In this blog post, I will show you the driving factors behind why we need sustainable IT asset management (ITAM) practices, how to implement them into your business, how they can reduce the impact on the environment’s capital whilst increasing your organization’s capital, and deliver on what your customers and employees want to see from a sustainable viewpoint.

There are many factors why this area of ITAM is gaining more focus, however, there are two universal goals under the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) that are driving this:

• Goal 12, Responsible Consumption and Production
• Goal 13, Climate Change

A deeper dive into sustainability goals for greener ITAM

SDG Goal 12: Responsible Consumption and Production
Goal 12 is about ensuring sustainable consumption and production. The reason the UN named this as a global goal was that our planet provides us with an abundance of natural resources. However, we have treated Earth as an endless supply chain, and we currently consume more than what the planet can provide. In fact, every year there’s a day called “Earth Overshoot Day,” which occurs when humanity’s demand on nature exceeds Earth’s biocapacity. This year, Earth Overshoot Day was on August 2. In simple terms, by the second of August this year, we had already consumed the earth’s compacity for what it could produce for the whole of 2023. A negative compounding factor of this abundance of consumption is the outcome. In 2022, the estimated e-waste produced was 59.4 million metric tons. To put this in perspective, that’s the weight of the Great Wall of China, which is 13,171 miles long.

SDG Goal 13: Climate Change
The aim of this goal is to take urgent action to combat climate change and its impacts. The motivation behind this goal is to achieve a climate neutral world by 2050 and to limit global warming to below 2°C (35.6°F) — with an aim of 1.5°C (34.7°F)— compared with pre-industrial times. All organizations should be setting plans and targets to reach net-zero emissions aligned to 2050. This is across all scopes (both direct and indirect).

So, how can we achieve greener ITAM?

Step 1: Get a baseline position of your current assets.
Before we can make a plan, we must first understand what our baseline position is. To do this, you will need to gather an inventory of all your IT assets (laptops, desktops, services, mobile devices, etc.). If you have an asset register or an inventory solution like Snow Atlas, this can help speed up the process and establish a baseline, as you can discover and report on all your IT assets automatically.

Step 2: Assess the environmental impact of your current IT assets.
Devices consist of a number of minerals and materials that had to be mined and processed before entering the manufacturing process. When evaluating impact, you should assess not just tangible, hardware materials, but the entire lifecycle of the device, from factory conditions, to the percentage of recycled plastic and energy consumption of the device. Manufacturers and third-parties can provide sustainable factors and ratings associated with devices, so that you can start to rank the most sustainable and energy-efficient devices in your organization. This is how we can start to support Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) 12 and 13. Getting visibility of the environmental impact of all your devices can be a large undertaking. However, there are solutions to assist with this, such as Sustainability with Snow.

Step 3: Prolong the lifespan of your assets to reduce emissions.
If you prolong the lifespan of a laptop from four years to six years, you can reduce its total emissions by 28%. This is due to the highest proportion of emissions being created in the manufacturing process. What’s more is you could potentially reduce the cost of ownership also by 28%. This does come with a maintenance aspect with the possibility that in order to prolong an asset, you may have to replace the memory, hard drive and battery.

Step 4: Setting a sustainable procurement strategy.
Now that you have established a baseline and understand the sustainable credentials of your devices, you can now strategize how to improve your position moving forward. You can achieve this by replacing devices that no longer support the business user’s role with sustainably procured assets. This can be:

• Via third-party, sustainability-certified devices that have met the threshold to be awarded certifications of sustainable assets
• By procuring from eco-friendly IT vendors, for example, vendors that remanufacture laptops
• By vendors who use circular frameworks for their designs
• Via responsible leasing, where there are multiple lease cycles for a device

Greener ITAM is achievable with these steps. They can help your organization meet your sustainability goals, as well as the global goals. You can contribute to SDG 12 by purchasing IT assets ethically and extending their lifespan, and have a positive impact on SDG 13 by selecting devices that are more energy-efficient and have lower carbon footprints in their creation and operation. It’s time for greener ITAM.

The post It’s Time for Greener IT Asset Management appeared first on Snow Software.

