This blog summarizes some key evaluation points, so you can choose the right cloud management tools and pricing model for your organization.

Understanding cloud management functions and tooling characteristics

Cloud management tools enable organizations to effectively manage hybrid and multicloud environments, encompassing on-premises, public cloud, and other services. These tools provide governance, lifecycle management, brokering and automation for cloud infrastructure resources across various functional areas. The seven primary functional requirements for managing cloud deployments are:

• Provisioning and orchestration
• Cost management and resource optimization
• Cloud migration, backup and disaster recovery
• Identity, security and compliance
• Monitoring and observability
• Inventory and classification
• Service enablement

Four characteristics of effective cloud management tools

When selecting a cloud management tool, consider the four following key attributes:

1. Exposure to native cloud capabilities: Ensure the tool provides access to all the necessary native cloud capabilities required by your users.
2. Only pay for what you need: Opt for a tool that offers modularity, allowing you to choose and pay for the specific functions you need, rather than a bundled package.
3. SaaS deployment option: If possible, select a tool that offers a SaaS deployment model, eliminating the need for on-premises deployment and maintenance.
4. AI and ML integration: Look for tools that effectively utilize artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies where relevant, as this can enhance the tool’s capabilities.

What are the 6 key considerations when selecting a cloud management tool for your organization?

• Embrace cloud-native capabilities and modular design with AI/ML integration:
  • Look for tools that expose cloud-native capabilities and offer modular design, allowing you to leverage specific functions as needed.
  • Incorporating artificial intelligence (AI) and machine-learning (ML) capabilities can enhance the tool’s effectiveness.
• Evaluate cloud provider offerings:
  • Assess the tooling options available from your selected cloud providers. Many cloud vendors offer their own management tools that seamlessly integrate with their platforms. Choosing such tools can facilitate integration and potentially save costs.
• Assess your organization’s need for internal resources to operationalize the tooling:
  • Assess whether the tooling can be effectively managed by your internal resources or if external assistance is needed.
• Weigh “lift and shift” needs for the migration of workloads from on-premises to the cloud:
  • Consider the resources required to operationalize the tooling. If you plan to migrate existing workloads, look for tools that can assist with planning and moving virtual machines at scale.
• Consider SaaS management requirements:
  • Historically, the two tooling markets (i.e. IaaS/PaaS management and SaaS management) have been separated, but vendors are increasingly starting to combine the two in a unified IT asset management offering. SaaS management is the practice of managing SaaS applications to effectively improve security and optimize costs. Evaluate the tool’s potential capabilities for SaaS management, especially if it aligns with your business needs.
• Normalize pricing models:
  • During the evaluation process, ensure that you understand and normalize the pricing models of different vendors, as there may be variations. This will help you make accurate cost comparisons and avoid unexpected/hidden costs.

Considering your entire organization’s requirements and future plans

Before exploring third-party solutions, assess your organization’s requirements and evaluate the capabilities provided by your strategic cloud partners. The following questions will help guide your evaluation:

Cloud environment: Determine whether you operate in a single cloud or multicloud environment and consider future plans. Native tooling may be more suitable for a single cloud, while multicloud environments might benefit from third-party tools.

On-premises environment: Assess the size and significance of your on-premises environment. If you intend to utilize the same tooling as your cloud environment, native cloud tooling may present challenges.

Workload migration: If you plan to migrate workloads between cloud and/or on-premises environments, a third-party tool can help abstract complexities and bridge differences.

To learn more about reimagining your cloud management processes and tooling, download our in-depth guide.

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Guiding principles such as collaboration, timely reporting, centralized teams, cloud usage ownership and business-value driven decisions are at the heart of the FinOps mission. We’ve identified three fundamental building blocks that help organizations build a robust FinOps discipline upon that foundation. These components are setting up the FinOps team, implementing FinOps and leveraging software tools designed for FinOps. 

Organizational mapping

The collaboration of various stakeholders is key to building a successful FinOps discipline. They keep cloud costs under control and detect cost anomalies to prevent unexpected expenses. Building effective collaboration around cloud financial management requires aligning competing priorities of fast development, watching spend and ensuring quality work. FinOps managers are responsible for overseeing cloud costs and enabling transparency with cross-functional stakeholders. Each stakeholder group owns a set of issues that need to be solved to achieve cost excellence with FinOps.

• Cloud Operations are responsible for supporting and architecting all cloud platform environments and applications. They continually monitor the applications to ensure resources are used effectively and provide recommendations for optimizing performance and operational resilience.
• Infrastructure and Operations teams establish technology roadmaps, operationalize technologies, and enforce governance, standards and processes. They require platforms and tools to ensure an organization’s IT estate is operating optimally.
• Finance must drive financial accountability and predictability in cloud costs. Forecast accuracy, effective cost allocation and the promotion of good governance ensure the enterprise is cost-efficient in the cloud.
• Engineering wants to create great products that are easily adopted and offer value to end users internally and externally. Moving the needle on cloud cost through initiatives such as cost transparency, staying on budget and monitoring application performance is important to this team.
• Leadership teams make strategic decisions based on the value the cloud drives for the business and customers that ultimately result in innovative solutions, satisfaction and loyalty. They strive for revenue to outpace cloud spend, accelerate savings, sponsor FinOps teams and hold them accountable for outcomes.

Implementing FinOps

Cost optimization will save money, but that should not be the main goal. The goal of a successful FinOps implementation is to get as much as possible from investment in the cloud.

Every situation is different and there isn’t a single way to handle cloud optimization in FinOps. However, many organizations can achieve better control and manage their cloud spending by building upon the 4 strategies which we’ll examine in this section.

• Analysis. FinOps teams must have access to the latest data and analytics to make informed decisions. Data analysis, chargeback and showback push spend accountability to those that are responsible for creating the expense. It calls attention to total costs for the business entity, opportunities for cost avoidance and financial KPIs.
• Benchmarking. Well-defined success metrics are critical for measuring the impact of FinOps strategies. Knowing where to spend money, budget and forecast accuracy, monitor cloud-instance performance are just a few success benchmarks for successful FinOps transformation.
• Optimization. Organizations need to understand how spending fluctuates relative to cloud management decisions. Rightsizing instances and repositioning workloads are actions that improve cost and performance in the cloud. It’s easy to forget to turn off resources when not in use. While tempting to shut down unused resources to lower running costs, it can be dangerous to do so without knowledge of the downstream impact on production or other processes.
• Governance. When it comes to improving the efficiency of the organization, the establishment of effective controls and governance is critical. Organizations need a policy engine that ensures cloud optimization objectives are being followed, budgets are maintained, costs are properly allocated, reports are generated, and that communication is taking place across the enterprise.

