SaaS Management

Exciting new product family capabilities for Adobe Creative Cloud

SaaS Management on Snow Atlas now lets you filter for related products within Adobe’s family of applications and subscriptions.

 IT/ITAM Managers can:

• Easily query Adobe and its sub-products to understand the usage and optimize costs (e.g. aggregated view of Adobe Creative Cloud or down to applications such as Photoshop, InDesign, Acrobat, etc.).
• Quickly see charts with application and subscription KPIs such as purchased or free, unassigned or over assigned, usage and costs, active, inactive, have no activity, or not monitored across the last 12 months or 30 days.

IT, Finance, and Procurement Managers can make faster, better decisions around costs, app rationalization, and vendor negotiation.

Improvements to applications tables for better SaaS management 

We’ve updated the SaaS Management applications page to include more granular details to help you gain more visibility into your SaaS estate and optimize your spend.

We’ve added new data, such as:

• Discovery date: This information displays the date when the application was first discovered in your SaaS estate, allowing you to focus on the most recently discovered applications.
• Active users: This information displays the number of users that used this application in the last 30 days, allowing you to track its usage.

Cloud Capabilities

Cloud License Management: Key features added to improve your Azure Hybrid Benefit’s (BYOL) usage

In your cloud license management (CLM) dashboard, you can now see:

• Potential savings in licensing costs if all eligible resources (VMs) are converted to bring-your-own-licenses (BYOL) (Azure Hybrid Benefit).
• The realized savings from your existing BYOL configured resources. We can do this as we have exposed the price for Windows Server licenses in a BYOL and pay-as-you-go (PAYG) configuration in the Snow Atlas UI.
• The number of Windows Server licenses required for BYOL-eligible resources. By automatically calculating the license requirement, you can now quickly confirm that licenses are correctly applied while simultaneously optimizing costs.

Refer to the documentation here.

We have more enhancements lined up for March. As a Snow Atlas customer, we invite you to join the beta program for this application. Speak to your account manager to get started.

Access Snow Cloud Cost application using single sign-on (SSO)

Snow Atlas customers with a Snow Cloud Cost subscription can now access this application directly from the Snow Atlas UI using SSO. To enable this, configure your access on the Snow Cloud Cost page in the Snow Atlas settings. You only need your client ID and the name of your identity provider for Snow Cloud Cost to set this up. Follow the instructions here.

Snow Cloud Cost

New anomaly detection features

We introduce two impactful features that elevate the anomaly detection experience: root cause presentation and anomaly graph visualization along with the anomaly baseline.

With our new root cause presentation feature, you gain deeper insights into the factors contributing to anomalies in your data.

Revamped budget page

Introducing an enhanced look and upgraded capabilities to elevate your cost management, you can now:

• Budget 6 months daily and monthly granularity forecast presentation.
• Easily create budgets based on amortized/net amortized/unblended costs.
• You can now configure your budget setting with all available Cost and Usage filters.
• Seamlessly browse between monthly and daily views along with a detailed table.
• The triggered budget alert is now visible on the budget level.
• New and informative budget alert email.
• Save the budget chart and information as a dashboard panel.

For more information review our documentation. Note: This option is not available for EA accounts.

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: February 2024 appeared first on Snow Software.

While common audit triggers include a reduction in spend and recent M&A, not all vendor audits look alike. Some are disguised as free ITAM/license assessments (e.g. Microsoft^® SAM Assessment, Adobe Software Insights Review) to help organizations get more value and stay secure.

Another type of audit is a cybersecurity audit. These are often triggered by your internal audit team or by commercial requirements to have a security certification (e.g. ISO27001, SOC2, etc.). We also find that organizations who’ve encountered a significant security incident conduct third-party audits to identify gaps.

While audits are time-consuming and can be expensive, they can be a blessing in disguise if organizations heed the wake-up call and get their software asset management house in order. Here are three benefits of being audit-ready.

1. Eliminate the practice of paying for software your organization isn’t using.

When you take a look at your effective license position, you are understanding what you’ve purchased against what’s installed and licenses allocated or assigned. If you’re not compliant, then the next question is the software actually being used, and can it be uninstalled? If you perform this activity >90 days before your next audit and are able to get to a positive position, your risk of being fined reduces significantly.

The side benefit of understanding usage data is your organization has one more lever in renewal negotiations if you aren’t using the licenses you’ve purchased. Here are a couple of examples of customers who leveraged usage data to mitigate risk, and reduce license costs.

• Sasol was able to identify license compliance violations to the tune of $28.6M. On top of that, they’ve been able to save an additional $5.4M by optimizing licenses and rationalizing their application portfolio with other vendors including Prometheus GWOS, K2, OMADA, Autodesk, AirWatch, OpenText, Acquire Sentinel, Cloudera, and VMware.
  
• Telkomsel was able to identify $740,000 in license compliance risk. Additionally, they’ve been able to find savings of 10% of their Oracle license costs in addition to $74,000 in potential savings for Microsoft subscriptions.

2. Improve your cyber-security posture.

If you can’t see it, you can’t secure it. Fortunately, many organizations are now seeking to follow this advice, especially with guidance from the United States federal government for all agencies to obtain a complete software inventory.

Organizations can improve security and visibility of IT assets by:

• Identifying the use of unauthorized applications and blocking use (as Max Life Insurance did)
• Identifying free and unauthorized SaaS applications not known by IT (as Christchurch City Council found more than 200 unknown applications in use)
• Locating applications with vulnerabilities and applications end-of-life and end-of-support that are at risk because they are no longer eligible for patching

3. Minimize interruptions and get more value from your team.

The time spent preparing for a vendor audit can consume your team for weeks with all the manual processes involved. With automated reporting of application usage against entitlements, organizations can get near-real-time visibility into how licenses are used to ensure compliance. For instance:

• 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.