In the third blog of our FinOps and ITAM series, we explore more use cases where FinOps and ITAM intersect, providing a comprehensive overview of how they can work together to optimize resource utilization, manage costs, and ensure efficient cloud management. These use cases are from the framework the FinOps Foundation has established on how ITAM intersects with FinOps capabilities.  

Resource utilization and efficiency

FinOps activities: 
FinOps professionals seek to understand cloud service providers’ (CSPs) and their associated costs to inform utilization and cost-efficiency analyses. They also collaborate with other teams like Finance, Procurement, IT, Engineering and more as needed. 

ITAM activities: 
ITAM plays a crucial role in assessing and adjusting licensing requirements, working alongside FinOps during right-sizing or resource cleanup efforts. ITAM ensures that resources are used efficiently, licenses are allocated appropriately, and keeps a watch on governance and security to know who is accessing what and if they have the proper rights to do so. 

How ITAM and FinOps intersect: 
Collaboration between ITAM and FinOps is essential to achieve the right balance between resource utilization and licensing optimization. Together, they can ensure that cloud resources are used efficiently, leading to cost savings and improved management of cloud assets.  

Measuring unit costs

FinOps activities: 
FinOps professionals work with stakeholders to develop and report unit economic metrics, aligning cost allocation with organizational strategy. They use data and analysis to understand changes in unit economics and assess whether cost variances are favorable or unfavorable. Unit economics in FinOps is a way of measuring the revenues and costs of cloud spending in relation to one unit of business. It helps FinOps teams to correlate cloud spending growth to overall business growth, and to optimize profit based on objective metrics. Unit economics can be applied to different units, such as a customer served, a unit sold, or a feature delivered. 

ITAM activities: 
ITAM evaluates the use of licenses, identifying underutilization or overuse to manage resource deployment efficiently. ITAM also assesses the costs of licenses, including maintenance, contributing to the cost-per-customer calculation. 

How FinOps and ITAM intersect: 
Collaboration between ITAM and FinOps is crucial when calculating unit costs. Including licensing costs in unit cost calculations ensures that all aspects of cloud management are considered, promoting transparency and cost optimization. 

Chargeback and finance integration 

FinOps activities: 
FinOps professionals implement systems for expenses, identify costs based on the allocation strategy, and integrate financial data into internal reporting systems. They maintain visibility and accountability for expenses at the department or product level. Accountability for expenses may look different, depending on the organization. The person most likely accountable for expenses is a financial controller, who may or may not be on the FinOps team, or someone who sits elsewhere, not on the cloud team. 

ITAM activities: 
ITAM oversees license costs to ensure accurate inclusion in the chargeback process. It supports the implementation of tagging strategies to allocate expenses, maintaining visibility and accountability for IT asset expenses. 

How FinOps and ITAM intersect: 
Collaboration in chargeback processes ensures that licensing costs are accurately allocated, benefiting both ITAM and FinOps. By working together, they can optimize cost allocation and improve financial accountability. 

Data ingestion and normalization 

FinOps activities: 
FinOps professionals determine the necessary data sources for reporting and operations, establish data normalization processes (tagging), reporting and clarifying line items, and maintain the accuracy of cost and usage information. Data ingestion from FinOps revolves around cloud billing services. They work with various teams to define the metrics and metadata required for official output.  

ITAM activities: 
ITAM ensures that relevant asset data is available for data ingestion and normalization (particularly when it comes to establishing and standardizing cloud and licensing terminology across the organization), contributing to the accuracy of cost management processes. The data ingested by ITAM teams includes software data running on-premises and in the cloud. 

How ITAM and FinOps intersect: 
Although data ingestion and normalization have traditionally been parallel processes, ITAM and FinOps can work together to consolidate data into a report under a consolidated view. This collaboration enhances the accuracy and efficiency of cloud cost management. 

Establishing FinOps culture 

FinOps activities: 
FinOps professionals establish best practices, benchmarks, and visibility in cloud cost management. They promote a culture of accountability, collaboration and empowerment. 

