IT Asset Management (ITAM) involves gathering the information you need to make effective use of and run your digital technology. The first step towards building effective ITAM within your organization is understanding what you want to achieve. To identify that, it’s useful to look at some of the reasons why companies have ITAM capabilities in the first place. For the most part, these fall into three main categories:

1. Risk management: With a rise in global cybersecurity attacks, protecting customer and company data is top-of-mind for IT leaders. They also need to protect themselves from risk associated with unanticipated and unaccounted for software, cloud, SaaS or hardware spend.
   
2. Cost management: Cost reduction is always a key to an organization’s success, especially during times of global economic uncertainty. Organizations need to spend wisely, so they can allocate more of their funds to innovation and be more competitive in a tough market.
   
3. Growth and innovation: Quickly delivering new innovations and responding to employee and customer requirements are now fundamental to surviving in today’s economy. Fostering innovation starts by optimizing your current technology stack.

Some other event-based priorities can drive ITAM programs, including a large merger & acquisition (M&A), an audit or compliance event (sometimes triggered by an M&A), or the need to report on technology ROI to a board or C-suite.

Building a governance framework for your ITAM program

If ITAM’s role is to allow the organization to maximize the value from their technology assets while minimizing risk, then it is important to provide a framework within which this should happen. There is little value on reporting on opportunities to save, or compliance issues, if the business implications are not understood and the mechanisms for resolving issues, or taking advantage of opportunities, are not in place and accessible.

Every ITAM practice should include these elements:

• Mission statement: This statement articulates the goal of ITAM and should show a clear link between ITAM and your organization’s goals.
• Charter: The charter or roadmap sets out roles, responsibilities, accountabilities and reporting mechanisms. It also provides the ITAM function with a mandate.
• Policy: The policy will make it clear to everyone in the organization what the basic rules are around the way in which technology assets are managed throughout their lifecycle and why. This document should be accessible to everyone in the organization, not just ITAM or IT teams, so it needs to be clear, concise, easy to translate (if in a multilingual organization) and free from jargon. The policy does not dictate the details of how people work but what they need to take into account when dealing with technology assets.
• Standards: These are the mandatory standards or any relevant regulation (whether financial, industry-specific, environmental etc.), as well as standards the organization is aligned or compliant with (e.g. ISO 27001, ISO 14001, GDPR, HIPAA, etc.).
• Processes: This is where many people get ITAM wrong and try to include all the processes that touch on the IT Asset Lifecycle within ITAM’s scope. Most of these processes are owned elsewhere. ITAM is concerned with the oversight of the asset lifecycle and as such, ITAM processes are those that gather the relevant data about the assets and investigate and analyze it to identify where exceptions to policy are occurring and why. Processes should be documented at a high level, and need to be generic as they should apply to the full range of technology assets across the organization, and all the various data sources required to support the data analysis.
• Procedures: These are the more detailed activities that ITAM practitioners will undertake on a daily basis to support the processes and may be asset, vendor or system specific. They tend to be more technical in nature and are not designed for general distribution.
• Reporting: Provide evidence that your policies and processes are achieving expected results.

Selecting your supporting cast of people

In order to achieve successful outcomes, ITAM functions need people and technology to support the governance framework and carry out the supporting activities. One of the biggest mistakes we see is when organizations unrealistically put their ITAM program on one person’s shoulders. The size of your eventual organization will be dependent on the scope of services you provide and the size of the larger organization you are supporting.

While there is no easy answer to ‘how many people do I need’, as this will vary based on the size and complexity of the organization and the technology that is in use within it, it is important that there is someone accountable for the success of ITAM, and that the activities associated with ITAM are assigned to appropriate individuals either as their primary role or as a key part of their wider responsibilities.

Here are a few checkpoints as you select people to assist in your ITAM program:

• Estimate the number of resources it will take to develop and manage your ITAM tool along with your policies and processes.
• Decide if you’re supporting one geography or one department at the onset, or if this will be an organization-wide operation.
• Identify your realistic staffing costs and evaluate your current team’s internal expertise to choose one of these options:
  — In-house staff and software
  — Extended staff with partners for specific projects/expertise
  — In-house staff with partner-hosted software
  — Partner-based managed services

There is no magic formula for successful ITAM, but by starting with clear goals and objectives and putting in place the supporting governance, processes, people and technology, it is possible to build an effective ITAM capability that has real relevance to your business stakeholders.

The post Getting Started: How to Build an Effective ITAM Program appeared first on Snow Software.

Snow Tribe, 

Like many of you, my leadership team and I have spent the last few days taking in the full weight of the events that have unfolded in the US and the response to those events from across the world. It has brought to the forefront that systemic inequality, racism, discrimination and oppression are still unacceptable blights on our communities.

This moment in time is when we come together to support one another, our families, and communities in taking a stand for equality and fairness.

What can we do at Snow? 

We can aspire to live up to our Snow Spirit, “we are at our best together”. This value is founded on the principles of mutual respect, care, and support. These principles are at the core of equality and fairness. It sounds deceptively simple, but we all know how difficult it is to live up to, every day, in every scenario and context. 

We can display honesty and courage by challenging ourselves and others when we aren’t at our best and should do better. This is uncomfortable, but it is also powerful and lasting. You have our commitment that we will work hard to provide an environment that supports us all to do this.

We must be more deliberate in nurturing a culture that cherishes inclusivity and diversity. We will have to find meaningful ways to do that. Your ideas, your help and your commitment in this work will be vital. We will start this straight away.

As a tribe we can – and should – also strive to have a more actionable impact on eradicating inequality and injustice beyond Snow. We will be cementing a corporate plan for influencing change, joining our voices to other global bodies that are working to address those issues.

We are fully committed to advancing positive change within Snow and beyond, and know we are all in this together.

Please stay safe, and speak soon.

Vishal & the Leadership Team

The post Better Together at Snow: A Message from our CEO appeared first on Snow Software.

In this situation, IT organisations are trying to identify and cut waste and discretionary spending, as well as understand the real business value of their technology investments. They need not just to survive the economic uncertainty ahead, but also protect their workforce from unemployment. As one general manager I spoke to this week told me ‘My business is dependent on the people – I need to find ways to retain them. If I have to let them go now and then later recruit people to replace them, I lose skills and experience and incur both redundancy and recruitment costs’. Technology isn’t about replacing people with robots – it’s about helping people work more effectively.

