Mature organizations are excited about the multitude of ways they can help their organizations with the intelligence they have on their technology assets. Here are a few examples:

• Understanding how technology is actually being used so they can buy the right amount of licenses
• Reporting on application versions to identify devices that need to be updated
• Determining where there are overlapping technologies used in the organization and where some applications and costs can be eliminated
• Finding applications that are end-of-life or soon to be deprecated
• Identifying applications in use that haven’t been vetted by security
• Quickly reporting on effective license position

Less mature organizations understand the potential value of their IT asset database but find getting other departments to leverage their data repository is like pulling teeth.

The least mature organizations are typically using an ITAM tool for one use case. These organizations don’t have a good owner of the tool (it’s often someone’s part-time job) and resulting data. The potential for using this data set never sees the light of day.

“Data and analytics leaders who share data externally generate three times more measurable economic benefit than those who do not.”

data sharing is a key digital transformation capability by Gartner^®

6 ways to advocate for your data

So, how should less mature organizations advocate for their data? Here are a few tips:

• Communicate the quality of your data. How is the data collected, how often, how is it normalized, and enriched? How will you validate the data accuracy?
• Understand the process others are using for capturing data today. It is possible your colleagues are ignoring you because they think they already have the answers? Have a sit down and get a detailed understanding of how they capture the IT data to do their jobs. It’s likely they are doing a lot of manual work or have big gaps in their data that you could help them with.
• Use tools for sharing data already familiar to the organization. Many of our customers feed their IT asset data into their analytics tool of choice (PowerBI, Tableau, etc.) where most in the organization already have access. The other benefit of this approach is users can join technology data with other datasets to solve additional problems (e.g. reporting on sustainability initiatives, etc.).
• Leverage AI. With generative AI technologies, there are now more ways to further democratize data insights. Now, your colleagues can simply ask your dataset questions like, “Are there any inactive computers in our inventory?” Or, “How many new servers have been discovered in the last 90 days compared to the prior 90 days?” You can experiment with these sorts of innovations with Snow Copilot, an AI assistant, that will allow customers to query their details on Software Asset Management (SAM) computer data securely, receiving insights and conversational responses directly within the Snow Atlas platform.
• Make data actionable. Provide the data in a format that can be used by your stakeholders. For instance, it would be best to provide data via API if your stakeholder is planning to use this information in automating processes.
• Leverage forums owned by your leadership. Your leadership likely has an all-hands meeting, newsletter, or some other kind of forum where you can communicate the rich dataset your organization has, its accuracy and some examples of how it could be leveraged by various stakeholders. Involve your leadership to understand what they think are the most impactful use cases you should pursue with others in the organization.

You can learn more about how other customers are using Technology Intelligence and the benefits they are realizing through our case studies.

The post How to Advocate for Your Data appeared first on Snow Software.

If you’re a Security Operations, IT or ITAM professional supporting organizations with any debt, this is not just another warning to invest in a healthy ITAM practice. This news, recently communicated in a report from the S&P Global Ratings agency, states that an inadequate ITAM practice can impact an organization’s ability to have solid cybersecurity controls, and as a result, creditworthiness will be impacted. If your organization’s credit scores are impacted, the cost of financing will go up, and the organization’s reputation will be damaged. If you receive a performance bonus or have invested in company stock, the impact can be quite personal.

Over the years, governmental agencies and standards bodies such as the NIST, CISA, ISO 27001/ISO 27002, SOC2, etc. have been promoting the need for ITAM in cybersecurity processes. The noise around managing these standards have been amped up in recent years with the following disruptions:

Even with all the urgings from federal and state agencies and standards bodies, organizations are still managing IT assets in spreadsheets and with tools that have not evolved to meet today’s complex IT infrastructure and application requirements. These are not mom-and-pop shops managing ITAM processes with bubblegum and toothpicks, but enterprise organizations with 10, 20, or 50 thousand or more employees.

Why has IT asset management been ignored?

