creation

IT admins using Snow Atlas will be able to save time and effort with self-service capabilities to create, configure and deploy inventory agents. With the ability to create their own inventory agents, users will be able to utilize their normal internal software distribution channels and processes to deploy the agents. Additionally, users will be able to create, configure and deploy agents whenever they need them – whether they are adding more devices to monitor, updating to get the latest features or configuring new security procedures.

Future innovation

Snow has a 20-year history of adapting to new technologies whether that be the introduction of the cloud and software-as-a-service or the shifting complexity of the IT landscape. Snow Atlas positions us to continue that legacy. As new technologies such as containers, function as a service (FaaS) and IoT become more engrained in the everyday environments of enterprises, Snow Atlas provides a platform for future innovations – allowing additional flexibility as the landscape (and customer challenges) change.

Additional benefits of SaaS delivery

We developed Snow Atlas in the cloud with our first solutions available via a SaaS delivery model, which means you can always expect some of the following benefits:

• Easy to deploy and easy to maintain for faster time-to-value
• Futureproofed with automatic upgrades so you can access the latest features as soon as they are released
• A flexible consumption model, the ability to recognize costs as OpEx and alignment to your organization’s cloud goals

Delivering on our mission

At Snow, we strive to deliver long-term customer value by providing complete insight and manageability across all technology. We believe that IT leaders who are empowered with end-to-end visibility of their environments are better prepared to make strategic decisions for their organizations.

With the launch of our new platform, we’re doubling down on our commitment to helping IT teams optimize their entire technology landscape to strategically support their organizations today, and in the future.

Learn more about Snow Atlas in the full press release.

The post New at Snow: Exploring the Snow Atlas Platform appeared first on Snow Software.

Within Gartner’s forecast, they also point out SaaS remains the largest market segment with a prediction of hitting $122.6 billion. Any hesitation corporate IT may have had about cloud reliance before 2020 was ushered out with the onset of COVID-19. IT essentially gave their users a free pass to the buffet and now, one year later, organizations are asking, do we still need the buffet? Or can we be satisfied with the few things we like and leave all the rest?

Optimizing spend

The collaboration tools that proved so valuable in keeping companies connected – Zoom, Teams, Slack, Skype and others – were likely onboarded with blanket subscriptions. But now, it’s time to question those costly subscriptions and look for ways to optimize your SaaS spend.

One common example of this is if your organization relies on Microsoft 365, you also have Teams. In this instance, is Zoom also needed? Likewise, if you’re a Salesforce shop and using Skype, you might consider using Slack instead, given the Salesforce purchase of Slack late last year.

These and other examples illustrate the opportunity for optimizing your SaaS investments. Every IT budget could use a little money back, but another critical consideration often missed has to do with your data. Where is it? And, how will you access it if you decide to cancel the use of that service?

Managing siloed data

When it comes to getting work done, users have more options than ever before. This includes countless applications that may be accessed via your business or any number of personal email addresses. The lines have blurred even further this year as people did what they could to get their jobs done from home and away from the helpdesk. While choice keeps people productive and happy, it can also create complications and chaos. Eventually, choice can be a productivity killer.

Many of us have worked long and hard on a project, saved and closed it only to forget where we put it. Is it in OneDrive? SharePoint? Maybe all the documentation is still in Slack or even your email archive? Keeping your hands on your data is a challenge and this common reality is only amplified when you consider it from the corporate viewpoint. Whether it’s customer information, corporate IP, or anything in between, tracking data is critically important. Just ask your compliance officers.

Introducing too many SaaS applications leads to confusion over how they should be used in a corporate environment. They also create siloed data. Many of us rely on Dropbox, for example – both personal and business versions. While an effective collaboration tool, it also hosts all the valuable data you’ve stored there. And if in your decision to optimize your SaaS sprawl, you decide Dropbox will no longer be used, pulling out all that data isn’t a pleasant task. But if you don’t, Dropbox will delete it.

Introducing technology intelligence

Siloed data is a real problem and escalating as the number of applications your users rely on grows. The need for true technology intelligence — or a clear line of sight into the applications used, by whom, and how often will tell you where your data sits. In this way, you can improve the efficiency of its use and better guard against data and security risks that may arise. Constantly evolving global data privacy regulations and the costly implications of a data breach require not only careful tracking of your data but strict guidelines for how it is used and shared.

Learn more about rightsizing your SaaS costs and see how Snow can help address issues created by SaaS sprawl.

The post SaaS Sprawl Is More Than a Money Problem appeared first on Snow Software.