We often hear that organizations only have enough time to proactively manage the top 3-5 vendors. What impact could you drive if you had data for your next 50 vendors at your fingertips?

The post 3 Reasons to Love Software Audits appeared first on Snow Software.

Batch editing of agreements and agreement filtering

In response to customer feedback, Snow has released (in Snow License Manager v9.33) the enhancement to edit multiple agreements of the same type at once from the Agreements page. Snow has also improved the filtering options on the Agreement list page, and now all columns can be filtered. Additionally, we’ve added three new columns to the Column Selector that you can filter. These include:

• Valid from (date)
• Valid to (date)
• Active (yes/no)

SaaS Management

Improved home page

We’ve updated the organization of information on the SaaS Management home page, so that it’s easier for users to find the information most relevant to them.

The Overview tab includes key performance indicators and trends for your subscriptions, including:

• The count of all your SaaS subscription types
• Your monthly cost of all subscriptions
• Your monthly potential savings across all your SaaS subscriptions
• The number of SaaS subscriptions expiring in the next 60 days to help you manage your SaaS renewals
• A timeline showing your top 5 upcoming renewal term costs by vendor

The Get Started tab helps users quickly find new and existing value with their SaaS Management solution:

• Guidance to key areas of value
• Embedded videos
• Links to key information and documentation

The News tab highlights new releases and capabilities within SaaS Management.

Improved subscription family view

The Insights tab helps users see potential cost savings across SaaS subscriptions:

• Users can select the insights to see only the list of the users that can be optimized
• A dynamic table allows the user to view more than one insight on the dashboard

The Users tab presents user-based information relating to the SaaS subscription family:

• KPIs highlight the total number of users in the family and the total number of active, inactive, and never active users
• A dynamic table shows users of that subscription family with pertinent details like department, monthly cost, and potential savings per user, among others

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: January 2024 appeared first on Snow Software.

• Creating IT asset visibility across the enterprise 
• Public cloud visibility and cost optimization 
• SAP license management 

Innovation area: Enterprise-wide asset visibility, insights and risk mitigation

ITAM for end-user computing 

Do more with Snow Agents with a new package builder feature 

Get more from your Snow Agents and add files and scripts using this new capability in the Snow Agent Package Builder. This feature is available in Snow Atlas and is in early access for on-premises Snow License Manager customers. 

Additionally, the Snow Agents team has improved agent documentation including agent default behavior and a change log. The new documentation repository for agents can be found on GitHub. 

SAM on Snow Atlas: Bulk archive and delete of computers 

We’ve improved the customer workflow and made it easier to manage your computers in SAM on Snow Atlas with the ability to archive and delete computers in bulk. 

We heard from users that the process for archiving and deleting computers was tedious and time-consuming, requiring users to select and edit computers one-by-one. 

With this new release, users can save time and improve productivity with the ability to edit computers in larger quantities. 

SaaS Management 

New: Recommended actions 

Within SaaS Management on Snow Atlas, we’ve organized the homepage to make it easier for users to know what to do to get more value from their Snow solution. The page is structured with a status page and recommendations, details on how to get started, and an overview of what is new. 

• Recommended actions highlights to-do actions within the system, including missing items such as billing, connectors, configurations and subscription-related metrics. 
• Get started – offers users help on how to configure and set up for maximum value. 
• News – summarizes our latest features and enhancements that are regularly released. 

We’ll be continually enhancing the user experience, so check back here for future updates! 

New product family view for Microsoft 365 

SaaS Management on Snow Atlas is one of the first to allow users to filter by product families and related products within the family of applications and subscriptions.    

Customers can now see a holistic view of not only all their Microsoft 365 subscriptions but also key insights to optimize their Microsoft investment (e.g. aggregated view of the Microsoft 365 offering that bundles all the applications such as Visio, Project, Microsoft Office, etc.).   

Users can review assignments and activity across multiple Microsoft 365 license types in one place to support optimization efforts. Other KPIs include purchased and free, unassigned and over-assigned; approved and unauthorized; usage and costs; active, inactive, and no activity; monitored and unmonitored.  

These metrics help you control shadow SaaS, keep the IT environment more secure, and properly allocate costs across business units. 

SAP license management 

Snow Optimizer for SAP® Software: Latest version provides even greater compliance, optimization, and automation  

Besides becoming certified once again by SAP, Snow Optimizer for SAP® Software’s newest release—version 4.0—provides Snow customers with even more control over their SAP license management. Here are some highlights: 

• Compliance: 8,000+ embedded products provide easier contract management possibilities. 
• Optimization: Two new STAR License Intelligence rule set updates help customers stay current with recent SAP changes. 
• Automation: Customers can always rely on the latest Snow release to keep them automatically up to date, as we stay certified and current to frequent changes from SAP, such as pricing condition lists. 

For more news related to version 4.0 of Snow Optimizer for SAP® Software, please see the Release Notes and view the video below: 

Innovation area: Cloud management capabilities 

CostGPT – AI tool on Snow Cloud Cost 

Snow Cloud Cost customers now have access to an AI tool called CostGPT across the platform. You can talk to CostGPT, ask it questions about your cloud cost, and in return, it provides you with personalized insights and visualizations, all in just a few seconds. 