There are multiple reasons why ITAM is ignored and not properly funded in organizations. Here are a few of the main reasons:

• Distributed purchasing and users bypassing procurement controls. The majority of applications purchased today are outside IT. With SaaS, all you need is a credit card and internet connection. Most organizations are suffering from application sprawl and are unaware of dozens or hundreds of applications used across the organization. Many ITAM practices are focused on assets they can physically inspect – installed software – and the resulting issue is that no one is focused on governing ITAM for modern technologies.
• It’s a part-time job. Gartner estimates that organizations with more than 5,000 employees should have a software asset management team of at least six people. A lot of organizations relegate the ITAM function to managing the IT inventory and helping out with big audits or renewals and only dedicate minimal resources to the function. Because of the collaborative and data-intensive nature of the job, it is nearly impossible to make much progress in a part-time capacity. Especially with cloud infrastructure and SaaS applications, the role has shifted to be much more proactive from a governance perspective.
• The job is not easy. To be successful, ITAM professionals need a mix of soft skills such as listening, idea selling, cross-functional alignment and relationship building along with technical skills of managing projects, vendor negotiations, and being data driven.
• Revenue-impacting investments win over keeping data secure. This is the same reason why software companies suffer technical debt – everyone wants to work on the shiny, new thing. ITAM has been around for decades, yet we still see unpatched known vulnerabilities, organizations paying penalties for license compliance, managing IT assets in spreadsheets, and having data leak from their company due to unknown applications in use.  

ITAM’s new partner – the CFO

Even with the challenges above, organizations will need to mature their ITAM practices. Now with credit ratings on the line, the CFO will become more invested in ensuring cybersecurity controls are in place and be open to fund a proper ITAM practice for modern-day technology environments. No CFO wants to disclose material weaknesses of internal controls in their financial statements and risk having the cost of debt go up.

Another reason CFOs may be more focused on ITAM is the bridging of FinOps and ITAM practices to create a robust governance framework and optimization roadmap. This is especially true in organizations with significant IaaS spend and needing to get a handle on software cost of goods sold.

Learn more about ITAM best practices in this free guide or connect with us to determine how ITAM can improve your cybersecurity posture.

The post Will CFOs Take on ITAM to Keep Credit Ratings Intact? appeared first on Snow Software.

In this hybrid reality, FinOps professionals are tasked to derive the business value of cloud and work with other parts of the business such as engineering, finance, and business teams to collaborate on data-driven spending decisions.

The north star principle¹ from the FinOps Foundation is, “Teams must collaborate.” Among those teams and personas are the IT asset management (ITAM) leader and ITAM practitioner, and they lay the groundwork for a successful cloud cost program.

The FinOps Foundation also says that FinOps professionals are coming together with allies such as ITAM leaders in defining a common language, building enablement strategies to elevate business objectives, and developing communication programs.

Gartner talks about combining ITAM and FinOps to create a robust governance framework and iterative optimization activities². Gartner also says that executives need to create a new operating model to achieve shared objectives of reducing waste and avoiding costly licensing and contracting issues.  

Gartner doesn’t stop there, but urges executive leaders for mature software and cloud governance disciplines to, “Create an integrated unit that profits from the synergy of both disciplines to deliver optimum benefit across an increasingly complex technology environment.”

Discovering blind spots and finding a model for working together

In a recent conversation between the FinOps Foundation and Amy Ashby, the FinOps lead at Under Armour, Amy echoes the same thought process saying that senior leadership plays a key role in bringing the two disciplines together:

“[Our processes] naturally put FinOps and ITAM together, and if we can come together and tackle it from being on the same team, then we can do more and optimize more. There are lot of blind spots on both sides and we can help each other. There is so much value in knowing what is in the environment – across cloud, on prem.”

amy ashby, finops lead at under armour

To make this a reality, ITAM and FinOps professionals must collaborate to cover the blind spots and work in tandem to close the gaps that exist for each other.

FinOps professionals cannot do the heavy lifting of driving visibility and accountability of cloud costs alone. There aren’t many FinOps professionals around the world and even The FinOps Foundation tells us that 62% of organizations with less than one million dollars don’t have a formal FinOps position³. And even if organizations do have a FinOps person or team, they lean on other teams to drive business value out of cloud.

The blind spot for FinOps is that they ignore software and SaaS applications that are not on cloud and they stick only to assets that appear on the cloud bill. For ITAM, they have limited visibility into the cloud unless they have a SAM tool agent deployed into an instance. The other tricky area is that software license agreements have bring-your-own-license (BYOL) terms that are complex, which need to be carefully read and interpreted to avoid compliance risks. A common software vendor option, BYOL can yield substantial savings over demand pricing when used effectively, and ITAM professionals are well equipped to advise on this.

The ITAM team also does not have a view of containers and newer technologies hosted on cloud. With that said, they have an important, shared goal to pursue: to maximize IT investment. CIOs and CTOs need a single-pane-of-glass view across their entire infrastructure to make data-driven decisions.