(Source: The Rise of the Digital Native – ‘Generation S’ and their impact on you.)

When we’ve talked about the evolution of IT Asset Management (ITAM) over the last couple of years we discussed the move from cost optimisation and driving more value from technology to using technology intelligence to

“Provide a better understanding of the interaction between people and technology, and this is what helps us to drive value not only from the technology but also from people – freeing them from repetitive and unproductive work and allowing them to add value through creativity and flexibility that machines alone can’t achieve.”  – (Source: The Rise of the Digital Native – ‘Generation S’ and their impact on you.)

This sits at the heart of our view of human-centred IT.

What’s happening in the world of technology right now?

The first thing I want to say is that no one can predict what’s going to happen. Despite all the ‘back to normal’ and ‘new normal’ talk, no one really knows what the implications of this virus are for our economies, political systems, societies and businesses. I saw a tweet the other day saying something like ‘Suddenly everyone is a futurist now that we don’t know what the future looks like’. Most individuals and organisations aren’t looking much more than 6 weeks ahead. There may be generic planning going on beyond that but right now even 6 weeks feels like a long time given how much uncertainty there is and how much has changed from week to week.

What we have seen:

• Millions of people out of work either temporarily (furloughed) or permanently (made redundant)
• Millions of people working remotely at very short notice
• Businesses changing the way they work and the way they deliver products and services. In some cases even changing the products and services they deliver

What we do know is likely to happen at some undefined point in the future:

• Some people will go back to work – some to the same jobs, some to different jobs
• Some people will go back to the office – but anyone who CAN work from home will probably need to justify going into an office. And anyone who has even a hint of sickness will be expected to stay at home
• Some businesses will go back to the old way of delivery
• Some businesses will go back to the old products and services that can’t be delivered remotely or digitally
• Some businesses will go back to the old way of working – some will find their new ways are better.

You’ve probably all seen this:

What does this mean for businesses?

Who will be working?

Despite furlough schemes in many countries, we’ve seen global increases in unemployment, and it is inevitable that this will continue. There will be lots of people out there looking for jobs, some of whom will need to develop new skills. But overall, this also means that for those businesses that are recruiting there will be a bigger pool of skilled workers to choose from. Salaries may drop, and if the cost of labour in home markets reduces, we may see work that is currently outsourced or offshored moved back onshore.

Where will they be working?

It’s worth remembering that not everyone can work remotely. While it is relatively straightforward for office workers (even some call centres have been changed to 100% remote), there are many roles where this isn’t possible. However, more remote employees mean fewer people in the office, and with the need for social and physical distancing, the way we use offices will change. We’re expecting to see additional investment in Integrated Workspace Management Systems to allow workplaces to be managed more effectively for the lower numbers of people that will be using them, and also to ensure that capacity limits (which were previously based on fire regulations and will now be based on distancing and ventilation needs) aren’t breached. Salesforce recently introduced work.com to help organisations manage a return to the workplace where continued remote working isn’t feasible.

Remote working will continue to be the norm for most office workers rather than an exception (for example, many of the big tech companies have already said that they expect people to work from home for the rest of the year, and Twitter has said that employees who want to continue to work from home forever will be able to) and while there are lots of different estimates out there as to the percentage of employees that will work from home in future, what is clear is that office/knowledge workers are likely to be spending at least some proportion of their working week based at home.

What technology will they be using?

Technology spending forecasts have changed dramatically over the last few months, and Gartner now forecasts that global IT spending will be down 8% from 2019 to 2020. However, they expect cloud spend to increase by around 10%, in part sustained by the need to support the rapid changes organisations have made, and to provide ease of access to remote workers. The moves to the cloud forced by remote working will remain and force digital transformation and migration of legacy systems.

In addition, we’ve also seen changes in retail spending on technology as people purchase equipment to allow them to work from home while homeschooling their kids. NPD US retail tracking for w/c 25^th April showed:

• PCs – week-on-week increase to 62% from 53%
• Printers – week-on-week increase 54% from 36%
• Mesh routers – week-on-week 60% for 6^th consecutive week
• Range extenders (183%), monitors (78%), Headphones (39%), tablets and accessories (71% revenue increase)

More remote working means there is a need for investment in collaboration software and unified communications systems. Some of the products that were deployed rapidly to fill gaps in capability (such as Zoom) may remain, or they may be replaced as organisations go through their usual technology selection processes to find long-term solutions. The need to focus on resilience highlighted by the response to the pandemic means organisations will be considering redundancy (if one service is down, can we use another?) and the need for multi-vendor and multi-cloud strategies. There is also a clear need to invest in addressing neglected infrastructure and consider either migration of legacy systems or improved remote access where that isn’t possible.

What are their priorities?

Let’s think back to the example at the beginning of this post. Cost cutting is clearly a priority. But not indiscriminate cost-cutting. There are tough decisions to be made, and organisations will be informed by their objectives, ethics and finances. Many people are hoping that the crisis we’ve been through (and are still enduring) will result in a more ethical, kinder and less aggressive world. Not everyone is convinced. But whatever is driving the business response to the pandemic, the current economic situation and the unknown impact on society and behaviour of the ongoing health crisis – as well as the expected continued economic downturn – means most organisations are looking at how they will survive. They’re also considering what they have learned.

Organisational priorities have changed, and just as I looked in a previous post at individual priorities changing to focus on survival, the same is true of many businesses. To do this, they need visibility and information to allow them to make decisions at speed. The world has become unpredictable, no one is doing any real long-term planning. As our CFO James Denena said in his blog post, even our company is looking at different scenarios so that we can respond appropriately to circumstances as they unfold.

What does this mean for the future?

The move to the cloud is accelerating, as is the move to the edge, both driven in part by remote working and in part by changes in the way businesses serve their customers. The recent launch of the Starlink satellites and the rapid growth in 5G deployments are very timely developments and indicate that the move to remote working can be sustained and improved as they support the move of workloads to the edge. These technologies are crucial to the growth of edge technologies and will accelerate automation via IoT devices and the use of AR and VR technologies for remote operation of equipment or improved collaboration experiences.

How can I get involved and help address these challenges?