Here are some key benefits of using CostGPT: 

• Simplicity: Users can ask questions about their cloud costs in chat. For instance, “How much have I spent on Amazon in last three years?” Users can also ask more specific queries like “What percentage of my EBS storage is gp3?” The tool will analyze cloud accounts and provide the requested insights. 
• Actionable insights: CostGPT offers insights to optimize cloud costs and suggests additional questions and commands to understand cloud spending better. 
• Proactive decision-making: CostGPT enables organizations to make informed decisions on cloud resource allocation and spending based on search data. This prevents unnecessary costs and optimizes resource utilization. 
• Real-time data visualizations: CostGPT provides visualizations for exploring and analyzing cloud costs. This helps our users make informed decisions and plan expenditure patterns. 

We recognize the challenges of managing cloud costs and the need for multicloud visibility. With CostGPT, users can effortlessly understand their cloud costs instantly. 

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: December 2023 appeared first on Snow Software.

• Creating IT asset visibility across the enterprise
• Public cloud visibility and cost optimization
• Working with ITAM partners

Innovation area: Enterprise-wide asset visibility, insights and risk mitigation

New UK Snow Atlas datacenter

In response to public sector customer feedback for data residency in the UK, Snow has invested in an UK datacenter. Snow Atlas customers now have four options to store their technology intelligence data: UK, Netherlands, United States and Australia. 

ITAM for end-user computing

Snow ITSM Enhancer: Greater control via extended data in updated ServiceNow apps

Version 4.3 of our certified ServiceNow apps for Snow ITSM Enhancer are now published. In short, ServiceNow tables have been extended to include the following out-of-the-box data:

• Software lifecycle dates: End of life (EOL), end of support (EOS), and end of extended support (EOES)
• Application data: Allowlisting and denylisting

This extra data provides service desk personnel with even more control, helping them to serve their internal stakeholders better by resolving support tickets faster than before.

These two upgraded apps are compatible with the latest ServiceNow Vancouver release:

SaaS management

New ServiceNow connector

We are excited to announce our newest connector to track and monitor ServiceNow, now joining our other 23,000 discovered applications in Snow SaaS Management. Many of Snow’s customers are well-acquainted with ServiceNow, the leading IT Service Management tool and one of the biggest SaaS spend line items for an organization. 

The connector identifies stale or inactive users, show related costs and insights to identify potential savings. The connector displays: 

• User information (name, email, department, country)
• User activity (user’s last login to ServiceNow)

We will continue to build more capabilities that expand your understanding of usage and licensing across ServiceNow’s modules. Features coming soon include license information (license plans, assigned license plan per user) and insights to optimize your ServiceNow licenses. Additionally, organizations will be able to identify users provisioned with the role of “Approver”, a more expensive license, and identify inactive users and unused licenses to further control costs.

Test drive the ServiceNow connector now by reaching out to your Snow Software account manager.

New SaaS subscription trends

Managers can quickly see charts with the most important KPIs — assignment and activity information for the product family. Within these KPIs, you can dig deeper into purchased or free, unassigned or over-assigned, usage and costs related to subscriptions as well as whether they are active, inactive, have no activity, or not monitored across the last 12 months or 30 days.

Unique SaaS product family grouping

SaaS Management on Snow Atlas is one of the first to offer this exciting feature that filters related products within a family of applications and subscriptions.

IT/ITAM/Finance/Procurement Managers can:

• Easily query these brand families to understand the usage and optimize costs for the family or sub-applications (e.g. aggregated view of the Microsoft 365 offering that bundles all the applications such as Visio, Project, Microsoft Office, etc.).
• Quickly see charts with application and subscription KPIs such as purchased or free, unassigned or over assigned, usage and costs, active, inactive, have no activity, or not monitored across the last 12 months or 30 days.
• User-centric filtering shows only relevant provisioned users and respective monthly subscription costs that can be aggregated at the Microsoft family level.

Managers can make faster, better decisions around costs, application rationalization and vendor negotiation.

Datacenter computing

Snow Atlas now verified for Oracle Java SE

Snow is pleased that both Snow Atlas and our on-premises SAM offerings have Oracle Verification for Oracle Databases, Oracle Middleware and Oracle Java SE. This new functionality allows Snow Atlas users to generate a .zip file that contains information about the estates where Oracle databases, middleware and Java products are found. This capability helps users quickly respond to audit requests with confidence of accurate data.

Improved data sharing for Oracle verified data

Responding to customer feedback, Snow has made it easier (in Snow License Manager v9.31.2) to share Oracle data with third parties and now computers with incomplete verified data can be exported in PDF or CSV format with all relevant details included. For Oracle verified data, customers can generate a .zip file.

Innovation area: Snow Labs

Snow Atlas Generative AI Assistant – Snow Copilot

Snow Labs is a multiprong innovation initiative to help organizations make better decisions and deliver positive business outcomes with Technology Intelligence, or the ability to understand and manage all technology data, via Snow Atlas.

One of the first innovations developed under this team is Snow Co-Pilot, an AI assistant that leverages the Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service. It allows customers to input questions and receive insights on their computer data, such as “How many computers have been installed in the last 90 days?” as well as explore “what if” scenarios all directly within Snow Atlas. Snow Copilot reduces the need to export data into PowerBI or Excel to get insights into advanced questions on forecasting, asset allocation, and trend identification of SAM computer data.

Snow Copilot and other AI innovations will be available for current Snow Atlas customers who enroll in the beta program. Reach out to your Snow Account Manager to become enrolled in the beta program.

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: November 2023 appeared first on Snow Software.