Technology tools

FinOps practitioners know that technology is limitless, and intelligence is priceless. Optimizing IT spend, reducing risk and leveraging technology all help to prevent cloud usage and cost from spiraling out of control. This is especially important for organizations with large and disparate user bases. Software tools help cross-discipline FinOps team members to effectively track, manage and reduce cloud costs. Their capabilities include the following:

• Visibility. A top challenge for FinOps teams is the ability to visualize, understand and manage cloud costs and usage over time. Software tools analyze cloud data (including containers) from multiple cloud service providers. These tools allow teams to gain insight into cloud provider bills, identify trends, pinpoint cost drivers and detect anomalies.
• Cost Allocation. It’s impossible to accurately attribute costs to users until you know where each teams’ resources live. Cloud provider billing accounts often lack the granularity required for allocation. Software features such as tagging allow for efficient cost chargeback and drive greater accountability based on resources that are consumed.
• Reporting. FinOps teams face the challenge of investigating changes in cloud spend by cost center, application, service and resource. Software consolidates and visualizes billing, containers and other data from multiple cloud providers into a single, unified view. This makes it easy for teams to share and work from the same data set.
• Budgeting. Forecasting cloud budgets can be difficult because of the large number of services, resources and pricing variables involved. With FinOps tools, stakeholders can analyze historical spending data to accurately forecast cloud spend and usage.

FinOps inextricably links people, process and technology to break down organizational silos, facilitate information flow, improve decision making and more. While needs and usage may change over time, developing an effective plan for cloud financial management will help maintain balance between cloud performance and cost well into the future. A good FinOps strategy ensures that everyone who needs to be involved is included in the planning process.

Ready to take the next steps to improving your cloud visibility and lowering costs? We’re ready to help.

The post The Fundamentals of FinOps: Cloud Cost Transparency and Optimization appeared first on Snow Software.

We know there are countless cloud vendors out there and that it can be challenging to sort through them all to find the perfect solution for your organization’s unique set of challenges and criteria. This is one major reason why Snow pursued STAR and Trusted Cloud Provider certifications – to help both current and prospective customers cut through the noise and quickly and easily identify Snow as a cloud provider whose security practices meet the industry best practice.  And now, with this certification, business leaders can feel reassured that the tools they depend on from Snow are on the cutting-edge of security and compliance.

Snow’s Technology Intelligence platform, Snow Atlas, which is now listed on the STAR registry, provides comprehensive visibility and contextual insight across software, SaaS, hardware and cloud. With Snow, IT leaders can effectively optimize resources, enhance performance and enable operational agility in a hybrid world. Snow is changing the way organizations understand and manage their technology consumption. As technology partners, it’s important that we’re outspoken and deliberate in our commitment to security and compliance for our category-defining solutions.

To become a CSA Trusted Cloud Provider, Snow completed the following requirements:

• Complete a 270-point assessment of our security controls vs. the CSA Cloud Controls Matrix (CCM)
• Have at least one current member of staff who has achieved the CSA Certificate of Cloud Security Knowledge (CCSK)
• Volunteer at least 20 hours annually to CSA for activities such as research working groups, regional chapters, call for presentations, blog contributions and more
• Be a corporate member of the Cloud Security Alliance in good standing

The CSA is the world’s leading organization dedicated to defining and raising awareness of best practices to help ensure a secure cloud computing environment. Built upon existing CSA programs, the Trusted Cloud Provider trust mark (which is displayed on qualifying organizations’ Security, Trust, Assurance & Risk (STAR) registrations) helps consumers and business leaders identify cloud providers that demonstrate their commitment to holistic security and are aligned with their individual security requirements. We’re proud to support the CSA and align ourselves with this industry-leading organization and its security and compliance values. Looking ahead, we intend to pursue additional certifications, ISO27001 and SOC2, to further demonstrate our commitment to cloud security competency, and a commitment to our customers and the industry at large.

We’re eager to engage with the networks, educational resources and knowledge-sharing gained through the CSA community to strengthen our security posture and enhance security across the cloud community. Given the exponential pace of cloud adoption to support modern business and a distributed workforce, it’s vital that businesses can be confident that their cloud providers are certified reliable, secure, compliant and have the CSA seal of approval.

Does this sound like something that could benefit your organization? Reach out to learn more about how STAR Level 1 and Trusted Cloud Provider certified Snow Atlas is defining the Technology Intelligence category and how it can help your organization unlock game-changing insights.

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There are a few points that highlight both the risks and opportunities cloud deployment presents:

• Why effective SAM includes cloud
• By their nature, cloud services introduce cost control challenges
• Cost optimization is only possible with broad visibility across environments

SAM includes cloud services, and is better off for it

There are still a small number of SAM leaders that feel cloud doesn’t fall under their remit. But beyond semantic definitions and ISO/IEC categorization, effective SAM leaders have recognized that in order to provide value to their organization, they must consider cloud services. Let’s look at just a few of the areas where SAM and asset data can provide value:

• Digital transformation
• Cloud migration
• Mergers and acquisitions
• Contract negotiations
• Cybersecurity
• Compliance regulations

But value can’t be provided to these areas without incorporating usage and cost data for cloud services. Without considering public cloud, organizations aren’t able to track the shift from on-premises to cloud, don’t have complete visibility into technology spend, and aren’t ready for new and varied challenges cloud brings to security and compliance.

As compliance concerns wane, cost challenges grow

While being out of compliance in the cloud is still possible—especially when using on-premises entitlements in public cloud environments—it is less of a concern than when desktop deployments dominated the enterprise. But as this concern lessens, another grows: controlling costs. There are a few primary reasons for this:

• Decentralized IT purchasing. Cloud adoption has enabled a shift from IT to business units as the primary decision-maker of technology purchases. Today, approximately 40% of technology is bought outside of IT with some analysts predicting this will grow to 80% within the next three years. Arguably this has made organizations more agile and—hopefully—more innovative, the free-for-all use of applications is translating into less visibility for IT and SAM practitioners into what technology is being consumed. This lack of visibility inhibits IT’s ability to manage, control, and predict costs.
• Ease of use. The very thing that makes cloud services so attractive, the ability to easily procure and consume them, is what makes them ripe for wasteful consumption. Development, support, services, and other teams can spin up VMs, often with little to no governance.
• Pay as you go license models. For the most part, cloud vendors charge based on how much they are used. While this certainly has an appeal, without governance, organizations can find themselves paying for underutilized or forgotten environments, driving significant wasted spend.

