Audit Defense Always be audit ready
The best defense is a good offense. Snow automatically calculates software license requirements based on verified usage data, so you can optimally negotiate license agreements and ensure always-on compliance
On-demand compliance reports
Get real-time visibility to your compliance position and quickly pull reports to confidently communicate your effective license position (ELP). Learn how Telkomsel was able to reduce the time to prepare for audits by 90%.
Automated, accurate and complete inventory data
An incomplete inventory is not good enough for audit defense. Snow provides organizations a comprehensive view of application usage and installations to confidently report your effective license position.
Insights to reduce datacenter license costs
Snow automatically provides optimal licensing and deployment recommendations to maximize cost efficiencies, including licensing metrics like processor and processor core licensed software on both virtual and physical resources.
Maintain compliance for your largest vendors across your hybrid IT environments
Snow helped us to identify unnecessary and underutilized software licenses. We are also much better equipped to ensure round-the-clock compliance with all our software license agreements with a near real-time view of installed software — making it easy to spot and deactivate unused licenses.
Here are 10 steps you can take to navigate a software audit:
1. Notification. Don’t ignore an audit request. Once the notification letter arrives, notify your ITAM team.
2. Assemble the audit board. Gather your key stakeholders and communicate the audit process.
3. Prepare your documentation. Gather and review all license entitlements, contacts and agreements associated to the audit.
4. Acknowledge the audit letter and clarify products included in the audit.
5. Propose a non-disclosure agreement (NDA).
6. Meet with the auditor.
7. Gather the data. Only collect data that has been defined and in a form that is agreed to by all parties.
8. Submit the data.
9. Carefully review the results. Never agree to the findings in the first instance.
10. Settle and close the audit.
Dig deeper in this blog, 10 Steps for Navigating a Software Audit.
An NDA often represents the only opportunity to put a fence around the scope of a software audit. Many software publishers and their hired auditors may refuse to consider comprehensive pre-audit agreements. However, most typically will agree to negotiate NDAs to control the handling of audit data. Almost always it is a good idea to include appropriate, corresponding protective measures in the NDA to protect all parties involved. It’s advised not to proceed with the audit until this step is complete.
Learn more about how to prepare for an audit in this article, Audit Defense Principles and Ground Rules.
Many vendors pursue an audit strategy that at first looks like an informal request for information. These requests often arrive as a generic, impersonal request for the customer to collect and report data or as an offer for an assessment or review. They are often written in a way that makes it sound like the vendor is offering a free or helpful service. The important thing to know is that these are still effectively audit requests. Learn more: Winning Strategies to Beat Software Audits
Manual ELP (effective license position) reporting can take months without automated visibility. With automated reporting of application usage, you can get near-real-time visibility into how licenses are used to ensure compliance. Some examples of how our customers have benefitted:
• Telkomsel was able to reduce the time to prepare for audits by 90%.
• Dorset Council used spreadsheets to report on installations of applications and servers. By having all these details in Snow, they were able to reduce processing and analysis time from 2-3 days to 5 or 10 minutes.
• Investec saved an estimated 200 hours by pulling in-depth reports on demand, eliminating the need for time-consuming and complex manual work and the expense of external consultants.
Learn about other benefits of being audit ready in this blog, 3 Reasons to Love Software Audits.
With our automated visibility, expert team and value realization services, Snow is normally able to help prepare for an audit in less than 90 days. Snow is also Oracle Verified for Databases, Database Options, Middleware and Oracle Java, so that you can produce reports for auditors with ease.
The Snow software asset management solution helps organizations understand their effective license position for thousands of vendors. Our Data Intelligence Service recognizes over 750,000 applications. The most common vendors include: IBM, SAP, Microsoft and Oracle, including installation details of Oracle Java. News articles have indicated that Oracle has doubled its sales and audit team for Java in 2024.
Learn more about Snow Software features to get visibility to Oracle Java.
Exposure to Indirect Access is becoming more and more prevalent in SAP audits and with the rapid growth in SaaS, the risk of Indirect Access is growing greater. We have also heard of enhanced audits resulting from potential indirect access usage. Many organizations are unsure whether to adopt Digital Access licensing or stay on their legacy user licensing. To make the best decision, it’s important to carry out system checks to avoid unnecessary Indirect Usage and assess which licensing option is the best fit.
Learn more about SAP software audit best practices in this blog, The Art of Preparing for an SAP Audit.