In this month’s innovation blog, we’ll show you how we’re bringing Technology Intelligence to life through a selection of new and enhanced portfolio capabilities Snow introduced to the market during the first three quarters of 2023. These product capabilities provide a quick glimpse into innovations in the areas of:

• Creating IT asset visibility across the enterprise
• Public cloud visibility and cost optimization
• Working with ITAM partners

Innovation area: Enterprise-wide asset visibility, insights and risk mitigation

ITAM usage and spend optimization is Snow’s flagship domain, and we continue to offer significant new and enhanced capabilities here—especially on Snow Atlas, our cloud-native platform. The following is just a small taste of what we’ve been up to with our ITAM offerings so far in 2023.

ITAM for end-user computing

Container visibility now illuminates previous blind spots in your commercial software compliance position

Containers are isolated and dynamic environments. This makes gathering information about how they are being used or the software and applications residing in them extremely inefficient using technologies such as agents. As a result, software asset managers risk having a real blind spot in calculating their effective compliance position for commercial applications running in these environments.

To help software asset management (SAM) pros mitigate this risk, Snow Spend Optimizer on Snow Atlas provides visibility to software running in Kubernetes environments by:

• Scanning the container environment to identify commercial products that need a license. This entails scanning for commercial applications in standard, non-modified containers for Microsoft, RedHat and Oracle.
• Providing details on what license type is required for compliance. SAM pros need historical insight on when applications were deployed (start/end times) within containerized environments in order to know when a compliance vulnerability may have originated.

Currently supported environments: Kubernetes on-premises, Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS), Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), Google Kubernetes Service and OpenShift.

SaaS management

Early this year, we announced the launch of Snow SaaS Management. As SaaS expenditures continue to accelerate and decentralize, so do the costs and risks associated with shadow SaaS. ChatGPT is no exception, as we highlight below.

Manage SaaS risks by discovering usage of AI tools like ChatGPT

AI tools such as ChatGPT exploded onto the scene in 2023, and our customers are rightly concerned about the use of such technology in their organizations. Earlier this year, Snow highlighted the opportunities and risks associated with these large language model tools.

To help customers mitigate such risks, Snow added a new category—artificial intelligence—to our list of application types, so that customers can quickly identify when these tools are being used. From there, they can identify who is using these tools and remediate as needed.

Our browser-based discovery of SaaS usage makes it uniquely positioned to provide data on free and trial software such as ChatGPT. Unlike other SaaS management solutions that rely primarily on expense data to determine which SaaS applications might be in use, our discovery methodology quickly and automatically identifies usage of ChatGPT and similar AI applications.

For a deep dive into this topic, view our on-demand webinar to better understand how ChatGPT and tools like it could potentially impact your organization and what you can do about it.

Datacenter computing

Oracle: Triple verification of Snow gives customers increased control, speed and efficiency

When data regarding Oracle product deployment and usage must be identified in an organization’s IT environment (such as for a software audit or advisory project), Oracle uses their own in-house tooling to gather this data, which most often happens via their own License Management Services (LMS) consultants. This is an on-site process where Oracle LMS personnel run tooling scripts manually, server by server. This complex process impacts customer access to their production systems, possibly during office hours, which could require the alignment of several teams across many regions and time zones.

As an alternative, Oracle awards qualifying third-party vendors with official verification status to access Oracle deployment and usage data themselves. However, Oracle sets the bar extremely high for their verified third-party tool vendors because these vendors’ solutions must provide information that Oracle themselves will accept.

Snow Software is one of only a handful of global vendors verified for all three programs set up by Oracle:

• Oracle Database and Database Options
• Oracle Fusion Middleware
• Java SE

While Snow reached the first verification milestone in 2022, we’ve added the second and third in 2023.

So, what benefits and business value do these Oracle verifications give Snow customers?

• Complete visibility: Detection and reporting on exactly which Oracle features and functionality are switched on and being used.
• Increased control: Customers can get this data whenever they want (not being at the mercy of a scheduled Oracle LMS visit, with its resulting downtime).
• Greater speed and efficiency: From the Snow product interface, the verified data is speedily exported in the Oracle-verified format for the entire datacenter with the literal click of a button.
• License optimization incentive when preparing for audit/advisory projects: Customers get chances to oversee and optimize their Oracle estate as often as they prefer prior to a compelling Oracle event.

For more information on these Oracle management capabilities from Snow, check out the videos below.

Innovation area: Cloud management capabilities

Many new and improved cloud financial management capabilities have been added in 2023, including managing OpEx charge rates over time, Kubernetes cluster asset cost visibility, new cost & usage explorer dashboard, managing Azure costs with our virtual machines usage dashboard, and more. Let’s highlight a few enhancements for managing your AWS spend.

Snow Cloud Cost: New S3 recommendations for better cost efficiency

Amazon’s S3 (Simple Storage Service) is among the most extensively used AWS services. Recent enhancements to the Snow Cloud Cost recommendations engine for Amazon S3 include:

• 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.

Innovation area: Partner management capabilities

Our new and improved Snow Partner Program went live mid-year in 2023. To provide context, the Snow partner ecosystem comprises a diverse array of resellers, managed service providers (MSP), global systems integrators, independent software vendors and more. These partners enhance and scale our offerings to customers around the world. Some quick examples of the ways that Snow has supported our partner ecosystem with new and enhanced portfolio capabilities this year include improved Snow Atlas partner console customer environment visibility & security, faster troubleshooting of customers’ IT environments and support for customer cloud cost optimization. Let’s expand on this partner support by rounding off this Technology Intelligence roundup through a closer look at the following two capabilities.

Managed service providers: Improved protection and service through customer system access

For Snow partners who manage their customers’ SAM environments (customers buy through a partner and grant full access to the partner), administrators can now very quickly see the specific customer systems they can sign into and access.

MSP administrators with such full control can also extend or prevent access to other users, allowing partners to identify gaps in servicing their customers, as well as prevent any unauthorized access to the customer systems.