As we continue to move through this period of uncertainty, if you have a perspective or a story to share, please don’t hesitate to reach out and start a dialogue. I will continue to review the ripple effects of the changing developments and offer analysis both here and on LinkedIn.

The post A Perspective on the IT and Human Impacts of our Current Reality appeared first on Snow Software.

In uncertain economic times, there is pressure within all organizations to reduce costs. But approaching a supplier and simply asking to pay less for the same service is unlikely to be successful. Worse still, it is a pretty blunt approach that leaves you little room to negotiate when a supplier responds with a straight out “no.” However, it does raise the question: what can IT do to successfully streamline spending?

Step 1: Examine your IaaS spend

Most IaaS contracts run on consumption-based billing, meaning you pay for what you use each month in arrears. As there is typically no contractual or term limit this is a great place to start to reduce costs.

The first area to look at is waste, where you are incurring charges needlessly. Prime examples include:

• Amazon Web Services (AWS) un-attached Elastic Block Store (EBS) volumes. If you terminate an instance but forget to remove the attached storage, you will keep paying for the storage
• Un-attached IP addresses. You pay for your public IPs, so if you do not need them, make sure you deallocate them
• AWS load balancers with no servers behind them
• Idle Microsoft Azure virtual network gateways

In all of these cases, you need to track down this waste and terminate the services. If you primarily use one public cloud service, using the vendors’ tools like Azure Advisor or AWS Trusted Advisor can be incredibly helpful to identify areas where you can potentially reduce spend. If you have a hybrid or multi-cloud environment with a few different public cloud services, private cloud(s) and/or virtual machines, you might consider a Cloud Management Platform (CMP) that can help you spot these opportunities across these various systems. In one audit, I found $60,000 a month of savings – about 6% of spend – in these areas alone.

Another top item on your target list should be over-provisioning. Load can change, and what was once a correctly sized instance can end up over-specified. By shrinking the size of an instance down to what it actually needs to be, you might be able to make substantial savings. For example, in this screenshot, you can see that Azure Advisor recommends shrinking the size of the machines to deliver cost savings (note that this is an example from a training class). A good CMP can easily pay for itself by analyzing a multi-cloud environment.

The third area is cost optimization schemes. If you know you have workloads that will be running for some time, you can look at reserving capacity with the IaaS provider. This does provide substantial discounts but you will lose flexibility, so be sure you have a long-term need before you start reserving instances. If your spend is significant, then make sure you have investigated the Enterprise Discount Programs (EDP) – this is where the IaaS provider offers you discounts in exchange for committed spend.

For more ideas, take a look at these resources from Microsoft and Amazon.

Step 2: Examine your SaaS spend

SaaS contracts are more typically signed with a term, committing to spend for one to five years. This makes it hard for you to renegotiate mid-term, so the first action you should take is ensuring you are properly tracking all of your agreements and renewal dates. It’s amazing how many businesses don’t keep an up-to-date record of renewals and thus miss opportunities for renegotiation. One of the terms I always hate to see in a contract is the auto-renewal clause – there is little worse than finding you needed to provide three months’ notice to terminate and missed that deadline.

Once you have visibility of your renewal dates, you should start looking at your usage levels to ensure you understand what your employees are really consuming. All too often a business will sign-up for a specific level of licensing and later find that level doesn’t reflect their needs. Getting more licenses is never a problem but shrinking your bill can be really challenging. A technology intelligence platform or a software asset management (SAM) solution can help identify your usage and potentially be a repository for tracking your agreement dates.

Armed with this information you can attempt to approach your vendor mid-term or wait for the end of the contracted period.

The best approach mid-term is to look for a technology exchange where you try an exchange un-used licenses for services which you would be able to use. It’s also an opportunity to raise questions around payment terms or payment plans. If you do find that all of your licenses are in use but you’re getting requests from other users who want access to the same resource and you’re not making progress exchanging licenses with your vendor, consider re-harvesting. At least in the short term, you might be able to find a few users that weren’t taking advantage of the tool and put it into someone else’s hands in the short term.

Renegotiation at the end of a contract gives you a much better opportunity to push the reset button.  But some technology suppliers, particularly the market leaders, have been taking a “take a take it or leave it” approach where they won’t allow you to just shrink your bill for the same services. It may be worth re-assessing why you need that service and figuring out how to get more value out of it.

Step 3: Review your software licenses

While this blog post has focused mostly on cloud subscription models, it would be remiss not to highlight the importance of looking at on-premises software licenses in exactly the same way as SaaS licenses. Again, you need to build visibility of your renewal dates and usage data so you understand what your options are. A SAM solution can help identify your usage as well as track your agreement dates, and a technology intelligence platform like Snow can help you look at usage and spend across traditional software and cloud-based applications. To maximize savings, you want to take the most holistic approach possible across on-prem and cloud technologies.

Step 4: Don’t forget hardware maintenance contracts

While it isn’t cloud, hardware maintenance is another subscription, and another opportunity to optimize costs. Take a close look at what you are paying – when equipment ages the maintenance costs can spiral. This is often a way for vendors to encourage you to migrate onto newer equipment. I have taken two approaches in the past:

• Use a third party who will offer the service for less than the vendor
• Find out what an upgrade will cost. They might surprise you, especially given the need for suppliers to bring in business at this time.

Businesses operating in the “new normal’ after the coronavirus crisis will need to ensure that costs are optimized. The approaches I’ve outlined above seek to improve visibility to ensure that IT spend is carefully targeted with as little waste as possible. These are prime areas for cost savings and the rewards can be substantial for those who get it right.   

If you’re looking for more advice on how to rightsize your IT spending, be sure to visit our Essential Resources Center.

The post How to Streamline Cloud Subscriptions & IT Costs During Uncertain Economic Times appeared first on Snow Software.

But what if you don’t have one? What if you are now tasked with doing more with less and you don’t have a dedicated platform to help? We recently asked some of our in-house experts that very question. The answer: it isn’t easy and requires a lot of manual work, but it can be done. Here are some of their recommendations, based on decades of IT asset management experience, both as former systems administrators and current service delivery experts.