The way to progress this relationship depends on the nature of the company, team size, culture and practices. There is no one-size-fits-all solution to solve for this. The ideal way to go is take a slow and steady approach, or follow the FinOps Foundation’s maturity model, called the “crawl, walk and run” approach.

Using the crawl, walk, run approach for better collaboration between FinOps and ITAM teams

A crawl, walk, run approach enables organizations to start small, and grow in scale, scope and complexity. Taking quick action at a small scale and limited scope allows both teams to assess the outcomes of their actions, and to gain insights into the value of taking further action in a larger, faster or more granular way.

If you are an ITAM professional, work with your FinOps professionals on the following recommendations:

• Establish and maintain clear lines of communication and coordination with FinOps professionals or Cloud Center of Excellence (CCOE) within the organization. 
• Determine which cloud services are billed with software licenses, including bundled with a service or purchased from a cloud provider marketplace.
• Determine which cloud services have been configured as BYOL.
• Look at software license agreements and determine which cloud services are eligible for BYOL to leverage unallocated licenses.
• Ask for service usage metrics, so that you can determine which cloud services need further OS or container-level inspection. 
• Ask FinOps to track licensing costs and realized savings from BYOL licenses. 

Read the next post in this series, 6 Collaborative Use Cases for FinOps and ITAM Teams.

[1] Establishing FinOps Culture

[2] Target Software and Cloud Costs by Uniting Software Asset Management and FinOps by Gartner

[3]FinOps Foundation April ’23 Summit: State of FinOps Tooling Insights, Normalizing Multi-Cloud Billing Data, and FOCUS

The post Bridging ITAM and FinOps for Success Today and in the Future appeared first on Snow Software.

From the moment he got to the City Council, he recognized a group of very capable people with strong skill sets. But they were so busy just making things work, they had no strategic visibility of assets, no clear understanding of who was doing what or what contracts they had in place and zero insight into the total value or cost of IT to the organization.

“It was clear to me that the biggest problem was no visibility,” Lawrence says. “If you can’t see it, you can’t manage it. Nothing you do will make any big change until you get visibility.”

We sat down with Lawrence to talk about his career journey and how he modernized Christchurch City Council IT.

How did Christchurch get here?

In 2010 and 2011, Christchurch, population 380,000, suffered widespread devastation from a series of earthquakes. Buildings and homes were destroyed, and infrastructure collapsed; 185 people were killed and thousands more were injured. New Zealand declared a national civil defense emergency and response to the natural disaster became a herculean effort. This included lasting support from Christchurch City Council.

The City Council serves the community’s citizens with essential public services with an annual budget of approximately NZ$1.14 billion and just over 2,400 employees. In response to the catastrophic quakes, the entire agency moved into emergency mode to aid the community’s massive rebuild. In the months and even years that followed, the City Council continued to operate that way – doing what they could to make things work. Fast forward five years though and the City Council was still operating under such a premise. Until Lawrence got there.

For nearly forty years, Lawrence worked in ambulance service and management. In 2020, he was hired by the local government agency to support their IT efforts. Thanks to his clinical training as an advanced care paramedic, Lawrence was adept at walking into a situation and quickly evaluating the scene. He knew how to understand the context of that scene and assess what actions needed to be taken to maintain the status quo, or preferably, improve upon it. For City Council leaders, improvement was the goal in the form of delivering better services to the community at a lower cost.

Modernization to the rescue

Soon after Lawrence was hired, the Council began their first-ever IT asset management plan to provide a comprehensive record of IT infrastructure, assets, and performance. This information could then be used for strategy development and assessing IT efficacy. Under Lawrence’s direction, an extensive review of IT asset management solutions and internal evaluation of both software and systems integrators was devised along with a roadmap for a more strategic IT in the future.

At the end of this process, Christchurch City Council chose Snow Software for full visibility of assets, users, and IT consumption.

“Snow gave us visibility into things we knew about, and revealed much more, too…For the first time, we obtained accurate totals for on-premises devices, software and cloud subscriptions, and we could see who used which software and services.”

– Colin Lawrence, Team Leader, IT Asset Management, Christchurch City Council

Learn the benefits Christchurch City Council realized using Snow Software in the full case study.