ITAM activities: 
ITAM actively participates in the FinOps culture, emphasizing the synergies between ITAM and FinOps practices. 

How FinOps and ITAM intersect: 
To promote a unified approach, ITAM and FinOps must collaborate transparently and in a centralized way, ensuring that they work together to maximize their impact and cover each other’s blind spots. This joint effort creates a cohesive, centralized, effective cloud management culture. 

Onboarding workloads 

FinOps activities: 
FinOps professionals collaborate with teams to ensure cost visibility during workload onboarding. They monitor new workloads for optimization, incorporate costs into forecasts, and engage in funding review processes. 

ITAM activities: 
ITAM reviews licensing needs for new workloads, ensuring that the necessary licenses are in place. It checks compatibility with existing IT assets and supports budgeting, license reharvesting and retirement. This also includes hybrid license management, where a bridge between ITAM and FinOps is needed to consult the ITAM team to see what cloud services have already been paid for and can be repurposed. 

How FinOps and ITAM intersect: 
Consultation between FinOps and ITAM during workload planning ensures that licensing needs are met, and the best procurement methods are selected, reducing unexpected costs and optimizing resources. 

Cloud policy and governance 

FinOps activities: 
FinOps professionals recommend and document cloud usage guidelines, monitor policy and governance, tag cloud resources, and collaborate with stakeholders on established guidelines. 

ITAM activities: 
ITAM establishes procurement policies, aids in creating unified tagging policies of on-premises hardware and software, and defines governance for policy-compliant actions. 

How FinOps and ITAM intersect: 
Collaboration between FinOps and ITAM is essential to create and enforce cloud usage guidelines, governance, and procurement policies, ensuring compliance and optimized resource usage. 

FinOps education and enablement 

FinOps activities: 
FinOps professionals educate the organization on FinOps and promote a culture of accountability, collaboration and empowerment. 

ITAM activities: 
ITAM participates in training programs offered by FinOps and collaborates on education sessions to understand the interdependencies and overlap in their roles. 

How FinOps and ITAM intersect: 
ITAM and FinOps should conduct joint education sessions for stakeholders, focusing on cloud cost management, software licensing, compliance and asset optimization. A shared understanding and common language improve communication and efficiency.  

Exploring the relationship between FinOps and ITAM teams

The intersection of FinOps and ITAM is crucial for effective cloud management. We’ve started to explore this relationship in our three-part blog series. Catch the first part, Bridging ITAM and FinOps for Success Today and in the Future to gain perspective on what this burgeoning relationship looks like in practice. 
 
And in case you missed it, we covered another set of real-world use cases on how FinOps and ITAM teams can collaborate. By working together in various use cases, these two disciplines can drive digital transformation, have organizations move quicker, optimize resource utilization, reduce costs, enhance transparency, and foster a culture of accountability. Through transparent collaboration, businesses can unlock the full potential of their cloud investments, boost profits, and drive sustainable success. 

The post How FinOps and ITAM Teams Can Work Together in Real-Life Scenarios appeared first on Snow Software.

Cybersecurity governmental regulations and agency guidance

Recent cybersecurity regulations and agency guidance have highlighted the need for organizations to ensure an adequate IT asset management (ITAM) practice. Many of these specifically call out managing cloud providers as third-party dependencies in the supply chain. Below is a summary of recent regulations and agency guidance.

The S&P Global Ratings Agency reported this summer that creditworthiness will be impacted if organizations do not have adequate ITAM controls in place. ITAM is a foundational element of cybersecurity and security incidents are expensive and can impact organizations’ bottom lines.

At the end of 2022, the EU passed the Digital Operational Resilience Act which provides regulatory controls for financial institutes to safeguard detect, protect, contain, recover and repair against information and communications technology (ICT) related incidents. Financial institutions and third-party service providers must comply by January 2025. Failure to comply could result in a £10M fine or 5% of annual sales.

The new version of the Network and Information Systems Directive (NIS2 Directive, “NIS2”) came into force on January 16, 2023 and must be applied by October 2024. Failure to comply could result in administrative fines of £10M or 2% of annual sales of the prior year (whichever is higher).