“By 2020, eliminating the “toxic” consumption of “PaaS” and “IaaS” will become a high-priority focus of SAM discipline for 50% of organizations.2”

Based on my conversations with SAM and IT leaders, Gartner’s prediction of a few years ago has certainly come to pass. Organizations are struggling with cloud cost containment. Fortunately, with the right solutions, processes, and perspective in place, effective management is possible.

Broad visibility of assets and usage enables cost control

Snow recently introduced its Technology Intelligence vision (below) to capture the growing scope of technologies that asset managers must consider. We recognize that while we might still sometimes refer to our discipline as SAM, traditional software is only one part of the equation within the increasingly complex IT landscape. IT leaders and SAM practitioners must now account for on-premises, IaaS, SaaS, and hardware.

Importantly, across all of these environments, a critical aspect is the ability to capture usage data. With cloud services usage data, a SAM leader can begin to truly understand and manage costs. Just a few examples of what is possible within the realm of public cloud include:

• By monitoring utilization of CPU and memory in virtual machines, organizations can optimize how much they buy from cloud vendors, rightsizing instances and significantly reducing costs
• Scanning for discarded “zombie VMs” that are no longer needed enables IT to deprovision these instances
• Establishing effective cost tagging creates an environment and culture of cost visibility, helping departments self-enforce their own usage

Closing Thoughts

Two years ago, Gartner said of SAM, “Market Penetration is low today – between 1 and 5% of the target audience, despite the many benefits that can be achieved by implementing SAM tools”1. While adoption has certainly grown in the past two years, most organizations still have not taken advantage of SAM and asset management solutions. My prediction is that the explosion of cloud services usage will create an opportunity and a justification for organizations to realize the value these solutions can bring, especially in the area of cost management.

For more insight on cloud management, download your copy of the latest 2020 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Cloud Management Platforms.

1 Gartner, Emerging Technology Analysis; Software Asset Management Tools, April Adams, Roger Williams, March 5, 2018.

2 Gartner, Predicts 2018: Mature Your IT Asset Management Discipline to Deliver on the Promise of Digital Business, Yanni Karalis, Tim Zimmerman, Stephen White, Roger Williams, Bart Willemsen, December 12, 2017.

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Technology plays a significant role in travel experiences and often, can make or break them. As our recent survey of 3,000 global workers reflects, technology can support the mobile workforce for the better, or worse. Our study’s resulting data demonstrates that if your organization is in the travel business, it’s more essential than ever to effectively manage and maintain your technology footprint – from your infrastructure to delivering premier customer experiences.

Technology Can Make Travel-Related Pursuits Faster and Easier

According to Snow’s survey, technologies that most enhance respondents travel experiences include:

• Apps and websites for booking travel (44%)
• Mobile apps for airline check-in and boarding passes (41%)
• In-flight Wi-Fi (40%)
• Mobile apps for hotel and rental car reservations (36%)
• SMS, text and push notifications for travel information and updates (34%)

Forty-six percent of survey respondents said such technology helped them be more organized in their travel plans. Forty-five percent said it allowed them to be more informed, and forty-two percent said they saved money as a result of technology.

Time savings is the top reason survey participants said they book travel online however. Sixty-seven percent of the group said that’s why they make travel plans on their computers or via an app. More than half (54%) said booking travel online gives them more options, while nearly as many (53%) said they do it in an effort to save money.

Thirty-five percent of those surveyed indicated that booking travel online allows them to avoid having to speak to someone on the phone. Nearly a third (32%) went so far as to say said that booking travel online enables them to enjoy a better customer experience.

Don’t Let Technology Be a Barrier for Travelers

But not everything works all of the time – or is always on time. Just consider these statistics from the Bureau of Transportation.

In June, more than seventy-three percent of airline flights arrived on time. But security delays, system problems, weather and other often-uncontrollable factors resulted in twenty-seven percent of flights being late on arrival, diverted to other locations, or canceled completely.

Our data reveals that more than half (59%) of global workers said technology has adversely impacted their travel experiences. For those who have had a technology-related issue with travel, twenty-six percent said it was while they were attempting to book travel and the website crashed or the app wasn’t working. Unfortunately, fourteen percent said they were impacted by a travel company’s data breach.

When asked about the pain points to online travel booking, forty-five percent of respondents said that prices fluctuated, and forty percent reported online travel sites were confusing or slow. Other issues included limited options (27%), incorrect bookings (23%) and not enough flexibility (22%).

It isn’t all bleak however. The good news is forty-one percent of survey respondents said technology has never gotten in the way of a good travel experience.

Bring Complex IT Ecosystems Together to Ensure Positive Experiences

As our research illustrates, travelers rely on technology to get organized, be more informed, save money, and enjoy safe and seamless travel experiences. For the companies to enable those kinds of experiences, technology must be a key company pillar. Using it effectively means you can deliver efficient, secure, well-priced experiences that delight your customers throughout their journey with you.

While your customers want seamless experiences, that doesn’t always mean they are easy to deliver, particularly when large, legacy systems and processes weigh you down. IT ecosystems can seem overwhelmingly complex for even the most seasoned IT team. Start by addressing the fundamentals and fain a clear line of visibility into your technology estate. Strong IT asset management will help you optimize, manage and further transform your organization into one that delivers premier experiences.  

If you’re looking to build a case for IT asset management, download our free three-step guide today.

The post Serve Up Safe and Memorable Travel Experiences with Technology appeared first on Snow Software.

At one time, building the IT infrastructure and managing the software that runs on it was the sole the responsibility of the IT department. Control was centralized, cost was transparent. But the cloud has changed that.

Supported by automation and self-service, the cloud has enabled business users to spin up virtualized infrastructure and run software on it, where and when they need it. Distributing both control and cost. Leaving organizations with no insight into their cloud environments, what hardware, what software they have running on it, who in the organization has created instances, and what risks they are exposed to in terms of license compliance and security.

The cloud challenge – unleashing benefit to business users while remaining in control – is likely to become harder to overcome as cloud adoption accelerates – According to Gartner, “IT spending is forecast to grow from $3.5 trillion in 2015, to $3.9 trillion by 2020. This represents a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 2.0% from 2015 through 2020.

