Reduce IT spending and mitigate risk across on-premises, SaaS and hybrid cloud using Technology Intelligence.
3 Key Actions to Optimize Costs and Free Up Funds
DISCOVER MORE
4 Ways to Reduce Cloud Infrastructure and SaaS Spend
6 Tips to Identify and Mitigate Risk
Explore each of these journeys to see how you can mitigate risk and reduce IT spending with the help of Technology Intelligence — the comprehensive data and insights that Snow Software provides across on-premises, SaaS and hybrid cloud assets.
4 Ways to Cloud Infrastructure and SaaS Costs
3 Key Actions You Can Take to Optimize Costs and Free Up Funds for Innovation and Growth
Explore each of the journeys below to see how you can mitigate risk and reduce IT spending with the help of Technology Intelligence — the comprehensive data and insights that Snow Software provides across on-premises, SaaS and hybrid cloud assets.
TAKE ME THERE
3 Key Actions to Reduce Costs and Improve Customer Service and Satisfaction:
Optimize Costs for Innovation Funding
According to the 2022 IT Priorities Report, reducing IT costs and boosting customer service and satisfaction are two of the highest priorities for IT leaders. Gartner® also predicts that “IT spending is projected to total $4.6 trillion in 2023.” Read on to discover three ways your own organization can achieve these goals while saving precious time and funds.
READ MORE
Automate provisioning of hybrid cloud infrastructure and services.
Automate license harvesting.
Automate the collection of IT asset data.
It’s crucial to choose and budget for an ITAM tool that will provide visibility to your entire software license usage and spend. The general rule is to estimate your tooling cost at around 20% of your desired cost savings.
Pro Tip
LEARN MORE
Using a spreadsheet to keep tabs on IT assets keeps you in a constant loop of adding data to the spreadsheet and reconciling it against other teams’ spreadsheets. By the time you’re done with one update, your spreadsheet is already outdated and useless. By automating data collection and running reports against a normalized inventory and application usage database (a.k.a., a single trusted source of Technology Intelligence), your team can free up hundreds of work hours when creating strategic IT plans, streamlining software assets or prepping for software audits and vendor negotiations. When multiple teams use that single source of Technology Intelligence, it improves their collaboration and enables faster decision-making. If you combine that Technology Intelligence with solid processes and policies right at the beginning of your ITAM practice, you’ll have a solid foundation for success. If you’re starting a new ITAM practice, check out our latest 2-minute guide on how to build it and establish those processes and policies.
Using a spreadsheet to keep tabs on IT assets keeps you in a constant loop of adding data to the spreadsheet and reconciling it against other teams’ spreadsheets. By the time you’re done with one update, your spreadsheet is already outdated. This inefficient, error-prone and costly process may put your organization at risk. By automating data collection and running reports against a normalized inventory and application usage database (a.k.a., a single trusted source of Technology Intelligence), your team can free up hundreds of work hours when creating strategic IT plans, streamlining software assets or prepping for software audits and vendor negotiations. When multiple teams use that single source of Technology Intelligence, it improves their collaboration and enables faster decision-making. If you combine Technology Intelligence with solid processes and policies right at the beginning of your ITAM practice, you’ll have a solid foundation for success. If you’re starting a new ITAM practice, read our latest 2-minute guide on how to build it and establish those processes and policies.
NEXT
READ CASE STUDY
“Before we deployed the Snow solution, we were unable to ensure a consistent level of compliance across our company. We were constantly running the risk of not detecting missing or excess licenses. In the first three years after the introduction of Snow, we were able to optimize our licensing stock and significantly reduce the burden on our employees. We achieved savings of more than €750,000 and minimized the financial risk of an audit.”
Manually researching how each employee is using an application and comparing that usage to their assigned license level is tedious work. There’s no need to toil when you can automatically set policies to repurpose licenses after a certain time. Aside from saving your IT team tons of time, you’ll prevent overbuying and actually reallocate licenses to employees who really need them. You can also automate your system to provision licenses when employees join your organization and reclaim them when employees leave. With Snow Productivity Optimizer you can proactively avoid common resource-related issues such as unmanaged access to software, overuse of software licenses and license sprawl at your finger tips.
“Our new user software delivery timeframe reduced from 5 days to 2 hours and our SAM project has delivered cost savings and avoidance that total more than $34 million.”
Stop manually provisioning your cloud infrastructure and embrace a self-service approach to enable faster innovation and eliminate IT bottlenecks. By giving developers (and any other requestors of virtual machines) direct access via a service catalog to provision their workloads, you can make provisioning 100 times faster. With automation, you can also set policies that will prevent infrastructure sprawl by decommissioning unused workloads after a certain period. This collection of customer success stories shows how organizations have leveraged automation via Snow Commander solutions to combat their own IT infrastructure challenges and enjoy some significant benefits. Additionally, Snow Cloud Cost powered by Anodot, our recently released cloud cost management solution, can help organizations immediately reduce cloud spend by 30-40%.
Discover even more benefits of complete technology asset visibility from your on-premises and cloud infrastructures to SaaS applications and beyond, with our next-generation platform.
Snow Atlas
DOWNLOAD PDF
© 2023 Snow Software, Inc. All rights reserved.
Snow Software is changing the way organizations understand and manage their technology consumption. Our Technology Intelligence platform 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. Gartner is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and is used herein with permission. All rights reserved.
About Snow Software
Follow Snow
www.snowsoftware.com info@snowsoftware.com
Contact Snow
Cut Cloud Infrastructure and SaaS Costs
According to Gartner, “Enterprise IT spending on public cloud computing is projected to overtake traditional on-premises solutions by 2025”. When fast-moving, agile organizations tap into public cloud services, operations can easily grow out of control, leading to significant overspend and waste. Gain complete visibility and management over multicloud spend and immediately reduce those costs by 30-40% with Snow Cloud Cost powered by Anodot.