At the end of 2022, all US federal entities were required to create a full inventory of software used to comply with NIST guidelines to improve the nation’s cybersecurity. Since then, some state and local governments have adopted StateRAMP to validate their third-party suppliers’ cybersecurity posture offering products delivered as a cloud service.

In 2021, the Texas Legislature passed Senate Bill 475, requiring the Texas Department of Information Resources (DIR) to establish a state risk and authorization management program that provides for standards of assessing, authorizing and monitoring all cloud computing services that processes data for any state agency. Essentially, any software procured needs to have gone through a standard security assessment review.

In 2021, the FTC also amended its Safeguards Rule for modern technologies to comply with protecting customer information. One of the key elements of this rule is to have a risk assessment, which includes an inventory of what and where customer data is stored, and assessing risks and threats to its security.

ITAM is foundational to cybersecurity

Armed with a deep understanding of application usage, many of our customers have formed deep relationships with their Security Operations (SecOps) counterparts to identify risk. A strong ITAM team, backed by robust tooling can aid cybersecurity initiatives in a multitude of ways, from having confidence of all assets that need securing to helping enforce security policies.

Obtain a holistic inventory of all IT assets

You can’t manage what you can’t see, and according to this article from Security Magazine, having a complete and current inventory is one of the top challenges that keep Chief Information Security Officers (CISOs) up at night.

86% of IT leaders report that business units are under significant stress because they’re unaware of all purchased cloud and SaaS.

Source: Snow Software 2022 IT Priorities Report

Unfortunately, many organizations don’t get accurate inventories because: 

• They still rely on spreadsheets and disparate data sources to get an understanding of their assets (even though frequent software updates, technology upgrades and personnel changes outdate those spreadsheets almost as soon as they’re created).
• Cloud technologies are easy for users to try and buy outside of IT’s awareness, especially now that business units and individuals conduct most IT purchasing instead of a centralized IT department.
• Many organizations have independent business units (especially those with histories of M&A) with distributed purchasing and IT asset management teams who aren’t using tools and policies for capturing inventory.

A modern ITAM platform can help you counter all this “shadow IT” by bringing together your IT asset data from end-user devices and applications, datacenter devices and applications, SaaS applications and even applications running in containerized environments.

Identifying shadow SaaS application risks

SaaS software is easy for anyone to try and buy, and it has also contributed to the move of most IT purchasing away from a centralized IT organization to business units and individuals. Though this level of self-sufficiency alleviates some of the burden on IT, it also creates an entirely new set of risks. IT must eventually face these challenges, especially when it comes to SaaS security.

Issues related to SaaS usage include:

• The risk that stems from users setting up weak and easily hackable passwords
• Trouble complying with data privacy regulations such as GDPR and HIPAA
• Software misconfiguration
• Unwieldy access control
• When employees leave the company, not knowing what other subscriptions they were using

To proactively investigate free or licensed SaaS applications used in your environment that are not going through your SSO platform, organizations can invest in a cloud access security broker (CASB) or leverage an IT asset management platform that provides this level of insight via a browser extension. The benefit of using an IT asset management platform is it can normalize software titles and provide additional insights into application redundancies.

Identifying employees using denylisted applications

Most organizations have a “denylist” of applications they don’t want to run in their IT environment. They do their best to limit employee exposure to them and educate their workforce on the risks of such applications. Despite their best efforts, there will always be users who don’t adhere to security policies. Today’s SaaS applications are generally easy to access and deploy, making governance even harder for IT departments.

Fortunately, some ITAM solutions, can report actual usage against denylisted applications, so that teams can point additional security education at specific individuals or departments.

Find assets with software vulnerabilities

PII data leaks are not only a PR nightmare, but also can get organizations out of compliance with industry and governmental regulations. ITAM solutions can collect details of vulnerable applications from the National Vulnerability Database, and compare that to where those applications are currently used. This information is valuable to help busy IT teams prioritize patching or removing the most critical vulnerable applications.