Use What You Already Have

Within your IT landscape, the main resource for software information is likely the same resource you used to deploy that software – a client management platform like SCCM, BigFix or Altiris. In most organizations, Windows systems represent the majority of laptops and desktops, and the client management platforms likely have hooks into the bulk of those machines. These platforms can be configured with a wide array of options but, as a baseline, most will provide at least some measure of hardware detail along with Add/Remove Programs data. These capabilities can be enough to start building a basic asset management program.

To begin, work with your Systems Administration or IT team to query the hardware detail and Add/Remove Programs dataset to pull the relevant hardware and software details you’ll need. On the hardware side, look for information like Chassis Type (physical, virtual, desktop, laptop), Inventory Client Status (active/inactive) and Last Inventory Date. To create the initial list of software in your environment, you’ll want to zero in on Add/Remove Program Name, Installation Date and Installation Path.

Validate the Data

A crucial step in this process is validating the reliability and accuracy of the data collected from this existing system or systems. A few things to consider include:

• When was this snapshot of data collected?
• Is there duplicate or redundant information in the data?
• What is included as standard software on all systems?
• Does the data include non-licensable software like updates, help, drivers, and service packs?

Clean Up Your First Data Grab

Your snapshot may seem unmanageable at first because it likely includes every single piece of software deployed, whether it is part of your Original Equipment Manufacturer

(OEM), non-licensable software, homegrown applications or even duplicate entries for updates. As a practical matter, you will want to sort out the information so that you have only legitimate data to base your decisions upon. To do this, you might follow this process:

1. Make a copy of the data. Make sure you retain a gold dataset you can revert to if needed.

2. Remove all records with an inventory date older than 15 days. This measure will give you reasonable currency, but your configuration settings as mentioned above may mean you need to make this a larger number. Sort by date and delete the rows you don’t want.

3. Remove all records with inactive client status. If the client is reporting any issues at all, you do not want to trust the data supplied. Again, sort and delete.

4. Remove all records with install dates outside of the range you want to investigate. In this example, you might match the inventory currency date because you are interested in recent activity due to a shift to full work from home. For more on that topic, read Visibility and Agility: A Perspective on IT Asset Management During and After a Crisis.

5. Create a pivot table to group your data.

6. Pull Add Remove Program Name into the “Rows” section then again into the “Values” section.

7. Pull Chassis Type into the “Columns” section.

Next comes the tedious work. In the data, you will see a large number of entries. Click the filter option and take out the unneeded Add/Remove Program Names as mentioned above citing help, driver, update, etc.

Define Your Goals

Now that you have a relatively clean inventory dataset, you can start to prioritize your actions and decisions based on this data. You may have a renewal coming up with a particular vendor and want to go into that negotiating period in the best position possible. Or you may want to focus on vendors consuming the largest portions of the organization’s software spend. Another consideration might be a major project requiring specific software deployments, like data center migrations or transitions to public cloud environments.

Once you have inventory data and a focus area, you’ll need to start understanding what the organization owns. It is good practice to obtain a license position from the publisher and supplement that with any purchases made through resellers not represented in those publisher statements.

A secondary option would be to leverage the last set of data for which there was an agreement with the publisher and supplement that with purchases made since the time of that agreement. An example of this would be a true-up statement or audit result. Another option would be to obtain an applicable report of purchases from a reseller. However, that may not represent a complete license position.

Work the Data for Value-adding Insights

Armed with all of this inventory and licensing data, you can start driving toward whatever goals you are tasked with achieving. This may require reconciling the two datasets to work toward a compliance position, identifying where there may be software waste or understanding where your organization may need to true-up with a vendor in the future.

You may feel the urge to take on this work and make decisions within your own function but we’d advise that you resist the urge to make assumptions based on a single view of the IT landscape. ITAM is a foundational effort that touches every area of an organization. That means asking questions of those who can best answer them, regardless of where they sit in the organization. You will gain valuable insight that you can use to the entire organization’s advantage.

Of course, you will save a lot of time and be able to extend your strategy beyond basic asset management if you have a platform like Snow. If and when you’re ready to consider an ITAM platform, we’re here to help. Start by downloading our eBook on Building a Business Case for IT Asset Management or requesting a personalized demo. 

The post DIY IT Asset Management: A Perspective on Getting Scrappy When the Going Gets Tough appeared first on Snow Software.

However, there is also great economic uncertainty brewing, and many organizations now face serious economic headwinds. Based on our conversations with customers as well as analysts, we’ve seen two primary responses when it comes to cloud: Some are accelerating their move to public cloud and ramping up their consumption as the way to get work done and mitigate risk. Others are decreasing their public cloud consumption to cut costs and save money, particularly if a multi-year cloud migration initiative was still in planning or early implementation stages.

We have gathered some tips and tricks to help make whatever approach you decide to move forward with easier, more strategic and less costly. And it all starts with improving your visibility.

For Organizations Accelerating Cloud Consumption

In the current climate, ESG senior analyst Mark Bowker says the businesses that are already using cloud are likely to have a growing appreciation for their investment and will accelerate their adoption where possible.

If you’re increasing your cloud consumption, increased usage will inevitably lead to increased costs. In order to manage demand while not breaking the bank, consider techniques such as:

• Continuously rightsize and downsize. A key factor in keeping cloud expenses in line is ensuring all virtual machines (VMs) are allocated with the proper resources for workloads. Over-provisioning means higher costs. Rightsizing infrastructure reports analyze performance monitoring data for individual VMs and then recommend changes to resource allocation.
• Configure power scheduling. Running VMs affect usage data, so power them down when developers aren’t using them. Our research shows that for non-production workloads like development and test environments, the most effective immediate step is to leverage power schedules, which can yield up to 10-15% savings.  
• Purchase reserved instances strategically. We recommend analyzing usage patterns at the end of each month. Based on this analysis, and after plenty of discussion with owners of the target instances, consider whether it makes sense to purchase reserved instances.
• Automate and orchestrate. Institute governed consumption including role-based API/UI access and create guardrails to keep cloud instances within budget. It’s also important to put automation in place where it makes sense to reduce manual tasks required to both actively manage cloud usage and provide easy guidance for new cloud usage. 

For Organizations Decreasing or Delaying Cloud Consumption

For organizations that are still in the planning stages of a cloud migration, as well as those who are in the early stages of working with a consulting firm to roll out, it may actually be more beneficial to cut cloud investment during this period of uncertainty. While a move to the cloud may still be advantageous in the long run, migrations require significant process changes, some of which may be too disruptive over the next couple of months. If this is where you find yourself, consider the following steps to make your current efforts more effective and efficient.

