Snow Atlas: More Capabilities, More Scalability
Over the past few decades, we’ve seen adoption of technology increase exponentially across all organizations. As more technology is brought in to address complicated and challenging market problems — as well as new opportunities of course — the overall level of complexity of managing that technology increases. It’s been an issue that’s plagued us for some time. To solve this problem, more technologies are introduced to manage our technologies, or we suffer by juggling between a series of pre-built dashboards for every tool. How do you really know whether the technology in your stack is serving you? How do you measure the value that investment provides?
This overarching problem is just one of the many reasons that we believe in the concept of Technology Intelligence. Technology intelligence is the ability to understand and manage all your technology to maximize business potential and resilience.
Our unique approach to Technology Intelligence lies in the aggregation and normalization of technology data, whether from within your own systems or through third-party integrations. Having a tailored form of the right data about your technology allows your organization to make more informed decisions that are founded in facts. Beyond the data itself, organizations need to be able to act on this intelligence through automation and orchestration.
Let’s explore how Snow Software is empowering our customers with Technology Intelligence.
Bringing Technology Intelligence to life
Snow Atlas is the realization of Technology Intelligence for Snow. It represents years of work and learnings to create a cloud-native, purpose-built platform to accelerate data-driven technology decisions. Our latest announcement for Snow Atlas is the first major feature release for this foundational platform, and it marks the beginning of another phase of our journey.
Of the capabilities that are incorporated in the latest Snow Atlas release, there a few items that are worth taking a moment to dive deeper into. Let’s start with SaaS management:
- Our new Okta SSO discovery provides an agentless ability to identify SaaS applications in use across an organization. This is just another way to paint a unified picture of an organization’s technology landscape. We recognize that SaaS is very complex and the data you need depends on the types of problems you need to solve (for example, SSO is great for looking for cost savings around your most used SaaS services, but it won’t be effective to identify free or trial services that create potential data risk). That’s why we intend to add future SSO discovery methods and other data sources for SaaS discovery based on the use cases that are most important to you.
- In addition to Okta SSO, we’ve also released six SaaS API connectors. Through our experience identifying more than 8,000 SaaS applications in our SaaS management solution, we’ve learned that building connectors and deploying them can be done more efficiently — and we’re all about making our solutions easier to use. These new and enhanced connectors were much faster to build and ultimately, will be easier for our customers to use. This represents a complete architecture update when it comes to how we bring data into the Snow Atlas platform.
With Snow Atlas, we’ve developed the platform to provide our customers with the ability to get up and running quickly. If you’re looking to bring SAM capabilities into your operation, Snow Atlas allows you to turn on the backend infrastructure almost instantaneously. Additionally, customers can configure their own agents in Snow Atlas, something that has been a more involved process in the past.
We recognize that decisions hinge on the ability to access your technology data, and Snow Atlas was designed to provide a much faster time to value.
The gang is all here
While we have been hard at work innovating our platform and capabilities for Snow Atlas, we recognize that we have many customers that are still invested in our other solutions. I want to take a moment to address how we’re continuing to innovate with our on-premises solutions.
With our on-premises products, we are leveraging the innovations from Snow Atlas to enhance our solutions. For example, we’re bringing what we’ve learned about platform scalability to our SAM solutions. Many of you have pushed us to scale performance as your businesses have scaled. While we’ve made progress in the current version of SLM, we are currently testing in development step function improvements that will begin in Snow Atlas and then be brought to our on-premises solutions. Some have asked why we’re taking this approach. Here’s the answer: in a SaaS service we can understand and control the environment the software is running in more closely. We also can build a better understanding of the impact of the changes before they are made available in the myriad of customer environments that exist for the deployed solution.
Beyond the innovations that we will bring from Snow Atlas to the on-premises solutions, we will continue to innovate and add more value in this platform. These changes include our ongoing work in Oracle that has recently resulted in certification, as well as Java visibility, enhanced AD and ITSM integrations and more.
We’ve also brought decades of customer learnings, experiences and knowledge to inform the direction of Snow Atlas. That’s why we launched Snow Atlas with our existing products in SAM — so we could focus specifically on how we could bring a familiar experience to the platform out of the gate. This makes the journey easier for our existing customers. It also allows us to innovate the platform underpinnings and how we’re evolving them without customers having to incur challenging or lengthy upgrades.
Celebrating a milestone
Our latest Snow Atlas release is a major milestone for Snow, and we want to thank all our customers for joining us on this journey. It’s no easy feat to build a platform from scratch. Through our conversations, requests for features, feedback through partners and every way we connect, our customers played a significant role in how we’ve developed and launched Snow Atlas. You’ve helped us ensure that we are offering a more robust platform that fits your needs and is flexible enough to accommodate new innovations and capabilities. Thank you from all of us at Snow.
To learn more about Snow Atlas, be sure to check out the Snow Atlas product page, or reach out to us for more information.
Sanjay Castelino is the Chief Product and Customer Officer at Snow, where he’s responsible for overseeing the complete product lifecycle from strategy and development through launch and continued innovation. He is a B2B product, marketing and operations leader with more than 20 years of experience in growing businesses from early-stage startups to public companies.