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 handle non-optimized applications or remove wasted software spend.

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: 2023 Technology Intelligence Roundup appeared first on Snow Software.

IT leaders have employed any number of processes and controls to combat shadow IT and impose order, but it seems to be a losing battle for most businesses. Why? Why does shadow IT persist despite the best efforts of organizations to eliminate it? The answer most often lies in the good intentions of high-performing employees just looking to do their jobs as efficiently as possible. 

The go-getter

Often the most successful employees are those predisposed to action. They can go from idea to execution in the blink of an eye, and the last thing they want is some pesky IT roadblock standing in their way. 

Thanks to SaaS delivery, the only thing required to get up and running with new software is an internet connection and a credit card, and even the credit card isn’t necessary when dealing with free or trial software. The go-getter knows that doing his/her primary job effectively is more important than always following the rules – better to ask for forgiveness than permission. 

The result is something between controlled chaos and the Wild West – dozens, if not hundreds, of SaaS applications running in an organization’s environment. IT is unaware of these apps, along with the waste and redundancy, security/regulatory threats, and data loss that typically accompany shadow IT.

Waste and redundancy

When purchasing is decentralized and taking place in silos, waste is almost unavoidable. Typical problems include:

• An unassigned or unused license purchased by one division can’t be transferred elsewhere in the organization if no one outside of the division knows of its existence. 
• Multiple divisions individually purchasing the same software miss out on possible discounting and other negotiating leverage that come with volume.
• Managers come and go, and they may leave behind software that auto-renews when it’s no longer in use by anyone on the team.

Siloed purchasing doesn’t only result in waste. Redundancy is a factor as well. Having multiple tools that address the same use case – file-sharing, instant messaging, project management, etc. – is inefficient for purchasing and results in unnecessary support costs.

In an environment where every dollar counts, this type of waste is something any IT leader is eager to avoid.

Security and regulatory threats

All shadow IT represents a security threat in some form. Software that is unknown to IT presents security risks, because they are:

• Not accessed via your SSO platform, so there are the threats that come from weak and commonly used passwords
• Not configured by IT, so misconfigurations open up attack vectors
• Not vetted by IT, so it’s unlikely anyone has reviewed the security protocols and precautions employed by the software vendor
• Not subject to standardized offboarding procedures, so (1) ex-employees can retain access to company data via the apps they once used, (2) the service can continue to run, and (3) data can continue to leave the organization without any oversight

Similarly, it’s unlikely anyone has reviewed the data handling and data storage procedures of these vendors. This increases the risk that you’ll run afoul of regulations such as GDPR and HIPAA when dealing with customer information. 

Data loss

Employees share all sorts of data with the apps they use, but who owns that data once it’s sitting on a SaaS vendor’s servers?  What happens to the data when you are no longer a paying customer? These are questions you can’t possibly answer for apps you’re not even aware are in use in your environment. 

Additionally, just as faulty data handling and data storage practices, or lack thereof, can lead to the security threats described above, they can also lead to data loss. There are few assets you have that are more valuable than your data, so it’s critical to be fully aware of how it’s handled, how it’s stored, who owns it and how you get it back once you part ways with the vendor.

How to bring order to chaos

Preventing shadow IT by layering more and more processes and controls on employees is bound to cause dissatisfaction internally and is unlikely to fully address the problem. After all, the more roadblocks you erect, the greater the incentive for the go-getter to find a workaround. 

A better path is to couple reasonable purchase procedures with comprehensive visibility of everything running in your environment. That’s where Snow Software comes in.

Our SaaS management platform goes straight to the source – the user – to provide market-leading visibility into the SaaS applications running in your environment. We discover not only paid applications but also the free and trial applications that so often escape detection.

The post With Perfect Processes, How Does Shadow IT Happen? appeared first on Snow Software.

“I’m shocked. I had no idea we were using this many SaaS applications.”

This is the #1 piece of feedback we get after speaking to new customers using Snow Software for the first time. This is no surprise. There are tens of thousands of B2B SaaS companies in the market today, all with their own suites of SaaS solutions targeted at individuals or departments, creating an overwhelming number of applications available. The average organization uses at least 125 SaaS applications, and this is not even counting the free ones.

It is no wonder that IT is drowning in SaaS sprawl with the never-ending proliferation of SaaS apps and the bloated budgets associated with them. The very aspects that make SaaS so appealing to end users is wreaking havoc on the IT, Finance, Procurement, and ITAM teams that need to manage out-of-control software portfolios.

To support these teams, Snow is expanding its portfolio of solutions for solving the challenges of managing SaaS applications with Snow SaaS Management. In March, we made Snow SaaS Management available to a select number of customers, and today we are excited to share that is now in general availability.

Snow has over 10 years of experience supporting Software Asset Managers (SAM) to rein in SaaS sprawl. We launched our first SaaS solution – SAM for Cloud – as an extension of Software Asset Management in 2013. Our ten years of experience in the management of SaaS is telling us something: the market for B2B SaaS is about to change tremendously.

The rise of product-led growth, the shift from user-based to usage-based pricing, and the increased cybersecurity and data risks felt in IT from shadow SaaS means the tools we have been using to address SaaS sprawl must change. Technology innovation never stops and the tools that manage technology, like Snow, need to stay ahead of changes.  