During the same period, the aggregate market for public cloud services is expected to grow at a significantly higher CAGR of 17.5% “, with IaaS set to 30.5% CAGR for the same period [1]. The challenge leaves IT in the problematic position of delivering support, managing infrastructure, ensuring compliance, managing security, and predicting cost for hardware and software that users elsewhere in the organization have commissioned, and may or may not be using.

WHAT DOES A VM COST?

Right-sizing a VM is a complex calculation relying on accurate estimates for several provisioning parameters such as: computing power, number of cores, memory, operating system, server services for say SQL or mail, and where – geographically – the VM will run. For example, AWS hourly rates for general purpose hardware running Windows, in the US East (N. Virginia) region range translate to an annual cost of up to USD 57,000. But whatever the cost, lack of control is the most significant contributor to soaring spend. The percentage of unused VMs varies, with some estimates indicating that up to 50% of your cloud network could be comatose, so even if you can right-size a VM at the outset, without proper controls for decommissioning, VM-spend tends to run amok.

If your organization relies on cloud services like AWS, or if you are shifting toward IaaS/SaaS, gaining insight is essential for IT and the CIO, as it facilitates control and optimization. Enabling IT to regain visibility can be achieved if a few challenges can be managed:

• Right-sizing VMs
• Upfront commitment
• Controlling virtualization sprawl
• The license implications of elastic-cloud scaling
• The transition from on-premise to cloud – what software licenses can you take with you?

Provisioning, VM sprawl, and scaling can be solved with tools and automation. But, solving the issue of what software licenses you can take with you, is difficult because it varies, and it varies massively. Even if I could provide the answers, the chances are high that the licensing terms and agreements will have changed by the time you read this post. But, by paying attention to a couple of typical licensing parameters, you can ease your organization into AWS without breaching the terms of your license agreements. I’ll get back that.

RIGHT-SIZING VMs

But first, let’s discuss some of the fundamentals. To create cloud services with AWS in a cost-effective way, accurately estimating capacity is essential. But how can you do this without first running the service? The tendency is to overprovision to avoid performance issues. But remember that AWS prices roughly double between instance levels (as the rightmost column in Figure 1 illustrates). So, knowing your usage pattern over time is a vital piece of insight that enables optimization.

Figure 1: Example on-demand AWS prices (December 2016)

UPFRONT COMMITMENT

The default behavior of spinning up resources on demand may be easier in the short term, but you can achieve considerable savings if you can make an upfront commitment. According to Amazon, you can save up to 75% for reserved instances (RIs) compared with on-demand prices – depending on how much upfront investment you can commit and for how long you intend to use AWS services. Reserved Instances are ideal for static services, because you pay irrespective of usage.

Any usage exceeding the SLA for the RI automatically flips to the on-demand rate. Adoption of RIs is relatively low compared with on-demand usage, as customers are concerned about the need to make changes to adapt to fluctuating business need. However, provisioning steady services on RIs will bring instant cost benefit. Convertible RI plans allow you to change provisioning parameters, but for those that are fixed, Amazon provides a marketplace to sell unused capacity.

SOFTWARE LICENSES IN THE CLOUD

So, getting back to the issue of software licensing in the cloud. Let’s say you have made the decision to shift to a cloud based infrastructure. You’ve chosen AWS for your compute, storage, networking, and memory needs. But what about your software? Can you use your existing licenses (BYOL)? In some cases, software publishers will allow you to run your software using a cloud solution like AWS with your on-premise license for a given time.

Other license agreements will dictate that you run your software on dedicated AWS services. In other cases, you may have no option but to write off your perpetual licenses and switch to subscription, however, most publishers will allow you to convert your perpetual licenses into subscription-based ones, and will even offer good deals when they are trying to encourage customers to make the shift.

THE SCALING DILEMMA

Let’s say you are running an ERP application on your VMs, which for performance reasons, is set up to scales – spin up more VMs – to cope with demand at month/quarter end. If the software is licensed on a per core basis, and VMs are created to handle load peaks, then the number of licenses you need to run the software in a compliant manner will increase according the number of VMs that are spun. But you have no control over this, except to completely ban any application running on an elastic model – which sort of defeats the purpose of using a cloud model. And you won’t find out about it until it’s too late, when you’ve got an audit on your hands. Well that’s perhaps not strictly true. The data is there, you just need to be able to find it.

VM SPRAWL IS EATING YOUR CASH

One of the benefits of cloud computing – the ease of spinning up infrastructure at the point of need – is unfortunately one of its drawbacks. The ability to spin up a VM in an instant, often leads to over-dimensioning (too much CPU, too much storage, networking capacity, and memory) and once the business need has been satisfied, VMs are often forgotten, yet they are still eating up your cash.

Just one medium-sized AWS virtual machine – t2.medium – will cost around USD 50 per month. Think about the scenario where hundreds of machines like this one, or worse still high-performing instances are lying idle.

ENABLING OPTIMIZATION

Looking back at the ERP example. The IT manager, CIO, and CFO are all in agreement that running this software on AWS make sense as it provides the maximum productivity and flexibility given the organization’s current needs. But how do you enable optimization as needs change? What these IT stakeholders need is insight. To enable right-sizing of the underlying AWS infrastructure, insight is needed about who in the organization uses the software and how much it used.

Snow can provide this insight.

Snow Automation Platform includes out-of-the-box functionality for AWS optimization to automate the process of spinning up virtual resources, providing users with the power of the cloud, but with the vital addition of control. By ensuring that resources are ordered with a decommissioning date, which can be extended, zombie VMs will become extinct. Educational environments, for example, can be removed once training is complete, and development VMs can be turned off at night and during the weekends. By including approval steps, or automatic budget limits for example, the risks of overspend and over-dimensioning drop dramatically. By ensuring population of AWS tags (such as cost center, price, and user) in the ordering process, insight into who in the business is responsible for virtualized instances is improved.

Snow Inventory tracks usage of software – even if it is running on AWS. Usage information enables IT to reassign unused licenses to other users, and down/upsize when software is up for renewal. But usage information is more significant for software running on AWS because unused software is not simply wasting licenses it is running up infrastructure costs unnecessarily. Together with compliance information delivered by Snow License Manager, Snow can enable your enterprise to build a flexible IT infrastructure, unleashing the full power of the cloud into the organization, maximizing productivity and improving user satisfaction, while assuring software license compliance. At the same time, Snow provides IT stakeholders with an efficient way to gain the right level of insight of the entire IT estate, securing cost optimization, internal billing, and accurate IT forecasts.

