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.

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Visibility into containers for better cost and risk management

IT and Engineering leaders are transitioning from virtual machines (think VMware) to container technology to:

• Build new, distributed applications
• Lift and shift large enterprise applications
• Refactor legacy applications

Benefits from adopting container technologies include:

• Faster software delivery
• Streamlined application lifecycle management
• Ability to move legacy applications to modern architectures

Containers are an exciting new technology, but increased adoption brings risk to IT. Most ITAM teams have established processes in place for virtualized technologies. However, the majority lack visibility into how and where containers are being used. This means IT and ITAM teams are unable to forecast the costs of applications running inside containers or the risks associated with their use.

The new container visibility feature available on Snow Atlas offers details on how many containers are used and how long they have been running, with a view on Microsoft^®, Oracle and Red Hat containerized applications in this first release. Container visibility is available for Kubernetes environments running on Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure^® environments.

As detailed in the below screenshots, ITAM professionals will be able to:

• Discover hosts, nodes and container instances running in Kubernetes in Amazon EKS and in Azure AKS
• Discover and normalize standard Microsoft and Oracle containers
• Identify the number of containers running licensable Microsoft and Oracle software
• Identify the number of (virtual) resources that have been assigned to a container and match the relationship between container and host/node

Click here to register your interest in our free beta program for container visibility.

Agentless billing visibility of Azure and AWS consumption

One of the biggest pain points we hear from ITAM professionals is how to start proactively managing cloud costs. For ITAM teams seeking more control over cloud spend, Snow recommends focusing on how much your organization is spending in the cloud and understanding what is getting purchased with that spend.

To make it easier for ITAM teams to gather public cloud spend data, Snow is launching agentless billing visibility of Azure and AWS. This functionality gives ITAM teams a spend snapshot across AWS and Azure in the terminology and views used by IT asset managers. With this new service — available to all Snow Atlas customers — ITAM teams have improved views of their organization’s spend profile in public cloud, natively within their SAM tool. By building this feature natively within the SAM solution, Snow is empowering ITAM teams to drive conversations about spend optimization with cloud stakeholders and FinOps teams.

This is our first iteration in providing comprehensive visibility to cloud license usage that complements our leading capabilities for SaaS visibility. As shown in the below screenshot, ITAM and SAM leaders can slice and dice public cloud consumption to identify spending patterns. Starting with a complete view of expenses, you can pick date ranges, apply filters and group data based on resource group, cost category or region. Short term or even one day spikes in public cloud expenses can be identified and addressed.

Finally, the ability to save customized views enables teams to continuously stay on top of public cloud expenses.

This new feature is released in beta and is free for customers to trial. We’re excited to get your feedback on how to iterate and improve this capability.

For organizations with more mature cloud practices as well as FinOps or cloud operations practitioners, Snow Cloud Cost powered by Anodot provides greater depth of visibility, insights and analysis on public cloud spend, controls for budget management and spend allocation, detection of anomalies and recommendations for optimizing spend.

Expanded support to reduce S/4HANA migration risks

With mainstream support for the ECC platform ending in 2027 and core SAP^® products being optimized for the SAP HANA database, the question is not “if” your organization will transfer to S/4HANA, but when and how.

For organizations embarking on a migration to S/4HANA, six critical questions you need to answer are:

1. How many SAP licenses will I need in the future?
2. What types of licenses will I need?
3. Do I have special agreements that I want to keep?
4. Should I opt for a contract or product conversion?
5. Am I prepared for measurement based on authorizations?
6. How should I license digital access?

“Gartner estimates that over 16,000 SAP Business Suite clients have yet to buy and implement SAP S/4HANA licenses before support is discontinued in 2030.”²

To support these challenges, we’ve enhanced Snow Optimizer for SAP^® Software with the addition of a new module, Snow License Intelligence, which offers:

• Out-of-the-box rulesets for simulating S/4HANA licensing scenarios, including more than 200,000 SAP transactions analyzed and assigned to SAP user types and >70 rules for both usage- and authorization-based licensing
• Continual maintenance to match SAP’s evolving licensing scenarios
• Easy customization to customer-specific situations and licenses
• Fast implementation for new projects and M&A
• Automation enabling reduced resources for SAP license management
• License management best practices

Use asset data to build a more sustainable enterprise

Finally, Snow is announcing a new service that will support organizations with their sustainability goals.

Our solution uses your existing Snow data to create a customized sustainability report including:

• Certified sustainable laptop and desktop analysis: Get insight into the number of certified sustainable laptops and desktops in your organization to support certification analysis and sustainability goals
• Server migration to the cloud carbon impact: Evaluate the estimated reduction in CO2 emissions your organization may be able to make when moving on-premises servers to the cloud
• Device carbon calculator: Assess device energy efficiencies and associated carbon emissions to drive more energy-efficient procurement choices.

Customers are already realizing significant value and impact for their sustainability initiatives. In just 9 months of using these customized sustainability reports, one of our largest customers increased their number of TCO-certified laptops from 25% to 61%, and their number of TCO-certified desktops from 8% to 54%.