Team is everything

For Christchurch City Council, strategic IT decisions fueled by visibility were an entirely new concept. Going through such a shift was a process only made possible with good tools and even better communication. Bringing people along through the culture change took willingness and plenty of communication from everyone involved. For Lawrence, it would have been impossible without solid teamwork.

“Teamwork is everything; you will get nowhere by yourself.”

At the City Council, my team listened, he says, and likewise, he listened to them and the problems they were encountering. In this way, the organization was able to come to an aggregated view of what needed to be done and as a result, a roadmap for how to get there with the budget available.

Remodeling software licenses, uncovering inappropriate software and automation, in general, provided significant cost avoidances and allowed the City Council to make strategic decisions in support of service delivery.

Lawrence also built a performance system that reflects on the work people do so that people could understand when and how they make progress. In this way, they know they are contributing and adding value to the organization. Problem resolution is much more effective, and people feel rewarded for their efforts. People sense they are listened to and that their ideas benefit the organization, he says.

Suggestions for success

For Lawrence, it’s important everyone understands the vision, buys into it and works toward it. When asked about his advice to other practitioners looking to make a difference in their organization, teamwork comes out on top. “Getting it right means listening to each other and collaborating. When you support your team and acknowledge their work, the entire organization benefits.” He has felt strongly about teamwork since working in ambulatory services. “I have a duty of care to my team.”

Secondly, always be open to new ideas, he suggests. “Be willing to look around you because your environment changes. And with that change comes a need for you to change. Be aware of institutionalization. Don’t get wrapped up in an organization so much that your thought processes and your actions limit your vision and your ability to see what actually needs to be done.”

This post is part of a series of blogs that highlight IT practitioners and their on-the-job experiences, diverse backgrounds and what it means to work in IT today. Look for more posts coming in the new year. 

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.

The post Ambulance Services Manager Drives Teamwork and IT Modernization at Christchurch City Council appeared first on Snow Software.

In this new era of hybrid work, the announcement of Microsoft’s Windows 365 will provide organizations with greater flexibility and a more secure way to empower the workforce, regardless of location.

Windows 365 is designed to make it easy for the non-IT workforce to enable employees to access their business with a predictable cost model. It offers organizations a fixed-price monthly subscription to a cloud PC that is dedicated to a single user and can be managed with the same tools as a traditional Windows PC.

Exploring Windows 365 Cloud PC

Just as applications were brought to the operating system with SaaS, Microsoft is now bringing the operating system to the cloud with Windows 365. The operating system itself becomes hybrid — accessible on the device and on the Cloud.

Today, every business wants to be able to scale up and down quickly. Shifting control to the end users or business units allows for rapid, secure deployment of OS and Office software through the click of a button within a portal.

While virtual desktops (VDI’s) and Microsoft’s Cloud PC offering have been around for some time, Windows 365 has made these offerings available as part of the Microsoft 365 subscription. With this launch, Microsoft is targeting both the enterprise and the business world with a product focused on simplicity and cost predictability.

One of the key benefits to Windows 365 is that it makes deploying these machines a lot easier for corporate customers that don’t necessarily have the skillsets for traditional VDI’s. Deploying Windows 365 virtual desktops is designed to be extremely easy and manageable.

As Windows 365 launches, here are some of the biggest changes we could see for businesses and employees:

1. Rapid employee onboarding

With Windows 365, organizations can onboard new employees with IT equipment, regardless of location, within a matter of hours. Employees can continue using technology they’re familiar with on their own devices and organizations can ensure that their data remains safe in the environment.

2. Savings on hardware lifecycle process

Hardware could become increasingly less important for organizations. Since employees will be able to run the Microsoft operating system and applications on any device, from anywhere, organizations may be able to save on traditional hardware lifecycle costs for their workforce. While businesses will still need to buy equipment, machines won’t need to be as powerful as before and employees will have more choice around what device they’d like to use. Since the desktop can be managed centrally and employees can access it from any device of their choosing, anything with a browser can be treated as a Cloud PC. As a result, businesses will likely buy more into Microsoft’s platform experience as equipment becomes less of a priority.

3. Increased security

Organizations won’t have to worry about what devices employees are using. They no longer have to worry about locking down the end points and having to deal with problems when employees are using their own devices for work. Instead, they can control everything in the Cloud. Users can securely stream a powerful windows PC including apps, content, settings and storage, from the Microsoft cloud to any device. Personalized Cloud PCs will enable employees, even designers or editors working with large collaborative files, to pick up right where they left off with their full Windows desktop on their virtual device, whether that is a tablet, a PC or a Mac.

