What’s New at Snow Software: September 2023
This month’s innovations include loads of new features and functionality for our customers and partners. From wide-ranging improvements across SAM on Snow Atlas, Snow SaaS Management to Snow Cloud Cost, there’s something for everyone.
New partner capabilities
Customer application management: Improved security and cost optimization
From the Customers overview page, Snow partners are now able to compare and prioritize high-value metrics across all their customers’ applications.
For example, they can quickly identify customers whose IT environments contain a specific number of installed yet prohibited (aka “denied”) applications. In the same way, partners can easily see which customers have applications with the following support statuses: end of support (EOS), end of extended support (EOES) or end of life (EOL).
As you can see in the bottom part of the screenshot above, the partner drills into the customer environment in question to then carry out established policies for handling these risky applications (in this example, 50 installations on Acrobat Professional 2017 reached EOS over a year ago).
And when it comes to optimizing application costs, Snow partners can also use these same views to immediately identify and uncover details regarding customers’ used and unused applications, acting accordingly to reduce provisioned licenses, and rightsize license entitlements with vendors based on actual usage.
New SAM capabilities
ITSM Enhancer for ServiceNow: Significant performance improvements
With Snow ITSM Enhancer for ServiceNow, customers can now gain greatly improved performance through implementing indexes.
Snow app Guided Setup.
This improved performance is realized in the form of faster processing and aggregation of Snow SAM data into ServiceNow. Implementing indexes provides the most benefits for ITSM Enhancer for ServiceNow environments from approximately 30,000 to 70,000 devices.
Learn how to use the ServiceNow Guided Setup steps to create performance-increasing indexes in our Snow Globe knowledge base article, How to implement Snow for ServiceNow performance improvements. To access Snow Globe articles, you can create a user account here for free.
SAM on Snow Atlas
Proactive data governance with computer properties filtering
As a SaaS platform, Snow Atlas is continually updated with incremental value. You can follow these frequently communicated new and enhanced capabilities through Snow’s community public broadcast page, Snow Atlas Releases.
One such example of a small but powerful, quick update is the recently released Computers list filtering capability, which allows you to inspect the current situation of computers in your IT landscape.
before they happen.
Has a laptop, datacenter server or virtual machine unexpectedly reported back as having Inactive status? Are computers being scanned in the time intervals you’re expecting? Just choose a column to filter to the property you’re most interested in; then, take appropriate action on the resulting filtered computer list, if necessary.
Oracle: Even better, more complete visibility of your Java installations
Detection of Java installations across your entire IT landscape can be tricky. Snow is a pioneer in this area, having first provided this capability two years ago, with continued enhancements all along the way.
Fast forward to the late summer of 2023, and Snow keeps adding incremental innovation, this time in the form of our enhanced All Java installations report on Snow Atlas.
This report’s value has increased significantly through the addition of the following new columns: Architecture, Installation status, Home path, Reason message, plus a host of others located in our new column selector.
New SaaS Management capabilities
Improved SaaS data source: Browser extension
Increasing SaaS sprawl in organizations is driving a lack of visibility, wasted spend, and heightened security & regulatory risks. To combat this, Snow SaaS Management provides consolidated SaaS application usage and cost data visibility, thanks to several discovery sources.
One of these SaaS data discovery sources is unique to Snow: Using a web browser extension to discover both known and unknown applications accessed from within your IT landscape, including free and trial SaaS apps. The browser extension also discovers individual SaaS activity, detailed down to the number of hours and minutes users have spent logged into such SaaS apps. This is key information for you to know when it comes to your security and software renewal processes.
Our most recent news is that this secure, powerful browser extension uses an innovative data collection method that does not depend on an agent. This allows customers to benefit from a standalone SaaS management solution if desired, without any other product dependencies.
New Cloud Cost management capabilities
Snow Cloud Cost: New S3 recommendations for better cost efficiency
Amazon’s S3 (Simple Storage Service) is among the most extensively used AWS services today. Take advantage of the following new enhancements to the Snow Cloud Cost recommendations engine to maximize your ROI on Amazon S3:
- S3 multipart uploads: Identifies unfinished S3 multipart uploads that are still incurring storage costs and consuming your space. This recommendation allows you to decide if you’d like it to be completed or cleaned up.
- S3 versioning: Identifies S3 buckets that have versioning enabled but do not have lifecycle rules defined to manage older version of your files. This helps you to implement lifecycle rules to expire or transition older version of files to reduce storage costs.
- S3 storage class: Identifies S3 buckets that are currently using the standard storage class or low-access storage class. This enables you to migrate data to more cost effective storage classes such as intelligent tiering for infrequently accessed data.
such as Standard IA.
What’s next?
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