Gain visibility and act on intelligence

With a large degree of uncertainty in the broader macroeconomic environment, ITAM professionals need to focus on optimizing costs, negotiating better renewals and improving operational efficiency.

The latest releases from Snow give ITAM teams the data they need to see the software, container and cloud services running in their environment. These new capabilities also provide the intelligence to make actionable decisions and recommendations based on that information to improve their business.

At Snow, we not only empower organizations with a complete picture of their technology environment but provide the intelligence to take meaningful action. This perspective is a powerful agent of business agility and resilience.

Request a demo to see how these new features can help your organization today and into the future.

<sub>1 Gartner.  “CTOs’ Guide to Containers and Kubernetes — Answering the Top 10 FAQs.”  Published 31 May 2022.  Arun Chandrasekaran, Wataru Katsurashima.

2 Gartner.  “Offering Managers Insight: Opportunities in the SAP S/4HANA and RISE with SAP Market.”  13 April 2022.  Fabio Di Capua.</sub>

The post What’s New at Snow: ITAM Solutions for Rising Cloud Costs, Visibility Into Containers and Asset Data That Drives Sustainability Initiatives appeared first on Snow Software.

Defining the sustainable tech estate 

Along with other insights on sustainability that Al shared earlier this year, he shared his definition of a sustainable company. Such a company, Al says, “recognizes its corporate responsibility to lessen the harm it does to the environment and . . . global resources.” In our latest interview, he expands on those sentiments to say that sustainability is a big area which we all need to be looking at for long-term strategy, especially IT. What, however, does adopting sustainable practices look like for IT? 

First, focus on energy use

Most people often start with focusing on their energy use when adopting sustainable IT practices. When looking at that usage for IT, Al would ask these three key questions: 

• Where am I consuming large amounts of energy? 
• Where are my datacenters? In other words, what energy sources are available where the datacenters are, and how does that factor into environmental impact? 
• How much is running a physical facility costing me? 

Cloud adoption is key

If an organization notices significant on-premises energy consumption, Al would advise looking at the cloud for help. Big public cloud providers are taking a greener, more sustainable approach to their energy. As Al has said before, leaving processing tasks to these providers often can be more efficient than trying to run your own. It’s also an opportunity to use autoscaling technology and run only the machines you need at any given time, depending on the design. 

Study your hardware’s lifecycle 

After looking at overall energy use at your facilities, evaluate your hardware’s lifecycle for your next step in adopting sustainable IT practices. Start by at the financial and environmental costs for building them in the first place. If you’re acquiring new assets, you can make an initial positive impact by adopting technologies developed for energy optimization. Also, look at how energy efficient your current assets are and see if it’s time for a refresh cycle. In Al’s view, how long you use your technology assets (laptops, phones, servers, etc.) is hugely important. Old servers, for example, tend to be less efficient in terms of the performance you get out of them. 

More ideas for adopting sustainable IT practices

Before his time at Snow, Al was a Snow customer who used Snow products to get the actionable data and insights that we know as Technology Intelligence. Organizations can use that Technology Intelligence for adopting the sustainable IT practices we discussed in our interview, among many others. It provides the full visibility of your IT estate needed to spot waste and increase sustainability for your business. 

Don’t forget to check out our previous CIO Perspective posts on how to start an ITAM practice, technology visibility, how to free up funds for innovation, maximizing cloud investments with FinOps and gaining Technology Intelligence with Snow Atlas. 

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Due to the fast-paced technological development we have grown used to in IT, we have lived for some time in a disposable environment where equipment is quickly outdated and replaced in a bid to improve customer experience or outcomes. However, at some point, most of us have looked at a stack of equipment destined to be disposed of and thought of the cost. It is only a small jump to consider the cost to the environment as well. 

IT Leader Strategies for Sustainability 

A sustainable company is one which recognizes its corporate responsibility to lessen the harm it does to the environment and reduce its draw on global resources. Customers, employees and investors are increasingly looking to all companies to answer the call to action by developing their own sustainability measures, especially in the IT sphere.  

Snow Software and I have introduced a wide range of strategies such as supporting greener data centers, safely recycling endpoint devices, increasing reliance on cloud technologies and extending the life of hardware.  

Snow is not the only company recognizing the increasing importance of environmental efforts and the CIOs who embrace them. A recent Wall Street Journal article reported that many CIOs are focused on sustainability initiatives now that the relationship between digitization and carbon-based emissions is more apparent. 

In addition to the recycling of endpoint devices and the other examples listed above, these leaders’ wide-ranging efforts often include: 

• Improving data center efficiency
• Reducing electricity consumption
• Adopting technologies developed for energy optimization and waste reduction
• Increasing reliance on sustainable hardware certification programs

As CIO, I know that managing a global technology estate brings significant challenges. Prior to joining Snow, I already used their products to secure technology intelligence. I know that the insights gained through these products aid sustainability initiatives and assist those who still need to transition to a cloud computing model. Spending money on servers that are sitting and consuming power whilst being unproductive is not in the interests of business or the environment. By ensuring full visibility of the technology estate, wasted resources can be identified and eliminated.