Are you having difficulties unleashing the full power of your AWS services? Contact Snow Software today, we can help you stay compliant, and optimize spend as you transition.

References:

• Gartner, May 2016, Market Insight: Cloud Shift — The Transition of IT Spending From Traditional Systems to Cloud, available at: https://www.gartner.com/doc/3321217/market-insight-cloud-shift-

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The shift to hosted, services such as Azure or Amazon AWS, and software rental under the Software as a Service (SaaS) model has created a challenge. A challenge that falls to the Software Asset Management (SAM) industry and SAM professionals to overcome.

As I see it, the question is this: are organizations in a position to manage new Cloud technologies and licensing models? Some are, some aren’t. But either way, my advice is to get Cloud ready, as the Cloud spend trend is on the up!

THE NUMBERS

Analyst firm Forrester recently released predictions for software market spend in its September 2016 report “The Midyear Global Tech Market Outlook For 2016 To 2017.” The estimates show a USD 463 billion spend for software in 2017, but the headline number is the USD 119 billion that will be spent on Cloud software and hosted single-instance subscription revenues (2017).

To put this figure into context, it represents an increase of almost 300 percent on 2011 (up from USD 30 billion), and a 23 percent increase on 2016.

With the current adoption rates of Microsoft Azure and Amazon’s AWS, with sources claiming that one in five of every corporate employee now using Office 365[1], the upward trend is likely to continue as more organizations move over to, or are pushed over to, the Cloud model.

The Forrester report highlights that software will be the second-largest technology spend after telecom services. The 2017 figures for telecoms services, which include mobile devices and applications, are estimated to reach a spend of USD 590 billion – owing largely to the rising use of smartphones within organizations. In the report, Forrester mentions that vendors transitioning to cloud experience a dip in revenue “for the first few years as the new SaaS subscription fees fail to replace the loss of the old license fees.”[2] The revenue drop is, however, short-lived.

For example, a copy of Office 2010 Professional may have cost around USD 350 per device on the perpetual model. For Office 365, organizations might pay a monthly fee of around USD 20 per user – depending on the volume and package. Naturally, the shift to SaaS creates an initial decline in revenue as buyers spend less in the first year. The early adopters of Microsoft’s Cloud and subscription model are now going through their first three-year Enterprise Agreement.

These organizations are likely to have paid more on average for the use of their SaaS-based products compared with the perpetual license cost. Even so, most enterprises are satisfied with the new model, as the SaaS model boosts productivity, and the fact that the initial up-front costs are far less than the previous perpetual model.

GROWTH IN SOFTWARE SPEND

The overall estimate for software spend in 2017 (USD 463 billion) shows a 9.5 percent increase on 2016 predictions. Of the 2017 spend prediction, Forrester attributes 26 percent to Cloud, compared with 15 percent in 2014 –  when significantly fewer SaaS and Cloud based offerings were available. That said, 2014 was a significant year for vendors like Microsoft and Adobe who shifted their flagship products to the SaaS model.

At the time, their financial reports didn’t make for pretty reading, but Microsoft’s Q4 2016[3] (October, November & December) report shows that Cloud services with Azure revenue increasing by 102 percent. Which is unbelievable growth in my opinion. So, after a sluggish financial start, software vendors that have adopted Cloud technologies, are now reaping the rewards.

The adoption rate and leveraging power that cloud will bring to the software and Software Asset Management market will continue to rise as vendors continue to show financial gains and users become accustomed to the operational freedom brought about by software availability on multiple devices. As is often the case with the adoption of new technologies and growth, some challenges will need to be overcome.

EFFECTIVE MANAGEMENT IS THE KEY

The purchasing ease of Cloud services and SaaS applications, together with simple pricing models presents one of the initial challenges of Cloud: sprawl and spiraling cost. Without Software Asset Management or the right processes in place, within a very short period organizations tend to experience Cloud sprawl and the huge costs associated with it.

The solution is governance and vigilance on who, within your organization, can spin up Cloud services. I see a lot of organizations investing in services like Microsoft Azure without first putting procedures in place to manage the new technology. Unfortunately, enterprises tend to focus on promoting the benefits of Azure to users, and not surprisingly notice a spike in the deployment of virtual machines.

The problem comes when a large proportion of these machines are forgotten – but not decommissioned. The result: bills for unused resources; which is not only a waste, but increases the risks related to data, access, and security. Good Software Asset Management helps to ensure that only approved users have access to the full set of features and services offered by cloud environments, which promotes control over spend and over the software estate. Which is good news.

But to manage and optimize investments made in Cloud software or services effectively, your SAM solution needs to be able to provide visibility on the Cloud software and services being used.

SAM TECHNOLOGY NEEDS TO KEEP UP!

For most of you reading this post, you’ll be glad to know that the responsibility to provide such visibility falls on the shoulders of Software Asset Management technology vendors, like Snow Software. With ongoing massive investment and continued growth within the cloud and SaaS market, SAM needs to deliver solutions that will help to overcome the challenges Cloud and SaaS present.

At Snow, our strategy and research are heavily Cloud focused, with continued investment and research in cloud technologies and solutions that resolve the challenges of our customers. The release of Snow License Manager 8 and our new Inventory technology are significant steps toward eradicating cloud-services overspend.

We recently posted a blog on the ‘True Cost of Azure’, which highlights how easy it is to overspend within the Cloud environment, specifically focusing on the pay-as-you-go pricing and licensing concept for Azure, but how lack of control is the true cause of overspend, irrespective of payment plan, or choice of product.

In this instance, Automation Platform is your best friend, as it enables you to manage Cloud and virtual instances effectively. It allows users to reap the benefits of Azure services, but by automating processes to include approvals and decommissioning information, Snow’s Automation Platform prevents sprawls.

If your organization is worried about how to manage cloud assets, check out Snow’s recent webinar on why you still need Software Asset Management in the Cloud, which puts an end to the myth that Cloud management manages itself.  

[1] ‘Office 365 Adoption Rates, States and Usage’ (2016) [online] available from: https://www.skyhighnetworks.com/cloud-security-blog/7-charts-reveal-the-meteoric-rise-of-office-365/ [accessed 24/10/2016]

[2] Forrester (September 2016), The Midyear Global Tech Market Outlook for 2016 To 2017

[3] FY Q4 (2016) [online] available from: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/Investor/earnings/FY-2016-Q4/press-release-webcast (accessed 18/10/2016)

The post Cloud Spend Up 23% appeared first on Snow Software.