Snow SaaS Management, our fourth-generation SaaS Management solution, is our solution to do this by:

• Building the most complete discovery engine in our industry with first-to-market agentless browser extensions for web application metering
• Launching an advanced optimization framework with deep insights by SaaS application built on our learnings from advanced optimization for M365 and Adobe Creative Cloud
• Empowering users with hybrid data to manage complex enterprise applications
• Taking a user versus device-centric view of the world (user-centric views, new to Snow SaaS Management, are critical in SaaS as IT needs individual insights for use cases like chargeback)
• Delivering this as a service on Snow Atlas, which means the end of waiting for a software upgrade – innovation is delivered on-demand
• Enabling users to buy SaaS Management without requiring them to purchase our Software Asset Management module first

Get the details on Snow SaaS Management

Here’s more on how Snow SaaS Management enables you to see what other solutions don’t and extract savings from SaaS that are impossible to do with other vendors in this space:

Consolidated visibility across all SaaS discovery methodologies

One of the reasons IT fails to rein in SaaS sprawl is multiple usage discovery methodologies, including connecting to SaaS vendor portals, importing SSO data and tracking browser data, are required for complete visibility. This is no easy task for IT to do on its own. Snow automates this by combining all discovery sources and providing comprehensive usage data at the application and user level.

Optimization insights at your fingertips

All Snow solutions move beyond simply providing raw data by transforming it into Technology Intelligence.

Snow SaaS Management now has “Insights” cards that recommend areas for optimization based on duplicate users or unused licenses.

In addition, Snow SaaS Management has broadened optimization capabilities from 8,000+ to over 23,000 SaaS applications, so you can see more and extract more savings across your entire SaaS portfolio.

User-centric views

Snow SaaS Management provides the ability to see all applications and subscriptions associated with each user. User views are also required to reduce risk when offboarding employees. In this scenario, IT must ensure access is removed not only for IT-managed SaaS but unknown applications that may have been procured by a department or individual.

Usage views not available anywhere else

While some SaaS management vendors can tell whether someone has used an application within the last 30, 60 or 90 days, Snow provides granular verified usage information with logs detailing how long an application has been used and when.

Given SaaS applications contain critical user data that would be lost if access rights were erroneously removed – usage data versus simply the financial data other SMPs provide – is a game-changer for IT departments seeking to improve license management, negotiate better deals at contract renewal and provide Security the data necessary to prevent shadow SaaS.

Optimization of complex, hybrid applications

One of the most expensive, difficult-to-manage SaaS applications are hybrid applications—such as Microsoft 365—that allow for both installed and cloud-based usage. Only by gathering and analyzing both usage types can IT and procurement leaders perform advanced optimization, such as selecting the most efficient license type based on usage. This choice can be critical considering the significant price difference between licenses such as M365 E5, E3 and E1.

Snow not only discovers and consolidates all hybrid application usage but provides actionable insights to highlight optimization opportunities.

Looking for more reasons to try out our newest solution for SaaS management? Here are 3 more:

1. Snow is the leading SaaS management vendor for tracking trial software and free applications such as ChatGPT.
2. We are the only SaaS management vendor with a SaaS cost optimization framework that combines installed and cloud-based hybrid application usage for applications such as Microsoft 365 to enable advanced license type optimization such as E5 vs. E3 vs. E1.
3. The combination of coverage of known and unknown SaaS applications – combining multiple discovery methodologies including a browser extension, vendor portals and SSO data – with our Data Intelligence Service gives you unparalleled visibility and management of SaaS.

As great as we feel about reaching general availability, we are just getting started.

Upcoming Snow SaaS Management innovations include new usage discovery methods, more specialized optimization capabilities for complex vendors, and even greater application rationalization capabilities, ensuring organizations have complete visibility of SaaS usage and optimized spend.

Existing customers, be sure to subscribe to our blog, so you don’t miss our latest product updates and industry news. Not a customer yet? Join 700 other SaaS customers and schedule a demo of Snow to see the power of SaaS management and Technology Intelligence.

The post Snow Launches the Industry’s Most Complete Discovery Engine and Cost Optimization Framework to Rein in SaaS Sprawl appeared first on Snow Software.

• IBM Passport Advantage^® products: a “harmonization” of 8% worldwide with some unlucky exceptions
• Adjustment of SAP support fees of 3.3% for on-premises software offerings
• Oracle is set to increase support fees to align with global inflation
• Google Cloud Storage price increases, effective April 1, 2023

Organizations also saw price increases from vendors such as Microsoft and Adobe, which were justified by improved and new features. Adobe Acrobat saw an increase of 20% for perpetual licenses. Adobe Creative Cloud increased prices by 4-7%, while Microsoft increased prices on Microsoft® 365 by 9-25%, depending on the offering.

Adobe also increased prices by up to 40% on subscriptions in the Adobe Value Incentive Plan (VIP) (effective July 1, 2023). The amount of the price increase will vary depending on the specific plan, region, and size of any current commitments and discounts.

This news has understandably caused some frustration and concern among Adobe users, particularly those who rely heavily on the software at the enterprise level. However, it’s worth noting that Adobe has historically raised their prices every few years, and the company has stated that they will continue to offer a range of plans at different price points to accommodate different budgets and needs.

Microsoft announced in July 2023 a $30 per person fee for accessing its AI-powered Copilot service for businesses. The Wall Street Journal estimates the fee to be more than double what Microsoft currently charges for the least expensive version of Microsoft 365. Additionally, Microsoft plans to enhance its Microsoft 365 business offering by integrating the AI-powered chatbot, Bing Chat Enterprise, as an added feature. For non-subscribers, Microsoft has set a monthly charge of $5 per use to gain access to Bing Chat Enterprise.

Starting from August 2023, Salesforce has announced a price increase of approximately 9% for certain cloud and marketing tools. This marks their first price adjustment in seven years. The decision comes at a time where like Microsoft, the company is making significant investments to incorporate generative AI into their offerings. The revised prices will apply to Tableau, Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Marketing Cloud, and Industries, impacting both existing and new customers alike.