How can ITAM prepare for the transformation?

While this announcement presents many changes for organizations and employees, IT teams will be uniquely impacted in the coming months. As businesses try new things and buy further into the Microsoft platform experience, IT Asset Managers (ITAM) will need to keep a keen eye on consumption and cost. Plus, instead of managing local Windows installations on expensive hardware, IT will be tasked with exploring how they can get by with simpler hardware.

It’s important for ITAM to ask questions like:

• Which users are accessing applications only through the browser?
• What is the cost impact for the business?
• How can this reduce my overall costs YoY?
• How do I track if it’s being used once provisioned?
• What is the impact of over-provisioned desktops?
• How could I help boost business uptime and scalability around busy seasons?
• How do I ensure that my workforce has a machine that is powerful enough for the work they do?

How Snow can help

If you’re looking to move from desktop environments towards Microsoft 365 or Windows 365, Snow can show you usage of specific application components including details such as who is using them and how they are using them — whether that’s via online access from a laptop/phone or an installed version. With this visibility, you can ensure you’re assigning the right types of licenses and reduce spend as you migrate to these cloud implementations.

If you are already using Microsoft 365 and considering utilizing Windows 365, Snow can help you understand how employees and contractors are using Microsoft 365 applications against current subscriptions allocated so that you can right size before migrating to the new offering.

Learn more about Snow’s solutions designed to help users gain visibility and control over their Microsoft 365 spend.

The post 3 Ways Windows 365 Cloud PC Will Impact ITAM Professionals appeared first on Snow Software.

Thankfully, the rollout of COVID-19 vaccines is evidence we are likely starting to turn the corner on the pandemic. Despite that good news, we have been forever changed by 2020. Individually, many of us bought home workout equipment, became new pet owners and we learned how to make sourdough bread. Collectively, the workforce became much more distributed and businesses adapted to smarter ecommerce models while taking steps to digitally transform into a customer-first company.

Given all this change, how has your organization settled into 2021? Have you formed new success strategies?

In the Top Strategic Technology Trends for 2021 report, Gartner reminds us the disruption of 2020 demands businesses find new ways to operate and drive growth going forward. They identify nine trends as opportunities for organizations to differentiate themselves and three are foundational to the evolution of IT and more specifically, asset management.

Distributed cloud

Gartner defines the distributed cloud as public cloud options for different physical locations. The public cloud provider operates their services at the point of need. This could include such offerings as on-premises public cloud, IoT edge cloud, metro-area community cloud (for smart cities), 5G mobile edge cloud and others.

When it comes to remote work, the cloud is vital for business continuity and productivity. While the various iterations of public clouds to come are interesting to consider, many organizations are still working on the move from on-premises legacy systems to the public cloud of any type. In 2020, we saw a seismic shift here and in 2021, it’s time to review all that you onboarded for the sake of getting work done and adjust as necessary. Do you have more than you need? Who is using what and for what purpose? Can some of the licenses be reharvested now that the dust has settled?

Intelligent composable business

Saying that the disruption in 2020 broke many business processes may seem like a serious understatement. But it did that and more and, according to Gartner, intelligent composable business is key to rebuilding. Decision making will need to change to include increasing autonomy and that means better access to information that is both modular and readily changeable when circumstances call for it.

For IT, this means complete visibility into your entire technology landscape both on-prem and in the cloud. It also means you have insights into usage, spend and vulnerabilities so that you can maximize your technology investments. To succeed in the years to come, developing this technology intelligence will be critical.

Hyperautomation

Hyperautomation is the automation of decision processes and tasks. Gartner also calls the predicted technology trend “irreversible and inevitable” and “the key to both digital operational excellence and operational resiliency for organizations.” The question then becomes, how far down the automation path have you traveled?

The key with automation is the output will be only as good as the data input and starting is often the hardest part. To effectively manage your IT consumption – from hardware to software, on-premises to the cloud – you need visibility into what you have, who’s using what and in what capacity. This is the kind of insight that lays the foundation for strong decision making.

Most would agree, the COVID-19 pandemic isn’t in our rearview mirror yet and uncertainty remains for 2021. The key is to remain nimble, yet informed, strategic yet flexible. If 2020 taught us anything, it’s to arm your organization with information and be ready to change course in a moment’s notice to adapt to whatever the next several months have in store.

The post 3 Imperatives for IT Asset Management appeared first on Snow Software.