I’m going to uncover some of the hidden costs of cloud services. And while the examples that follow are specific to Azure services provided by Microsoft, it really doesn’t matter which solution you have adopted. The principles, issues and endgame – the payment plans that best suit your business needs – are the same.

CLOUD IS A GAME CHANGER

Cloud and virtualization services are changing the way companies build their infrastructure and sell their services. Today, it is a fairly straightforward process to build an entire infrastructure with computational resources, storage capacity, networking, backup and failover through the web portal of a cloud service provider. Virtualization relieves the IT department of many headaches and the constant concern that something might fail and cause damage to the business.

The days of ordering the right hardware, waiting for it to be delivered, installing it, protecting it, adding backup, and then laying software over the top are disappearing. But these legacy systems will continue to exist as long as their perceived value doesn’t override their overhead, which leaves many organizations with hybrid solutions: some services residing in on-premises servers and some in the cloud, often with the need for these two models to cooperate.

CLOUD HELPS WITH SCALABILITY

In my opinion, scalability is the number one benefit of the cloud. If an organization suddenly needs a massive number of SQL servers at month end, then their cloud services provider can scale up infrastructure as demand escalates, and importantly scale back when needs drop. Organizations no longer need to provision hardware and software to cater for peaks in the business cycle. Staff get the performance they need according to the payment plan and users don’t even notice what is going on in the background.

So, where’s the catch?

Cost! Is your business on the right payment plan? To answer this question, SAM and IT managers need to be able to supply CFOs and business leaders with trend information on billing and usage. To provide this information, they in turn need visibility and control over cloud services.

ADDRESSING VISIBILITY

To build a clear view of the cost of cloud services, SAM and IT managers need to be able to answer a few questions: what services have been ordered, which ones are being used, does usage match the business need, and who within the organization is going to foot the bill? The CFO wants to plan spend, which requires trend information, and the avoidance of cost spikes and unplanned expenditure is key. Without the proper tools in place, cloud services can rapidly run amok, servers can be left running, feedback loops can cause repetitive downloading and expensive software can be left idling on forgotten machines.

So where can SAM and IT managers retrieve such invaluable trend information? When it comes to Azure, the information provided on an invoice is just not granular enough. For example, the line item Virtual Machines of type Standard_D3 VM (Windows) reveals nothing about how many machines have been created, or if the type is appropriate for the running applications.

And what about planning spend? My CFO wants to be able to forecast expenditure for cloud services. To do this, SAM and IT need to be able to provide the actual month-on-month spend, and be able to attribute the cost to different departments.

It sounds like a lot is missing, but remember cloud services are a maturing industry, and so how we get insight, how vendors sell or bundle cloud services will naturally change substantially over the coming years. The key for SAM and IT managers is managing change. And not surprisingly, we are going to need some good tools.

CONTROLLING VIRTUAL SPRAWL

The second issue when it comes to cloud services is virtualization sprawl. Cloud provider portals, enable users to spin up a VM in a couple of clicks, upload some software to it, use it and then move on. Unfortunately, those VMs will continue to run – and cost you money – until you have properly decommissioned them. And that’s bad enough if you are just paying for the infrastructure, but if there is software installed on these zombie VMs, you’ll end up paying for those licenses as well!

The ability to spin up VMs so readily often leads to over-dimensioning. The click-ease of modern portals and the lack of control over the ordering process make it all too simple to order VMs that are too powerful, have too much storage and too much bandwidth for your application.

And it’s not just the ease of ordering resources that leads to over-dimensioning. Lack of understanding of what resources are actually needed to run an application efficiently is also a root cause. Even with the best-laid plans, circumstances change and you’ll end up paying for more machines, more storage and more networking services than you are using.

COMPLICATED PAYMENT PLANS

I believe the final hurdle when it comes to cloud services is evaluating payment options. Enterprise Agreement (EA) customers can add Azure services to existing contracts by making an upfront financial commitment at any point in their three-year term, except during the last two months.

The pain point for the CFO is how to calculate the right level of upfront commitment and how to plan for reconciliation at the end of the year.  

Let’s look at how the billing process works.

If you believe that your Azure spend will be somewhere around USD 300,000 for the year, you can make an upfront commitment of USD 200,000, as Microsoft allows you to reconcile up to 50% of the upfront figure on the same payment plan. If you’ve under-estimated your Azure need, and spin up resources for more than USD 300,000, your billing switches from annual to quarterly, which may be good for your financial planning needs, but the payment plan may not be the same.

If you over-estimate your upfront commitment, any unused amount is forfeited.So, getting that upfront commitment right is key to procuring the best deal. And to help distribute costs, my advice would be to negotiate quarterly Azure billing with your reseller or Microsoft at the outset, instead of under-estimating usage to enforce it.

Server and Cloud Enrollment (SCE) is yet another way to procure Azure services, which are automatically included in this payment plan. This option, which effectively provides you with a pay-as-you-go/monthly-billing model, is for highly committed customers that require other non-Azure services, such as core infrastructure and developer platforms.

The annual renegotiation of the EA is a critical point in time at which you need to know your current and predicted levels of consumption of Azure services to procure the best deal.

OVERCOMING THE CLOUD CHALLENGES

As I mentioned earlier, to overcome the challenges of visibility, virtualization sprawl and complicated payment plans, you will need some good tools. And that’s where Snow comes into play.

Our platform, including Snow Inventory and Snow License Manager, provides the insight you need on the resources you consume today. In the context of Azure, Snow Automation Platform enables process automation and visibility, putting you in the driver’s seat to end sprawl and significantly reduce your Azure expenditure – budgeted or otherwise. Snow Automation Platform includes out-of-the-box functionality for Azure optimization to automate the process of spinning up virtual resources, providing users with the freedom they are accustomed to, but with the vital addition of control.

By ensuring that users order resources with a decommissioning date, which users can optionally extend when the time comes, zombie VMs will become extinct. By including approval steps, or automatic budget limits for example, the risks of overspend and over-dimensioning drop dramatically. In addition, Azure optimization enables SAM and IT managers to retrieve usage information from Azure, which can be used for planning. And significantly, by including cost information, spend over a period of time can be accurately estimated, giving your business the insight to select the right payment plan.

For more information about the Snow Automation Platform and its Azure capabilities why not speak to a Snow expert today?

The post The true cost of Azure appeared first on Snow Software.