Crises can reveal opportunities for better cost management

With the Covid-19 crisis, we experienced a lot of rapid technology innovation. Much of the spend for this innovation happened outside of traditional IT budgets, leading to application sprawl, waste and security concerns. According to the Snow 2021 IT Priorities Report, leaders said SaaS sprawl was their biggest concern around SaaS. In our most recent survey on SaaS management priorities, we found identifying all SaaS usage in the organization was the second highest priority behind managing SaaS security.

A large portion of technology investments over the last two years have hit operating expenses. If your organization is looking for ways to save cash now, SaaS and IaaS costs are good places to start looking. You may also have upcoming maintenance renewals where you can see some savings by performing application rationalization if those products are rarely used. Here are some ideas where you can start identifying cost-savings opportunities.

1. Analyze application subscription data to understand the value you are receiving from contracts.

While it might be difficult to significantly reduce spend on an application your organization is heavily dependent on, you can prevent over-buying and have a better argument for reductions if you know the value you are or are not receiving from the software. Likewise, you can decide to not renew  subscriptions with little-to-no use.

To start, take a look at your contract end-dates and filter by “subscription terms” with contract end-dates coming in the next six months. Sort contracts by highest to lowest cost.

Next, look at the agreement in closer detail. The renewal for this one is in October although it expires in December.

Let’s take a look to see which of these licenses are allocated and what is actually being used to assess potential savings for the next contract period. Right away, we can see 278 licenses assigned to users, but are not being used, resulting in savings of €9403 per month. Additional, potential savings can be found in downgrading users assigned to all app licenses but only needing one app license.

2. Look at alternatives and application redundancies.

Because SaaS applications are so easy to buy, it is very likely you have redundant applications used across your organization, or you may even have multiple agreements in place for the same applications across various business units. This scenario is extremely likely if your organization has multiple business units. To check for application redundancies, discover and inventory your installed and cloud-based applications. Then, run a report of all the applications in use by application type, and filter for applications requiring licenses. From there, you can see where there may be applications you can remove from your environment. In the example below, there are multiple applications used for instant messaging – should the organization decline to renew some of these subscriptions to save cash?

3. Find unused resources across your cloud infrastructure.

Cloud infrastructure can be used by various teams within your organization. Without tagging resources, and allocating costs, your organization won’t have visibility to determine if they are getting the value from these investments.

By obtaining detailed usage metrics on cloud instances, your cloud infrastructure team can take action to right-size or eliminate cloud workloads, as seen in the image below.

Learn more about the hidden costs of the cloud.

4. Assess license configurations for datacenter applications.

For organizations with on-premises datacenters, software costs for applications in these environments can be significant.

For instance, Microsoft offers a huge choice of products and associated licenses for the datacenter. Due to the high license cost for these products, it is possible to create multiple configurations that achieve the same results from a technical perspective but are vastly different in price. Small changes can make big differences to compliance and financial exposure. Getting the structure optimized and maintained from a licensing perspective ensures significant cost savings.

Some software asset management tools give you visibility to how your licenses are currently configured, and provide recommendations to reduce your license costs and improve your compliance position, as in the image shown below.

As organizations are going through budget crises leading into 2023, now is an opportunity for IT leaders to re-think how technology is managed for their organizations to enable ongoing technology cost management and improve the organizations’ risk posture.

Learn more about Snow Software solutions for optimizing technology spend.

The post 4 Ways to Lessen the Impact of Software Price Hikes appeared first on Snow Software.

To put it simply, containers are packages of applications which run in isolated environments. They are not dependent on an underlying operating system the same way that virtual machines (VMs) are, as they are directly working with the host operating system. This means that they are more lightweight than VMs in terms of storage requirement and normally require fewer IT resources to deploy and manage. One could see why this market is growing at a rapid pace.

While the technology has existed for quite some time, widespread adoption and accelerated growth started a few years ago.

According to a publication by Gartner^® in 2022, the container management market will grow at a rate succeeding 25% year over year (YOY) with an estimated market value of $1.4 billion by 2025. One recent analysis by Data Bridge Market Research published in Bloomberg even suggests over 30% YOY growth and a market value of 40+ billion USD by 2030.

New software asset management challenges

What does this mean to you working within the ITAM/SAM area? As with any adoption of emerging technology, disruption follows. The key challenges from an ITAM/SAM perspective include:

Lack of visibility
Containers are isolated environments, rendering traditional technologies extremely inefficient for gathering any information about the software and applications residing within them or how they are being utilized. Existing methods software asset managers utilize to understand software use, largely agents deployed on physical or virtual servers, are not transferrable to container environments due to the ephemeral nature of containers and the potential massive scale of these environments.

Lack of control
The technology is great from a flexibility point of view, but can potentially become a nightmare to manage as changes can occur rapidly with spinning containers up and down as required.

Lack of cost management
The phrase “you cannot manage what you can’t see” is highly relevant in this context. Without sufficient visibility, it becomes impossible to comprehend or quantify the costs incurred, leading to minimal to no cost control when it comes to licensing implications of running software in containers.

Potential risk of software compliance
The licensing rules of running software in containers differs from vendor to vendor. In certain cases, the licensing rules are container-specific. As both control and visibility are key challenges within this area, it makes the task of managing compliance seemingly impossible. This can be especially difficult if there is no clear governance structure within the organization where the SAM/ITAM team is involved in container management.