Discovering end-of-life assets

Using end-of-life assets is akin to leaving your windows wide open and your doors unlocked when you aren’t home. With end-of-life applications and devices, there are often known vulnerabilities with no patch available. One of the largest examples of this problem is the WannaCry attack; organizations were still struggling to patch for this vulnerability three years after this attack began.

A robust ITAM solution can scan your environment to reveal:

• IT assets already at end of life
• IT assets reaching end of life within 12 months
• How many devices are impacted
• Where these assets are located

SecOps can use this information to help IT Operations prioritize the most critical assets to remove from the network.

Determine application candidates for single sign-on (SSO)

With usage data for SaaS applications, you can quickly identify applications widely used throughout your organization, and bring them under your SSO platform. Taking this action will improve application security through stronger required passwords and better governance.

Likewise, when employees leave the organization, you’ll have a view of all the applications used to identify where subscriptions need to be canceled, etc.

Enabling your ISO 27001 certification

Having complete visibility of your IT assets, along with understanding of end-of-life, vulnerability and PII risks helps organizations get closer to reaching an ISO 27001 certification and complying with other internal audit policies (e.g. GDPR compliance, etc.).

The post Proactive IT Risk Assessment: Ensuring Data Security appeared first on Snow Software.

These use cases are from the framework the FinOps Foundation has established on how ITAM intersects with FinOps capabilities. 

Use case #1: Cost allocation

Cost allocation is a fundamental aspect of financial management, and it’s where FinOps and ITAM converge effectively. 

FinOps cost allocation activities: 

• Developing strategic naming standards and hierarchical groupings. 
• Defining governance standards for various groups. 
• Tagging groups such as by team, project, application, region, etc. 
• Reporting on key financial metrics such as cost per group/user. 
• Allocating costs with any associated commitment-based discounts. 

ITAM cost allocation activities: 

• Using naming standards for license allocation. 
• Applying cloud naming standards for Bring Your Own License (BYOL). 
• Developing reporting standards for BYOL usage. 

FinOps and ITAM intersection – Cost allocation: 

• Shared understanding and utilization of naming standards. 
• Overlaps in areas like BYOL and cloud service provider (CSP) marketplace, necessitating collaboration for optimal cost allocation.

Use case #2: Managing shared costs

Shared costs present unique challenges, but collaboration between FinOps and ITAM can ensure equitable distribution. 

FinOps activities with managing shared costs: 

• Identifying shared cost types. 
• Establishing mechanisms for dividing shared costs. 
• Applying shared cost models. 
• Reporting on shared costs.

ITAM activities for managing shared costs: 

• Collaborating with Finance to establish cost-sharing methodologies. 
• Agreeing on a methodology for distributing monthly costs. 

FinOps and ITAM intersection – Managing shared costs: 

• Overlaps in support costs (CSP or software). 
• Collaborating with application owners for shared cost allocation. 
• Handling products with prepaid lump sums and variable monthly usage costs.

Use case #3: Managing anomalies

Identifying and managing anomalies is crucial to preventing financial leakages and ensuring IT organizational processes are followed.

FinOps activities with managing anomalies: 

• Establishing an anomaly management process. 
• Detecting, documenting, and communicating about the peaks and valleys of cloud activity. 
• Generating alert reports to surface anomalous spending. 

ITAM activities with managing anomalies: 

• Conducting regular license compliance reviews (for example, when cloud spending spikes, it’s possible the associated license use spikes as well. It becomes a difficult situation when you don’t have enough licenses to cover the increase, leading you to fall out of compliance).
• Investigating license shortages and underutilization. 
• Addressing unauthorized/unsupported applications. 

FinOps and ITAM intersection – Managing anomalies: 

• Managing license usage, particularly overages. 
• Addressing unauthorized/unsupported use of services and products. 
• Rightsizing licenses in response to overages. 

Use case #4: Forecasting

FinOps and ITAM come together to make stronger forecasts for the business as a whole. 

FinOps activities with forecasting: 

• Collaborating with multiple teams to develop a forecasting methodology and process. 
• Leveraging historical data and future plans to create forecasts. 
• Coordinating with budget leaders to ensure budgets align with business goals. 
• Tracking and reporting on KPIs. 