• Gain visibility into your new status quo. Changing workforce requirements means you likely have new cloud instances that have been spun up by employees needing to complete critical projects, not to mention the addition of new hardware and software applications to your tech stack. Identify all of these new assets and bring them under management. For additional tips on how to gain visibility into your cloud applications, be sure to read our recent blog The SaaS Surge: A Perspective on Managing Cloud Applications as Remote Work Accelerates.
• Communicate with business units. Collaborating with your business units on what they are trying to accomplish in today’s new environment will help you determine what can (or cannot) be done in the cloud. This insight will also serve as the foundation for where efficiencies may be uncovered in the future.
• Reclaim on-premises resources. If you’re also using an on-premises environment in conjunction with cloud instances, consider running an audit to see if the resources are still being used as originally intended. You can potentially expect to free up roughly 10% of your resources this way, which can help defer hardware purchases months or even quarters. 

In some cases, we’ve also heard reports of companies that are considering moving from the cloud back to on-premises, what some in the industry have called cloud repatriation. According to research from IDC in 2019, some 85% of IT leaders were considering moving workloads out of the public cloud. However, while most cloud providers make it easy to start using their services, it can be difficult to migrate out. It is essential that organizations evaluate both usage data and the potential costs of making such a move before deciding how to proceed.

Another point that is critically important whether you’re accelerating or decreasing your public cloud spend is the notion of cost visibility. Providing business units a view of their project’s private and public cloud spend will make everyone more accountable during these uncertain times.

At the end of the day, the more information that you can gather on the current status of your cloud footprint and usage, the better positioned you’ll be to make an informed decision about how to manage your cloud costs. For more advice on how to manage and optimize cloud costs, be sure to check out our Essential Resources Center and our guide A Perspective On Rightsizing Your Hybrid Cloud Costs: The Shortcut To Cloud Cost Savings.

The post Cloud Economics: A Perspective on Implementing the Right Consumption Model for your Organization’s Evolving Needs appeared first on Snow Software.

While work may be on a crisis footing, home life is equally stressful with worries about sickness, family, friends, job security, educating and entertaining kids (according to Forbes there are 862 million kids out of school worldwide).

We know that just like people in other roles, Technology Guardians may be worried about job security, particularly in organisations that have temporarily closed or have reduced activities due to government-mandated lockdown. You may be worried that cost-cutting will impact you, or even wondering whether the business will survive.

Examples of Technology Guardians, Consumers and Decision Makers

Source: Snow Software 2019

Delivering value through uncertainty

Whether still working or furloughed, many Technology Guardians might be concerned about articulating their value during a time of crisis, and are rightly being cautious about issuing warnings about software audits, license compliance, technical debt, non-standard technology or shadow IT. When organisations are in reactive mode, actions are about survival. Decisions about which parts of the business can work from home are about whether it is practically or technically possible – keeping people safe takes priority over cybersecurity, cost or contractual and licensing obligations at this stage. However, we’re all well aware that the changes that have been made in response to the crisis will highlight known issues with technical debt, lack of VPN capacity, securing home-based workers and similar issues that have historically been accepted risks or dealt with using workarounds.

There are four main phases during which Technology Guardians can contribute to crisis-management. Most of us have made it through phase 2 and into phase 3. We now realize that we may be in this for the long haul.

Phase 1 – Planning for a crisis

You’ve probably already got a business continuity plan (BCP) that’s been used in this crisis, and hopefully contributed to it. Technology Guardians are integral to business continuity planning– in fact, everyone involved in ensuring technical resilience, IT continuity planning, disaster recovery or crisis management should consider themselves to be a Technology Guardian – after all, we are all trying to ensure that the digital technology within our organisations can be identified, located, classified, authenticated, authorised, paid for, secured, and used to generate value for the organisation, today and in the longer term.

Your organization is likely to be reviewing phase one once the situation is more stable.

Phase 2 – Supporting the crisis response phase

The initial crisis response is about what is technically possible. In the current crisis, this has been about maximizing the number of roles that can be carried out remotely and enabling them. It has involved strategies such as:

• relocating office-based equipment (workstations, peripherals and even furniture) to employees’ homes;
• enabling access to business systems from personal devices;
• employees buying devices to use at home;
• implementing new collaboration tools;
• expanding access to existing collaboration tools and cloud-based services.

These activities have primarily been about working out who needs what, what we’ve got and how we can get everyone up and running as quickly as possible. At the same time, managers have been making staffing decisions as to who is going to be furloughed or dismissed. In this situation, providing data about what technology individuals need to be able to work, and whether this can safely be provisioned remotely at speed is key.

Phase 3 – Managing the uncertainty

Last month Jelle Wijndelts wrote about some of the activities that ITAM and SAM teams should be focused on as most of us moved from phase 2 to phase 3. As we settle into this phase (and come to accept that it is likely to continue for some time) we need to focus more on enabling the ongoing changes needed to adapt to new and changing circumstances.

• Keep track of changes – for the ITAM and SAM teams this is likely to involve mapping changes in technology usage patterns as organisations adapt and change the way that they work. For example, as well as moving as many people to remote work as possible, many organisations have switched their delivery model to primarily (or completely) online. Others have had to make changes to physical working environments (e.g. grocery stores where screens, queuing systems and security have been put in place).
• Highlight the cost impact of changes, whether immediate (for cloud-based solutions billed monthly based on usage metrics) or upcoming (contract anniversaries). While some costs will increase, use of some systems may reduce (even if temporarily), and decisions on cloud migration or the replacement of legacy systems may be accelerated to facilitate new ways of working.
• Identify risks that have been introduced as a result of the urgent action (licensing, commercial, financial, reputational as well as security), classify and prioritise them, and provide remediation options. This includes ensuring that workarounds are either removed (where returning to the previous setup) or replaced (where new ways of working are being retained or different ones being implemented). The risk register should be updated regularly – vendors such as Zoom are already working to mitigate the risks identified due to the rapid increase in adoption of their service, as are the organisations that use it.  As one security specialist told me:

“It is crucial at the moment to understand what software is being used – particularly new solutions implemented at speed to enable changed ways of working – and identify vulnerabilities so that we can manage these and ensure that our employees are as secure when working from home as they are when working on-premises with our standard products.”