Initially, there was a lot of backlash to the news from Adobe customers. They didn’t want to move to a subscription model as at that time they would essentially be paying again for software they already owned. More than 5,000 customers actually started a petition for Adobe to continue to provide perpetual software[1].

Three years on, Adobe now has 4.252 million customers using the Creative Cloud subscription model[2]. Adobe saw a record $1.4billion revenue in quarter two of 2016 with a large part of that down to subscription licensing.

Sounds great, but when you consider that Adobe announced that in total they had 12.8 million customers using Creative Suite tools, they still have just over 8.5 million customers that haven’t yet made the move to the Cloud.

So, for those 8.5 million Adobe customers still on perpetual licensing, here’s a simple guide taking you through your future Adobe upgrade and license change.

FOCUS ON THE USER, NOT DEVICE

You are no longer licensing your Adobe software via the device, instead, it is user based. This means that when you are upgrading from the device-based Creative Design Suite 6, you need to focus on how many active users you have rather than the number of installs.

Be aware of this as we have heard from a number of organizations who look at the install base presented in Snow License Manager and used these install figures as the baseline for the number of Creative Cloud licenses they needed.

It’s not that simple, users and installs are not the same thing.

This resulted in overspend and over compliance as they identified the same user had installed CS6 on multiple devices. Whilst previously this would have required two (installation) licenses, now it would only require one user license.

Picture 2: User based Adobe license model represented in Snow License Manager.

It is important to look at a user’s usage of Adobe applications. The user may have the full Design Suite 6 Standard package installed, but only using Photoshop or Muse for example.

Naturally, the user will not need a full Creative Cloud Enterprise license – instead, they just need a single app license for the required software.

It’s important to understand the department or team that the user works in. If you have multiple users of Adobe Creative Suite products in the same team or department, you may find that it is beneficial to opt for the Creative Cloud for Teams (more on that later).

Finally, Adobe has Creative Cloud for mobiles that allow users to access the mobile versions of the software you have purchased. You simply install the mobile applications from Snow Device Manager, which is an Enterprise Mobility Solution that can control what the user can do from their mobile device in a corporate environment, and then use your AdobeID details to access all of the functions and features.

It really is as simple as that. Assessing your user’s usage and understanding which Adobe applications are and will be in use puts you in pole position for negotiating your Creative Cloud contract as you can dictate to Adobe your requirements.

UNDERSTANDING THE DIFFERENT PURCHASE OPTIONS

Once you have assessed and understood your users’ current usage and requirements, you have a number of different agreements and bundle options for Creative Cloud.

The agreement that will work for your organization all depends on the size of your business, the amount of Adobe licenses required and which sector you are in (government and schools have different agreement options).

The different ‘bundle’ options for organizations are listed in the table below.

A Snow Software customer uses Creative Cloud for Teams under the VIP agreement to great effect. We spoke to the IT Manager who stated, “We only needed a small pocket of Creative Cloud licenses for our marketing team, with the few CS6 licenses remaining still adequate to cover other users.

Instead of entering into a Creative Cloud agreement we simply purchased Creative Cloud for Teams for our marketing department. It saved us having to purchase hundreds of licenses which over three years would have a significant impact on our software budget.”

CONTRACT MANAGEMENT

The management of Adobe contracts remains simple and effective if you have Snow License Manager.

By adding all of your software contract information in Snow License Manager you have a centralized management system that will help you track all of your Adobe contracts and their associated licenses.

This is particularly important for Adobe Creative Cloud as the licenses have a set period of time. You can import all of your Adobe licenses and agreements by using the ‘Import’ feature within Snow License Manager.

This enables you to mass upload all of your details from a document like a spreadsheet, reducing the need to manually add each individual license or agreement.

Picture 4. The import feature within Snow License Manager.

Use the drop-down box under ‘Home’ > > Import Data.

You can create alerts for your Adobe contracts. The alerts should be set up well in advance of any anniversary date so you can start to assess your Adobe estate and understand how many licenses you will need to renew or true-up by the time of the anniversary.

Leaving contract renewals to the last minute will result in the organization frantically running around trying to gather data and understand usage. If you set your alerts to warn you 90 days in advance, you have plenty of time to act.

Snow License Manager will also warn you at two other points, depending on the days/ timeframes you require (for example, 60 days before renewal and then again at 30 days). Being this proactive contributes towards a mature and best practice SAM function and helps you optimize your existing investments, address risks and prepares you for future true-ups.

ONGOING USER MANAGEMENT

Once you have upgraded your Adobe licenses to the Creative Cloud and added all of the information into Snow License Manager, using Software Asset Management best practice, you can continually monitor users and their usage of the software.

Earlier I mentioned the AdobeID. This is a user account that allows you to install Creative Cloud applications on your device. It’s a verification step, if you will, as your SAM team will need to assign you a license. This means that the SAM team takes on a different compliance challenge in making sure that only users with a valid business justification have access to an AdobeID.

If you start to see users with Creative Cloud software installed on their device, but they do not have access to an AdobeID, then there is a strong possibility that there has been a case of account sharing. This is when one user gives their own user details to another user so they can access a piece of software.

This is a clear violation of Creative Cloud’s license terms and conditions, something you should certainly look out for.

FRESH START

Use this as a great opportunity to get your Adobe estate in order and to make sure that you only purchase licenses that will be used. Think of this as a fresh start and a new way for you to really control your Adobe estate moving forward and manage your investment proactively.

Snow License Manager can help you make the difficult step from Adobe’s perpetual to subscription licensing.

See for yourself and book a test drive today!  

  [1] ‘Unhappy Adobe Customers want to parachute from Adobe’s Creative Cloud’ (2013) [online] available from: http://www.wired.com/2013/05/adobe-creative-cloud-petition/ [2] ‘Adobe sees record $1.4billion revenue’ (2016) [online] available from: http://venturebeat.com/2016/06/21/adobe-sees-record-1-4b-revenue-in-q2-stops-disclosing-new-creative-cloud-subscribers/

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Change Management can help ensure such a change in licensing models and technologies is implemented within the IT Infrastructure with as little disruption as possible. This is just one example of how Change Management can help with Software Asset Management related matters. There needs to be a close relationship between SAM and Change Management as software and technology changes all the time.

WHAT IS CHANGE MANAGEMENT?

Change Management is an IT service management function that is a part of ITIL (Information Technology Infrastructure Library) discipline.