ITAM activities with forecasting: 

• Projecting cost increases, reductions, and requirements based on license reviews. 
• Collaborating with stakeholders to determine license requirements and cost adjustments. 

FinOps and ITAM intersection – Forecasting: 

• ITAM engages in forecasting, particularly related to licenses, while cloud forecasting is generally outside its scope. 
• Overlaps occur in areas like BYOL, CSP marketplace, and standalone SaaS, requiring collaborative planning and forecasting. 

Use case #5: Budget management

ITAM and FinOps teams can work together to optimize budgets for greater efficiency.  

FinOps activities with budget management: 

• Planning with budget leaders for efficient budget plans. 
• Tracking and reporting KPIs to monitor cloud spend versus budget. 
• Exploring optimization opportunities and overspending by alerting teams projected to exceed budgets. 
• Communicating with leadership when underspending is expected. 

ITAM activities on budget management: 

• Advising Finance on budget expectations based on licensing insights. 
• Conducting annual reviews of renewal expenditures. 

FinOps and ITAM intersection – Budget management: 

• FinOps collaborates with ITAM to ensure license and consumption-based usage aligns with budget expectations. 

Use case #6: Workload management and automation

Workload management and automation prioritize efficient resource usage by ensuring that resources are active only when necessary.  

FinOps activities with workload management and automation: 

• Collaborating with application owners to tag resources effectively. 
• Communication of performance statistics regarding automation and non-tagged resources. 

ITAM activities with workload management and automation: 

• Establishing protocols for transparent communication of performance metrics related to resource usage and automation. 

FinOps and ITAM intersection – Workload management and automation: 

• ITAM reviews license usage and collaborated with FinOps to clean up temporary or abandoned assets. 
• Collaboration ensures that licensed assets align with elasticity and scaling considerations, factoring in license rights and entitlements. 

The intersection of FinOps and ITAM offers a powerful synergy for organizations seeking to enhance their cost management efforts. By leveraging the strengths of both disciplines, organizations navigate the complexities of cost allocation, data analysis, anomaly management, shared cost distribution, and more. This is the second post in a series exploring the intersection of FinOps and ITAM.

Read the next post in this series, How FinOps and ITAM Teams Can Work Together in Real-Life Scenarios.

The post 6 Collaborative Use Cases for FinOps and ITAM Teams appeared first on Snow Software.

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.

Spreading the effort among multiple teams (e.g., FinOps and IT asset management) with their own blind spots and ways of getting and interpreting data compounds the problem. To combat that issue, these teams need to collaborate over a common source of Technology Intelligence on their assets.

Snow Cloud Control: Full visibility into cloud and SaaS spend

Snow Cloud Control provides complete visibility into both your public cloud and your SaaS environments. For cloud assets, you can discover and optimize cloud spend on Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform and Kubernetes. For SaaS usage, Snow Cloud Control discovers and optimizes spend across paid, unpaid, sanctioned and unsanctioned applications from across your organization.

Snow Cloud Control also supports cross-functional collaboration. Everyone can view the same dashboard and personalized reporting tied to their respective function. For example, Finance and/or FinOps teams can allocate costs by:

• Business purpose
• Forecast cloud spend
• Budget for cloud spend

With an easy-to-use user interface, customers also achieve quick time to value by seeing cloud infrastructure and SaaS consumption along with insights and recommendations for optimization.

A holistic view of public cloud server spend

With server usage spread throughout the organization, understanding when and where there are opportunities to eliminate waste can be challenging, to say the least. Do you have virtual machines that were spun up on Amazon Web Services or Azure and then forgotten? Are there servers running 24/7 that only need to be on during the workday? 

Eliminating this waste isn’t a one-time fix; it’s an ongoing effort. It requires regular monitoring, controls, and actionable insights to spot anomalies and identify opportunities for discounts or cost savings. Snow Cloud Control provides a holistic view of cloud spend and enables you to act quickly on cloud cost spikes across all your cloud assets. You’ll get an accurate picture of your cloud resources and Kubernetes costs with prescriptive recommendations for savings. What’s more, you can also properly allocate costs based on team, project, application, or your definition and the corresponding cloud consumption. Armed with this data, you can begin to eliminate waste, right-size infrastructure based on your cloud workloads and establish enforceable guidelines to prevent future waste.