However, as the initial activity settles down and organisations start to model scenarios for how they might operate as the pandemic and associated economic impact develop, organisations are going to need data to help them understand the options and their implications. James Denena, Snow Software’s CFO, wrote about this from a CFO perspective recently, but you will also need to support decision-making on ways of working and technology investments. According to one CIO:

“With budgets being scrapped overnight, we have been tasked by board members to understand the capabilities of the IT roadmap and how we can manage projects and funding in future – without automated and robust technology intelligence, that would be a manual exercise involving collaboration with teams who are already overstretched in the current environment.”

Phase 4 – Return to business as usual

You’re probably all too well aware of all the debate around ‘back to normal’ or ‘the new normal’. We don’t know what ‘Business as Usual’ will look like, or when we’ll get there. In the meantime, the way forward is for us all to accept that we’re working with uncertainty and keep good records so that when the situation stabilizes we’re in a position to provide the necessary data.

Make an Action Plan

While some crises are localized, and others short and sharp, the current pandemic has introduced so much uncertainty that even what would previously have been considered short-term planning is impossible. We are all largely in reactive mode, trying to navigate our organisations through the changes as they occur – business closures, movement restrictions, supply chain disruption and constraints, as well as with the mental and emotional toll this is taking on us, our colleagues our customers and our suppliers. We need to be agile, responsive and creative in collaborating with our peers to find solutions that support what is needed now, while also maintaining good quality data to allow us to have a clear view of what we have changed, when and why and make business decisions about our technology strategy, budgets and commercial relationships as we start to adapt. In a recent conversation with an IT Asset Manager, they explained:

“Mature SAM & ITAM teams, with good quality data in their systems, are helping their organisations to understand and reallocate costs where necessary. Ways of working have changed overnight and with good data, we are able to identify which applications are being used and whether this use is in line with contracts and license agreements.”

The primary role of Technology Guardians in these situations is to ensure that decision-makers have the data they need to make effective business decisions in the difficult circumstances that they are faced with.

What to do if you’re still working:

Engage with stakeholders, listen, ask them what they need to know, respond quickly with ‘good enough’ reports to help them make decisions. Help them understand what needs paying for (particularly where you’ve taken advantage of time- or functionality-limited offers designed to support crisis-management), what could be cancelled (systems scaled back or no longer used due to new ways of working, or services implemented as short-term solutions), and to understand the change in usage patterns both through the crisis to date, currently and for different future scenarios.

What to do if you’re furloughed:

In this case, you’re obviously not working, but if you’re reading this, then you’re one of many people keeping an eye on what’s going on and planning for their return. Where only some team members have been furloughed, then we recommend simply keeping up with industry and discipline news and trends, and maybe doing any free training courses that are available at the moment. If the whole team has been furloughed, then spending time thinking about what information you are likely to have on your return, and where the gaps might be, will be invaluable. On your return to work, engage with stakeholders to understand what support they need and establish what data you have that can help them. You may also need to flag up issues or opportunities that haven’t occurred to them while they’ve been involved in the day-to-day crisis management with a reduced workforce and limited data.

If you’re looking for more resources and best practices to help during this time, be sure to check out our Essential Resources Center.

#StayHomeSaveLives

The post What is the role of a Technology Guardian in a crisis? appeared first on Snow Software.

Understand your current investments

With business priorities often shifting around a bit, implementing cost optimization measures can be challenging, but one of the first steps for every department – including IT – is to understand exactly what your current investments and contractual commitments are. Every finance organization will likely ask about this, but we also recognize that this can be a difficult request for some teams as we don’t always speak the same language. Consider starting with simple questions like:

• What am I paying for? If you don’t have a complete list, a good place to start is your invoices.
• What is actually being used? It is especially important to note what is critical right now, such as teleconferencing, collaboration tools and cloud instances.
• How much are we really using? This is especially important to understand if you are getting value from your investments.
• What do I own? This would cover on-premises data centers, laptops, desktops, etc.

Once you have shared visibility of your complete technology ecosystem, the next natural conversation will be around contractual obligations including renewal dates and cancellation rights. This insight between IT and finance can be crucial and, as potential decisions are made, could shed light on opportunities to impact the bottom line by removing any redundancy or further optimizing current investments.

Dig deeper into what’s business-critical

Prioritization is certainly something that both finance and IT can relate to – whether reviewing tickets that indicate an outage versus a user error or approving an invoice before the due date. The same principle applies to the evaluation stage of a cost optimization initiative. Finance will likely ask IT to provide details on resources they deem essential, and that generally means parsing through which tools are critical to running the business versus those that may be considered more of a nice to have. You may already have this list well developed if you’ve had to recently update or revert to your business continuity plan. In addition to business-critical, we will want to understand which tools we can better leverage as a force multiplier to reduce cost and waste in the system. 

As both teams gain a clearer picture of the organization’s technology landscape, this is typically when any usage data becomes important. In some cases, by understanding usage data, finance and IT may be able to review whether underutilized resources could be used across other areas of the organization – cloud capacity for example – or if applications should be consolidated in favor of a similar yet more used tool. The more data and insights that can be shared, the more strategic and timely decisions can be.

Support scenario modeling

Most finance teams are doing a lot of scenario modeling right now. There is a strong and necessary bias towards action in this climate, and these plans allow the business to be more agile, regardless of which direction the market heads. The objectives of these exercises are to answer questions such as: How much uncertainty is out there? How long could we feel it? What is the severity of the impact that we will see? And be prepared to act quickly when visibility improves.