Relocating as much as possible to the cloud (due to the greener credentials of the cloud providers vs. legacy data centers), leaves processing tasks to larger, more efficient providers. It also allows companies to run only the number of machines that they need at any one time, depending on the design. Utilizing auto-scaling technology efficiently allows a business to decrease their carbon footprint significantly and save cost.

Sustainability Certification and TCO Certified

To help ensure that we are holding ourselves to the highest standards in our hardware decisions, we at Snow Software partner with TCO Certified, the world-leading third-party sustainability certification for IT products which is independent from the IT industry and buyers. Snow products also now make use of the data that TCO Certified produces and incorporates that into the intelligence that our customers have about their technology estate, allowing them to make better decisions.  

Companies wishing to extend their corporate social responsibility beyond their own consumption can use hardware asset management tools such as those from Snow. These tools identify “end of life” assets so companies can consider how they can best utilize those assets to meet development goals, lessen waste, and reduce the global requirement for raw materials.  Donating their IT assets (after giving due regard to data removal) to charitable organizations which give individuals and communities access to basic services helps both the environment and a demographic in need.

Waste of resources, be they physical, environmental or financial, is becoming indefensible in the modern business climate. While it is certainly a challenge to find innovative ways to improve our consumption and impact on the environment, it is one that those who are in leadership roles in IT should take seriously. 

Alastair Pooley is the Chief Information Officer at Snow, where he is responsible for global IT strategy and implementation. He has presented at national and international conferences and maintains in industry-leading technical/security qualifications across AWS, Linux Professional Institute and ISC(2). Alastair also earned a BSc in Physics from the University of Warwick and was awarded an MBA from Cranfield University.

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Throughout 2021, our home and working lives continued to adapt to the pandemic. Where possible remote working remains the preferred model today and some kind of hybrid working model (part home, part office) appears to be the most likely future of work for many. Through massive change in 2020 and 2021, the Information Technology sector stepped up and adjusted to the needs of a distributed workforce with a reasonable degree of success.

According to our new 2022 IT Priorities Report which studied the changing role and expectations of today’s IT leaders, 90% say their organization is able to deal with the challenges of hybrid work efficiently and effectively. But what comes next?

At the time of the year when predictions are popular, the work we have done at Snow has allowed us to make a few of our own. Each is rooted in this new landscape and may help you fine-tune your focus.

1. Digital transformation efforts have grown in importance, but CIO’s must focus on the joint priorities of improving customer experience and fostering better data for decision making

The pandemic led to increased efforts on digital transformation, whether that was growth in e-commerce, the switch of paper to digital processes or the wholesale replacement of legacy systems. However, in 2022 there will be more focus on improving the customer experience as an attempt to differentiate from competitors and leverage this advantage. Increased digitalization will also generate far more data than organizations had from paper which has the potential to enable faster and accurate decision making in 2022.

2. Make use of the increased reliance on IT to drive further innovation and make use of the increased willingness to change

While remote work isn’t new, the pandemic greatly accelerated its adoption. Had CIOs suggested such a dramatic change to this working style pre-pandemic, they likely would have been rejected. But today, there is a real willingness to innovate, and IT professionals can take hold of this new appetite for change in 2022 to make further progress. On the vendor side, we will see more companies launch new features tailored to improving hybrid work experiences addressing the challenges of office-based staff collaborating with those who are working remotely.

3. Adopt new technologies to improve day-to-day operations and train staff with new skills to support them

IT cost reduction was of utmost importance last year as organizations worked to navigate the disrupted economy. In 2022, we will see a heightened appetite for adding emerging technologies (such as IoT, hybrid cloud and AI according to the study) and therefore, there will be an increased need for skills required to manage their success. Companies will seek employees skilled in AI and machine learning, containerization, cybersecurity and DevOps but given these are in short supplying in the market, training current staff will be crucial.

4. IT can have an impact on sustainability initiatives and it is vital that advancements be made

As new regulations arrive on legislative agendas around the world to combat the damaging effects of growing electronic waste, CIOs (and other c-suite members) are best advised to pay attention to this challenge. 2022 will see added emphasis on green computing with the vast majority of IT leaders saying it is a rising organizational IT priority, whilst accepting that their company must do a better job at driving responsible sustainability initiatives.

The last couple of years have brought unprecedented change for everyone, but especially to the Information Technology sector which has risen to meet the challenge. In the new year, leaders now have an opportunity to build on the important lessons they have learned.

As technology estates continue to evolve and multiply, it will be increasingly important for IT leaders to understand what assets they have and how they are being used. Comprehensive technology intelligence, or full visibility into their current technology investments, greatly assist the ability to make informed data-driven decisions, draw up future priorities and fuel further innovation. The best intelligence platforms also provide key control measures for managing sprawl, allowing full oversight of the evolving estate and ensure that it is as secure as possible.

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