Even with complex challenges, this is a necessary undertaking

Even though it’s hard, you’ll need to get your arms around how to calculate your effective license position for commercial applications, regardless of the workload implementation (VM, server, container, etc.). When you get audited, the vendor won’t care that it is hard for you to gather the details to prove your compliance position. Key questions to consider in determining your position include:

1. What licensable commercial applications, components or libraries are running in the environment? (OS, application products)
2. What are the applications’ license rules and licenses required based on container limits, nodes, etc.?
3. What is the potential cost?
4. How do I know what my IT/engineering team has set up, taken down, and how long it was run in the environment?
5. How do I measure the usage of software in the container environment?
6. What are the hardware components (underlying infrastructure) to align to the license requirements? 
7. Do I have enough licenses to be compliant?

What licensable commercial applications are running in our containerized environment?

The first step in your research is to understand what your organization is doing with containers, what commercial applications are used and what orchestration platforms are leveraged (some orchestrators include OS licenses – see OpenShift).

Start your research by connecting with your IT Infrastructure Operations teams, Software Engineering teams, or your SRE team. Ask how they track licenses. In speaking to some teams, some tag the images to track the licenses and then pull point-in-time data to determine how many images have those license tags.

Another option is to look into your public cloud billing data to determine if you are being charged for container usage. If you have a cloud cost management tool this will be easy to pull.

What are the licensing rules for running the commercial application in containers?

Licensing commercial applications in containers varies by vendor. We’ve provided a summary of licensing rules with resources for key vendors. Also included are resources to bookmark, as licensing rules can change.

Microsoft container licensing

Licensing Windows Server for containers

Physical Core Licensing Windows Server Standard (with Hyper-V isolation)

• When all cores of the physical server are licensed (minimum 8 cores per processor and 16 per server), you are allowed to run two OSEs or two Windows Server containers.

Physical Core Licensing Windows Server Standard (without Hyper-V isolation)

• When all cores of the physical server are licensed (minimum 8 cores per processor and 16 per server), you are allowed to deploy unlimited Windows Server Containers.

Virtual Core Licensing

• When licensing by virtual machine, customers may use one OSE or one Windows Server container with Hyper-V isolation, subject to a minimum of 8 core licenses per OSE and 16 per customer. Use of any number of Windows Server Containers without Hyper-V isolation are permitted within any properly licensed virtual machine. Licensing by virtual machine requires active Software Assurance or a subscription license.

Windows Server Datacenter

• Datacenter edition provides rights to use Windows Server in unlimited OSEs, and any number of Windows Server containers with or without Hyper-V isolation, when all cores on the server are licensed (subject to the same minimums as standard edition).

Licensing SQL Server for containers

Active SA or subscription is required to license container environments.

Individual Containers

• Using the Per Core model, customers must purchase a core license for each vcore (or virtual processor, virtual CPU, virtual thread) allocated to the container. There is a four-core license minimum per container.
• Using the server license model (standard edition) a server license for each VM or container is required, and a CAL for each user or device.

Physical Core Licensing (SQL Enterprise Edition)

• Customers who have licensed all physical cores (minimum 4 cores) on the server can run any number of VMs/containers equal to the number of core licenses assigned to the server. A server with 16 core licenses can run SQL server software in up to 16 containers.

Virtual Core Licensing (SQL Enterprise/Standard Edition)

• When licensing the VM cores (minimum 4 cores, including HT cores) where the SQL containers are running you may run unlimited SQL containers on that VM.

Resources:

• Containers vs. virtual machines | Microsoft Learn
• SQL Server 2022—Pricing | Microsoft (Review the Licensing Guide and Datasheet for details)
• Windows Server and SQL Server licensing in containers (samexpert.com)

Oracle container licensing

Whenever a container image is pulled to a host or K8 node with Oracle software, the product must be licensed using the Processors metric for the number of processors of the physical host.  If the host is virtual, then use of the Oracle Partitioning Policy dictates the number of processor licenses. This means that all the same hard- and soft partitioning rules that apply on traditional VM’s also apply to containerized environments.

Resources

• Running and licensing Oracle software in Containers and Kubernetes
• Understanding Oracle Docker Licensing Requirements (redresscompliance.com)

IBM container licensing

IBM has provided a tool, IBM Container License Service (CLS), that measures the vCPU capacity at least every 30 minutes and the maximum value will be taken as your available vCPU. If organizations opt to not use this service, they will be charged for all cores in the cluster.

Unfortunately, IBM does not accept reports from third-party tools to track license compliance in containers.

IBM charges based on the sum of vCPU limits of the containers in a pod, capping at the physical capacity the worker node, either virtual cores or physical cores reported by the Kubernetes API. vCPU capacity will be aggregated at the cluster level, rounding up for fractional values.

Resources

• Container licensing | IBM
• IBM container licensing – new rules – The ITAM Review (itassetmanagement.net)
• Red Hat OpenShift | IBM

Red Hat container licensing

Red Hat Enterprise Linux subscriptions seem the most straightforward and containers are counted similar to a VM (the instance of where the software is executed and whether it is the VM or container). 

Resources

• Red Hat OpenShift enterprise Kubernetes container platform
• Try Red Hat OpenShift
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux subscription guide
• Self-managed OpenShift sizing and subscription guide

How do I monitor commercial application use in containers and determine the licenses required to stay compliant?

As mentioned previously, container management is an evolving market and how to track license compliance in containers is not an easy problem to solve because of the large scale and ephemeral nature of containers. Snow Software is actively working to solve this problem and is now able to recognize some commercial applications in Kubernetes environments with minimal configuration. To learn about future product enhancements, subscribe to our newsletter and see what’s new at Snow Software.

The post Containers: With Emerging Technology Comes New Software Asset Management Challenges appeared first on Snow Software.