A few good things to know about scenario modeling from the IT perspective:

• Baseline scenario. It is important to establish a scenario that you think is the most likely outcome. Many people like to use the 50/50 rule, meaning you could see a 50% probability that the results come in above and a 50% probability that the results come in below. Of course, every organization may need to alter this mix to better reflect their own risk profile, and in fact, this is often the time when many will shift to more of a 60/40 or even a 70/30 type view.
• Upside scenarios. This plan looks at a short-term impact and the potential for a surge in demand for your organization’s products, services or solutions. In this scenario, if finance believes a positive likely outcome, it may be important to consider resources that IT may need to add to meet potential future demand such as expanding users’ seats or increasing licenses. As such, it could be prudent to secure certain resources and renew contracts with your software, applications, hardware or cloud vendors. If these resources are deemed critical, you get favorable terms if you commit to a higher volume or length. 
• Downside scenarios. This plan supports a decreased demand environment over a sustained period of time. This could also be the result of a cascading effect of one market impacting another. If this scenario plays out, finance will look to all areas of the organization to optimize spend as quickly and aggressively as possible, but with a prioritization on actions that will have the least operational and human impacts. One area that I often see organizations make mistakes here is that they think optimization is always about reducing spend in every category. I would urge you to look at those investments you can make which will allow you to reduce more cost elsewhere and improve your people’s efficiency, ultimately helping you through difficult times, but also coming out more efficient and stronger on the other side.

Ultimately, scenario modeling is only as good as our data. Anything the IT team can do to provide actionable, fact-based insights will result in better decision making for the business.

Focus on people and customers

In the midst of all this market uncertainty, many organizations are trying their hardest to safeguard their employees and avoid cutting staff. The best advice I can offer here is to build and maintain a strong foundation for the business with good visibility to key metrics on performance and the right financial protections and governance in place. Every function has a key role to play here, but IT is critical in ensuring we all have the right business solutions and the right data, provisioned as efficiently as possible.

Remember, efficiency isn’t always about cutting costs. If you need to propose new tools in the midst of a cost savings environment, outline how it will offer a return on investment by expanding capabilities or improving productivity. For example, buying new technologies that could ultimately free up time that an employee has been spending on manual tasks, ultimately refocusing their efforts into more strategic initiatives, certainly makes the case more compelling for finance teams.

While broader cost optimization efforts may be in consideration across the business, it’s also important that organizations never forget about how they’re serving their customers, their partners and their wider community. Investing in the resources that customer service or support teams need may be something that IT should prioritize when evaluating technology requests.

At the end of the day, the only constant is change. Navigating change effectively requires cross-functional collaboration, pragmatism and agility – all supported by powerful and shared data insights. IT teams that foster a strong partnership with finance are in the best position to help their organizations adapt quickly and securely, no matter what new challenges arise.

For more advice on how to determine what you have in your tech stack and how to assess what’s essential, check out Visibility and Agility: A Perspective on IT Asset Management During and After a Crisis.

The post Better Together: A CFO’s Perspective on How IT and Finance Can Partner to Provide Stability appeared first on Snow Software.

Figure 1: Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs

We’ve probably all come across Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs at some point, although in recent years probably with the meme with ‘WiFi’ added to the bottom. For most of us, this pyramid has been largely irrelevant (and a bit of a joke). But the COVID-19 pandemic and our response to it made me realise that it might be time to revisit it, as it can help us understand how we can address the changed world we find ourselves in.

In the context of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs , what we were really talking about with ‘human centred IT’ was the ’self-actualisation’ at the top of the pyramid. For the majority in the tech industry, including the tech teams in the customers we serve, the lower levels of this pyramid are largely taken for granted. We know that we have access to food, water, shelter, warmth, rest, (even leisure time), and that we are essentially safe and secure – all the basic needs of humanity. We have friends and relationships and jobs that give us a sense of accomplishment – and despite the acknowledged mental-health issues in first world society, in general our roles (both work and personal) give us a sense of self-esteem, meeting our psychological needs.

While some social media may at times make us feel that we’re not measuring up to the perfect home, job, family, handknitted jumper, homemade sourdough loaf, homegrown tomatoes and Instagram-perfect lifestyle, what it does highlight is that our aspirations are focussed around self-actualisation and self-fulfilment. Even now there are posts on social media suggesting that we use the current crisis and lockdown time to lose weight, get fit, learn a new language, read the books we’ve always been meaning to, write that novel, declutter, do DIY, grow food, cook gourmet meals, make that sourdough, take up yoga. Suggesting, apparently, that we all have so much more free time now. However, the reality is often starkly different.

Basic needs

Physiological needs

With many businesses forced to close or change the way they operate, many employees have had their hours reduced, been furloughed, or sadly been dismissed. For some, this sudden change in cash flow has impacted their ability to provide even the basic necessities of life – like food and shelter – for their families. With schools closed in many countries, parents are trying to homeschool and entertain their children while simultaneously working from home (or in the case of keyworkers, going out to work in ever more difficult circumstances). Panic buying was a clear indication of how quickly instincts returned to the bottom of the pyramid and survival. Even now, grocery shopping isn’t straightforward – key workers struggle to get what they need when they come off shift, flour is in short supply (maybe everyone is making sourdough after all?) and people post triumphantly about having tracked down toilet paper or pasta, returning to their hunter-gatherer instincts.

Safety needs

I’ve posted on LinkedIn about some of the challenges that people are facing with working from home, (new tech, sharing space with others, limited connectivity, security concerns), but we also need to remember that many people can’t work from home – those we now think of as key (or essential) workers. Not just doctors, nurses and paramedics, but carers, cleaners, supermarket employees, delivery and truck drivers, bin men, transport workers and those supporting critical infrastructure. All of these are taking risks that those of us who can work from home simply don’t have to consider.

Psychological needs

We’re also hearing of people who are struggling with isolation, who thought that they’d be happy not to have to commute, but who are missing the social interaction with colleagues and customers. While these people may be safe, they’re unable to fulfil anything more than these basic needs.

Belongingness, love, relationships

I myself have now been in isolation for 6 weeks as the result of the virus and a secondary infection. As I was travelling before that, it’s been 8 weeks since I’ve seen my family or any local friends. I’m relying on the milkman and a veg box scheme for groceries (thankfully supplemented by family, friends and the local volunteer network picking up prescriptions and dropping off the odd additional groceries at the gate, without any contact), and telephone appointments with my doctor. While I’m still enjoying the novelty of spending so much time at home and not living out of a suitcase, I’m very aware that there are significant mental and emotional impacts of the current situation. As I was waiting outside the GP surgery to be assessed (just over a month ago now), I was scrolling through social media, and found that my response to the content was much more emotional than normal. Posts either exploiting the virus to sell, or continuing as normal with no acknowledgement of the worrying situation we were all in, really upset me.