Get insight into your SaaS portfolio and eliminate wasteful spending

With Snow Cloud Control, you can also manage SaaS spend. Managing SaaS spend is every bit as difficult as managing server infrastructure and cloud services. The first challenge is discovering what applications are in use within the business. To address that challenge, Snow goes straight to the source – the user.

With user data, you’re not only able to discover all the applications activated outside of your approved procurement processes, but also see how (or if) teams are using SaaS. This allows you to identify the applications that are adding value and those that are unnecessary.

These insights allow you to eliminate unused applications, repurpose licenses and appropriately match users with feature bundles. They also allow you to spot redundancies and overlapping functionality. For example, do you really need four file sharing, three project management and two video conferencing tools? Consolidating to a single solution can save money on license (through contract negotiations) and support costs.

Get started with Snow Cloud Control

Snow Cloud Control allows you to monitor, optimize and govern your technology spending across public cloud service providers and SaaS applications. And, as a customer, you get access to Snow’s global cloud experts and partners who know and share best practices to efficiently manage cloud usage and cost.

To learn more about how you can save money in the cloud, register for our webinar on November 3, 2022.

The post Discover How to Optimize Technology Spend with New Snow Cloud Control appeared first on Snow Software.

IT Asset Manager Beth Kaminski has worked in the ITAM space for 25 years. She’s spent seven of those years at Dart Container, a Snow Software customer. Thanks to those years of work from Beth and her team, the DART ITAM department excels at mitigating risks, adapting to changes in user needs and optimizing costs for their organization. 

We recently captured Beth’s valuable insights in the embedded video above. In it, she identifies the impacts of hybrid working on today’s ITAM landscape, the We recently captured Beth’s valuable insights in the embedded video above. In it, she identifies the impacts of hybrid working on today’s pandemic-era ITAM landscape, the challenges this way of working presents for operational efficiency, and the ways Snow has helped DART Container tackle these issues. She also offers her perspective on the future of ITAM and whether we’ll ever get back to “the pre-pandemic normal.” 

ITAM then and now

We started our conversation with Beth’s recollections of how her ITAM journey began before she even started working at Dart, and then we got her take on what IT is like right now. “It goes back to before software asset management, or IT asset management, was a thing,” she recalls. “I was doing financial management at the time, and the CIO called me up, pushed a stack of paper at me, and said, ‘Here, Beth, I know you can clean these up . . . You don’t have to do this forever, but just clean up these spreadsheets.’”  

Twenty-five years later, she no longer needs to work reactively by fixing hardcopies. Instead, she’s responding to and reflecting upon the ways in which the last few years have affected ITAM professionals like her. “IT is a reexamination of the daily life of an IT worker right now . . . a reexamination of the working environment,” she explains, “A good example is the Omicron variant. I think it took a lot of us by surprise, and Dart Container went back to remote work, but we can work here if we like to. It left people with a choice. Dart container made the announcement that we could go back and work at home at like, 8:30 in the morning, and by 9:30 everyone cleared out. Twenty-five years later, she no longer needs to work reactively by fixing hardcopies. Instead, she’s responding to and reflecting upon the ways in which the last few years have affected ITAM professionals like her. “IT is a reexamination of the daily life of an IT worker right now . . . a reexamination of the working environment,” she explains, “A good example is the Omicron variant. I think it took a lot of us by surprise, and Dart Container went back to remote work, but we can work here if we like to. It left people with a choice.” 

The move to hybrid

Her colleagues mirrored the larger movement toward hybrid and remote working in the IT industry, so we asked Beth to identify some of the challenges that arose for Dart professionals as they made the transition. She immediately singled out the working environment and tools we typically take for granted, such as internet access. “Dart Container actually sits in mid-Michigan in the United States,” she says. “We’re in a fairly rural area, and a lot of the people in IT live in rural areas. We were providing hot spots for folks. It was problematic; everybody was just sucking up the bandwidth. That was one of the biggest challenges around hybrid work — getting the right things that you needed to work with —printers, internet access, chairs. Who would’ve thought chairs?” With the right IT asset management tools, however, they had the ability to just go and be productive right away. “That,” she says, “was very successful.” 