Change management consists of a number of different processes. ITIL defines a change management process as :

“The goal of the change management process is to ensure that standardized methods and procedures are used for efficient and prompt handling of all changes, in order to minimize the impact of change-related incidents upon service quality, and consequently improve the day-to-day operations of the organization.”

Within IT a change is:

• Action approved by senior management (including processes)
• Something that adds value to the organization (general change)
• New configurable item (such as a new piece of hardware or technology)
• Event implemented with a low and accepted risk to the existing IT estate

This means that a change in hardware, software, communication systems or even documentation relating to IT requires change management to help communicate and implement the change the organization is trying to make.

Any changes that the business wants to make to the IT infrastructure must be discussed and approved by senior management or a Change Advisory Board (CAB). Organizations that have experienced large amounts of change in the past or are constantly going through change are likely to have a CAB already in place which is part of BAU processes.

CHANGE MANAGEMENT PROCESSES

In recent times, one of the most common changes within Software Asset Management and software licensing has been the upgrade to Adobe’s Creative Cloud. Previous Adobe products were licensed to a device on a perpetual basis, but with the introduction of Creative Cloud, it has become a user-based subscription license. Migrating to the new model requires a lot of change – from a change in how you manage licenses and compliance, as well as how the software is deployed across the estate.

Firstly, a Request for Change (RFC) needs to be submitted to the CAB highlighting the change in licensing terms, packaging and deployment methods. RFCs need to be opened and approved by the CAB before the contents are discussed. Once approved, the CAB will discuss how to manage the change and how it will impact the organization.

When moving from an Adobe’s device, perpetual license to a subscription user license, the CAB will meet with the SAM representative to discuss:

• What is the change?
• How will it impact existing systems? Will we need to make changes to existing systems?
• How will it impact existing processes? Will we need to make changes to existing processes?
• How will this affect users?
• How will this affect compliance?
• How will this affect financials?

A change plan will then be created by the CAB highlighting how the organization will physically make the required changes. When moving to Adobe’s Creative Cloud, this will include the upgrade process (identifying users’ usage rather than what is deployed on a machine), roadmap for software packaging and how the new software will impact existing hardware (do they have enough RAM, Hard disk space etc.?).

ADOBE PERPETUAL LICENSING TO CLOUD SUBSCRIPTION

It is then time to implement the change. We spoke to a SAM Manager of a Snow customer – an architecture practice with 16,000 devices – who used Change Management to help with a change in licensee models for Adobe..

“We used our CAB and change management to help us with the process of moving from perpetual Adobe licenses to the Creative Cloud subscription model. “For us, this was a major change and our first foray into the Cloud subscription world. It meant a lot of changes in terms of our SAM processes, how we manage compliance and our packaging cycle,” says the SAM Manager. 

How will change impact existing systems?

“The first question we needed to know was how will Snow License Manager report Creative Cloud applications and usage? Fortunately, it does this straight out of the box.” In this scenario, no changes were required to existing systems. However, there was an issue with packaging. The SAM Manager explains, “We packaged all our previous Adobe Creative Suite products, and because Creative Cloud is still a local file we needed to do the same. Unfortunately, Adobe could not provide us with a roadmap of updates, so our packaging cycle and process needed modification.”

How will change affect existing processes?

In this case, the change in license model and the way in which updates are distributed meant that a change in process was required. Instead of having a set and solid process for packaging Adobe products, the organization had to assess each release and identify how it would impact users before putting in the time and effort in packaging and re-deploying the software. “The SAM team had to change existing processes slightly and have the changes approved by the senior management. As it related to the packaging and deployment of software we felt we didn’t need to communicate the change with end-users,” continues the SAM Manager.

How will the change affect compliance? “Initially, the change in compliance was something that caused concern for us as the license model went from per device to per user subscription. Therefore, instead of looking at usage and compliance from a device perspective we had to assess each application that the user was using and align it to the Creative Cloud bundles.”

The SAM Manager continues to explain that during the upgrade and shift in license models they had to use Snow License Manager to predict compliance. He says, “We obviously still had a number of perpetual Design Suite 6 licenses that we wanted to continue to use until it became unusable for users who didn’t use Adobe products very much. Therefore, we had to identify the compliance position for the device perpetual licenses AND the user-based subscription licenses.” He continued to explain that thanks to the CAB and change management they planned well in advance for the change in licensing and management and created a custom report within Snow License Manager to highlight the compliance position for both the perpetual licenses and the Creative Cloud licenses.

How will the change affect financials?

There is a common misconception that subscription license models are cheaper than the old perpetual model. This is not necessarily the case. Whilst the immediate costs may be lower, the overall cost over three years can be significantly more.

“We entered into Adobe’s ETLA for our Creative Cloud licenses. We calculated that the initial outgoings were less than all of our perpetual licenses, but over three years the Creative Cloud agreement costs outweighed our existing perpetual licenses and maintenance/support. The CAB obviously took this into consideration and communicated the expected financial changes with Finance and Procurement.” Once the change occurred and the process is managed by the CAB, they then meet again to discuss any further actions that need to occur. If no further action is required, then the CAB will close the Request for Change and provide the relevant stakeholders with a report on the actions carried out and how successful the process has been.

WHY SHOULD YOU USE CHANGE MANAGEMENT WITH SAM?

“Any significant change made by the IT team needs to follow the right Change Management processes otherwise it could fall by the wayside and the change won’t be adopted correctly,” comments the SAM Manager.

“Think about it: users who are comfortable and familiar with existing IT technologies, processes or software do not like change, so you need to help guide them through the change so it doesn’t come as a shock to them and they can see the benefits of the new software,” he states.

The sheer amount of change that occurs within Software Asset Management and IT in general is huge – new technologies, license models or innovative ways of doing things crop up every day. To clearly realize and take advantage of the new technologies you need to ensure they have been introduced to the organization and users appropriately. Change Management and the relationship with SAM, as you’ve seen from our Architecture company example, helps embed new license models and processes quickly, effectively and with the cooperation of the end users.   Change needs to occur in order to cut software spend, whether through the introduction of new processes – such as re-harvesting – or through new SAM technologies like Snow License Manager.

If you are looking to implement change management within your SAM processes, why not talk to our SAM experts? Snow’s License Optimization and Consultancy Service puts the Snow subject matter experts into the heart of your SAM strategy. Our experts will work very closely with stakeholders, users and IT teams in your organization to ensure that your investment in Snow technology is maximized to support your SAM goals, minimizing compliance risk and software spend.

The post Managing the Change from Perpetual to Subscription Licensing appeared first on Snow Software.