Esteem, prestige, accomplishment

We need to remember that right now the people we work with – our colleagues, our customers, our suppliers – are struggling to come to terms with this ‘new normal’. They’re not thinking about fulfilling their potential or being creative any more than we are. They’re wondering whether their business will survive, whether they can manage on their reduced paycheck, whether they will still have a job at the end of their period of shielding or furlough. They’re worrying about the family members they can’t see, how they’re coping with isolation, whether they will ever see them again. They may have family or friends who are sick or who have died in the last few weeks. They may be in isolation and wondering whether they’ll be able to get a grocery delivery or concerned about how their children are coping with cancelled exams, lack of socialisation and more screentime than would normally be considered OK.

Self-actualisation

While self-actualisation may seem irrelevant in many ways now that there is so much uncertainty lower down the pyramid, we still see that it matters – but it has changed. Rather than worrying about whether our food is photogenic enough to post online, people are wondering how they can make a difference. They want to contribute towards making the current situation better – whether through their day-to-day work or through volunteering.

So what does the future of IT look like now?

We’re going to keep looking at this – there are some inspirational examples out there of how businesses have pivoted to fulfil the needs that this crisis has brought about. The humans at the heart of our organisations have never been more important, but right now, they may struggle to envisage the future. Right now, it’s not about a 10 year vision, a 5-year or even a 3-year plan. It’s whether I’ll have a business or a job or a home in the next 3 months, 6 weeks or even 3 weeks. So what does this mean for Technology Guardians?

Get back to basics

Firstly, cut yourselves some slack and remember that your mental and emotional reactions are a normal response to the situation we see around us. Secondly, do the same for your colleagues. But more than that, remember that your organisation has changed, and the market that it is in has changed. Don’t assume that you know what your stakeholders want and need – ask them. Help them work it out as your organisation changes. Your data has value beyond what you have traditionally used it for, so stretch yourselves, maximise the value of what you do, respond to the change and help your organisation navigate and survive the uncertainty and disruption.

The world that emerges as we reacquaint ourselves with the importance of those basic needs may not be the same as the one that we are familiar with. We need to be prepared for this, and be flexible. We all need to change our focus, and ask what we can do to help.

#StayHomeSaveLives

The post The Renewed Necessity for Human-Centred IT appeared first on Snow Software.

Thankfully, many countries have the underlying IT infrastructure needed to make remote work possible. The rapid adoption of the cloud and SaaS applications was already changing the way we work. But today’s unprecedented time has undoubtedly escalated this fact. Ready or not, we’ve all jumped headfirst into this new normal. And, as a result, the role of IT Asset Management (ITAM) in empowering organizations to keep a close eye on cloud and software investments, has never been more vital.

With all organizations having to adapt at speed, chances are that many have been pushed into making hasty decisions. And that’s okay as the first priority is to keep the company running and your newly remote workers supplied with the new technology resources they need. But the consequences of those decisions could have a lasting impact. For example, that offer for six months of free software may have been necessary at the time to seamlessly enable productivity. But was it the right software for the long haul and, if not, will the business be tied into a product that was never budgeted for?

As organizations adapt to the current market uncertainty, ITAM has a critical role to play when it comes to supporting their short-, medium- and long-term IT strategy.

Managing the here and now

With most workers now up and running at home, it’s time to begin getting your arms around what your new reality looks like. Here are some recommendations for smoothing out your go-forward path.

• Be proactive. Enabling both business leaders and end-users is your top priority to ensure smooth business operations. Get involved and help them make good decisions when it comes to things like SaaS, BYOD, virtual desktops and more.
• Stay focused. Keep an eye on what is happening in your estate. This is a fluid situation but, with ongoing visibility, you will be able to make decisions more quickly because you already know what is happening and what is needed.
• Ramp up communication. Regularly inform your users of what is acceptable and what isn’t. Help them understand how they can work remotely by sharing the tools you have already made available to them. Send frequent reminders on taking the proper precautions with personally identifiable data and maintaining strong security protocols.
• Be wary of “free” software. This is one way in which licenses can snowball out of control. Snow’s CIO Alastair Pooley has a favorite saying: “There is no such thing as a free puppy.” Make sure you read the T&Cs and understand when your free licenses end. That will put you in a good position to either stop use of or negotiate the required amount of accounts for the software or application.

Preparing for extended working from home

As you begin to think about long-term requirements, your organization’s leadership team will inevitably be having some future-of-work discussions and your company processes will need to adapt. To prepare for what comes next, consider these ideas in your planning.

• Ensure you have comprehensive visibility into your IT estate. A surge in shadow IT is unavoidable at a time like this, so it’s important to have an accurate handle on what technology is running across your organization.
• Publish a list of approved software and applications and share it broadly.
• Implement an automated software request process. This is so important for preventing incorrect licensing and maintaining compliance.
• Review the controls you have available for preventing workers from downloading unapproved productivity applications and modify as needed.
• Author a formal policy for BYOD, as well as virtual desktops, applications and cloud application usage, that includes strong governance. Secure leadership buy-in for your plan and then share it widely.

Shifting focus to cost savings

No one knows the long-term effects of our current reality, but economies around the world are already feeling the impact. During a time like this, asset management can be a tremendous help to the business as you start planning for the following cost-saving scenarios today:

• Look for opportunities to fully optimize your technology spend. Rightsizing licenses or negotiating an early renewal could free up the critical budget needed to support the business.
• Some companies may regrettably be forced to implement reductions in their workforce. If such tough decisions need to be made, prepare to negotiate with vendors to reduce technology expenses as well.
• Expect that software vendors will respond to economic pressure with an increase in audits. Prepare for that reality now.
• Economic shifts can also lead to an increase in mergers and acquisitions. ITAM data will be needed to provide insight on compliance, contractual commitments and technology budgets.

Regardless of what’s in store, having complete visibility across your IT estate has never been more critical. This comprehensive insight into your infrastructure, cloud usage and applications will keep you within budget and compliant as you ride out this storm.

For more on managing through a crisis, see our CIO’s perspective, A New Reality for IT: A CIO’s Perspective During a Business Continuity Event.

The post Visibility and Agility: A Perspective on IT Asset Management During and After a Crisis appeared first on Snow Software.