Despite the obstacles that this new hybrid working environment presents for IT asset management, it does have a big upside for individual contributors, according to Beth. “Individual contributors have more of a say in how things are done,” she says. “Management has backed off a little bit. There is more opportunity to be proactive in things like cost optimization. It could be that we are afraid that we are going to miss things. So, people are being more proactive, and they’re also being more diligent at the tasks they did in the past.” 

Operationally, however, there was a significant challenge as people moved back and forth between their homes and offices. “We have laptops, so we just drag them around,” she explains. Other people in her organization had equipment in both places. “That has been problematic from an operational standpoint,” she says. 

Supporting business growth with new tech

When it comes to best supporting business growth through hybrid working, Beth says that ITAM professionals need to look continuously for technologies that facilitate the transition back and forth from the office and make it easier for workers. “When we’re talking about hybrid, we’re maybe talking not completely remote, and not completely on-premises,” she explains. It can be a disorienting transition in which workers have trouble recovering what they miss from each environment. Beth strongly advises ITAM professionals to look for and adopt technologies that help workers feel that they are part of a group and not disconnected.

As for the future of ITAM, Beth asserts that we’ll all need to adapt to the new technologies —and their price tags — that are coming in fast and furious, just as Dart had to quickly adapt in its own recent history. “There has been talk out there in the space about how everyone had a different transformational journey,” Beth says. “That journey took place in about six months, and [had] a lot of cost and a lot of software asset management or IT asset management tasks and initiatives with it,” she remembers. “We were already sort of reeling from cloud, and it all kind of hit us at one time.” 

The future of ITAM

Talking further about the future of ITAM and whether we’ll get back to “the pre-pandemic normal,” she believes the new hybrid environment is a permanent fixture. “I think we’ve gone too far. I think if you look at the marketplace now, people are insisting on remote work, so I think hybrid is here to stay,” Beth insists. She adds that she’s not sure what that “normal” really was in the first place. “We were already doing a big metamorphosis in the space because of cloud,” she says. 

Hybrid working also created challenges regarding visibility, according to Beth. “I think you have to work a bit harder at it because you are remote, or remote part of the time. You have to try harder; you have to push your initiatives forward, you have to stand out and get good at being on camera and using video,” she says. “That was a learning curve for a lot of folks.”  Being proactive and better at this literal, traditional visibility helps for reporting visibility, Beth claims. “It gives the impression that you’re on top of things and that you’re seeing things, and everybody is watching you,” she says. 

Success with Snow

Beth also related how Snow has been a huge contributor to achieving that visibility into the entire IT landscape at DART.

“Snow has helped in giving us . . . that visibility to move forward, more importantly in governance, and be able to really see in this fast-moving pace around hybrid work and new technologies . . . what’s coming in and out of the environment. That’s very important. Having a tool that was portable in and out of on-prem, that was really important to us.”  

Beth Kaminski, ITAM Manager, Dart container

As a nice conclusion to our conversation, Beth conveyed the impact on her team and corporate culture when they won an Honorable Mention Award for Transformation of the Year at the Snow Software 2021 Technology Intelligence Awards. “Winning the Technology Intelligence Award was SO rewarding for my team,” she happily relayed. “We have worked together for six years, and . . . this program didn’t exist before the five of us started working. It was like . . . saying you’re recognized, it was all worth it. There were arguments, and yes, tears, but all those tears have been recognized in both the ITAM space and in Dart Container corporately.”

To read more of Beth’s industry insights, check out, “4 Key Metrics Every Software Asset Manager Should Measure.”

To learn more about Beth Kaminski, check out her bio on LinkedIn.

If you’d like to share your story with Snow readers or nominate an ITAM/SAM star to tell theirs, please send an email to kathleen.shepherd@snowsoftware.com.

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