Cloud Cost Optimization
Utilize volume discounts.
Rationalize applications.
Rightsize entitlements and services.
Identify unused and underutilized software.
“The ability to show the cost of resources consumed by business units has allowed us to have more informed and insightful conversations around budget, and the flexibility has allowed us to use resources more efficiently.”
Likewise, the easiest way to optimize cloud or on-premises infrastructure costs is to look for unused or underutilized resources. Often an administrator or developer might “spin up” a temporary server to perform a function and forget to turn it off when the job finishes. They might also forget to remove storage attached to instances they stop using. The result is that an organization’s cloud services or data center bills will include charges for resources they are no longer using. Removing these resources will not only lower costs but also achieve optimal performance from the live resources.
Find cloud sprawl
By gathering detailed usage data for your SaaS applications, you can rightsize contracts by buying and renewing only the subscriptions you need. Having the right data gives you the power to renegotiate effectively because you’ll see what you have, identify what’s inconsistent between your contract and usage and optimize what’s truly needed across the organization.
Identify unallocated and unused SaaS licenses
“Thanks to Snow, we will be able to reduce our Adobe footprint and costs by 15 percent, and our spend with Microsoft by 12 percent, when we come to renew licenses.”
When cloud administrators have millions of possible combinations to choose from, it’s a difficult task to correctly size instances. Rightsizing tools can also recommend changes across instance families if necessary.
Rightsize cloud services
Different license tiers of SaaS applications have vastly different costs. You’ll often have employees with advanced licenses who use just the basic features of an application. Once you identify this occurrence, it’s a simple process to get the license downgraded and save money. This requires a detailed understanding of both the license and its usage, so you’ll want to look for a tool that can truly examine which specific application features people are using. That can be tricky, particularly for apps with on-premises and SaaS components, such as Microsoft 365 and Adobe Creative Cloud.
Base downgrades on actual usage requirements
Downgrade SaaS entitlement bundles.
“Snow helped us to reduce software expenses by identifying and removing unused licenses. For example, optimization of our Microsoft subscriptions has saved us a potential $74,000 a year.”
It’s not uncommon for organizations to run multiple applications that do the same function, e.g., Dropbox, Box and SharePoint for file storage. Your organization can gain huge efficiencies by eliminating those redundant applications and consolidating to only one. These potential efficiencies include: • Reduced subscription costs • Lower support and security costs for just one application vs. many The time and resources saved by not managing multiple contracts and preparing for multiple, redundant renewal conversations can create major cost savings. Check out the latest Gartner report on: 3 Reasons Why SaaS Vendors Are Raising Prices and What You Can Do About It for more information. Read more on how to rationalize your SaaS portfolio in our latest blog.
“Snow provides us with complete transparency of software usage, licensing, and deployment. We can optimize the mix of license types, quantity, and allocation based on that knowledge. For large contracts such as Microsoft and Adobe, IT can buy licenses at volume, and if a local business reduces their user numbers, we can use those spare licenses within the Panasonic group.”
Organizations with multiple business units sometimes have duplicative enterprise agreements with the same vendor. By consolidating under one agreement, organizations can achieve cost efficiencies with volume discounts and leverage more favorable terms under one agreement. Check out the latest Gartner report, “How to Navigate Cloud Management Tooling Selection,” to help you select the right tool and pricing model for your organization.
Consolidate enterprise agreements
Enterprises that have a long-term commitment to the cloud should analyze past usage to properly prepare for the future. Investing in reserved instances is a must for cloud optimization as they will result in larger discounts based on upfront payments and time commitments.
Leverage reserved instances in your public cloud environments
Learn more about how Snow Software capabilities for SaaS Management and Cloud Cost Management can help you reduce your overall cloud costs.
Snow SaaS and Cloud Cost Management
Identify and Mitigate Risk
Your best defense against security threats is in uncovering vulnerabilities, where they reside and how you can eliminate them. To get that optimal defense position, you need current, comprehensive data on your IT assets and the activity in your entire IT environment. Explore these six tips for identifying and mitigating your organization’s security risks and discover the tooling and support necessary to achieve your security goals.
Uncover everything to protect everyone in your IT landscape
Get visibility to assets that are at end of life.
Find applications with personal data risk.
Find assets with software vulnerabilities.
Identify employees using deny listed applications.
Identify free and shadow SaaS application usage.
Obtain a holistic inventory of all IT assets.
DOWNLOAD REPORT
of IT leaders report that business units are under significant stress because they’re unaware of all purchased cloud and SaaS.”
“86%
Snow Software 2022 IT Priorities Report
Many organizations have independent business units (especially those with histories of M&A) with distributed purchasing and IT asset management teams who aren’t using tools and policies for capturing inventory
•
Cloud technologies are easy for business units to try and buy, and IT purchasing is now largely done by those business units and individuals, not a centralized IT team — making them hard to track and govern
Modern technologies are dynamic and constantly updated, making them impossible to track on a spreadsheet
According to Security Magazine, having a current inventory is one of the top challenges keeping CISOs up at night. Keeping a current inventory may be difficult because:
START A TRIAL
Snow Risk Monitor can help you reach your organization’s security and compliance goals. Try Snow Risk Monitor in a demo environment free for 30 days.
To keep your organization’s assets and data secure, adopt a scalable solution that will automate your entire technology inventory. It should cover all assets in your environment — from on-premises applications and owned endpoints, to datacenter devices and applications, to free, known and shadow SaaS applications.
Cyberattacks in the first half of 2022 rose by 42% compared to 2021
Find out how Snow can help your organization enhance security and eliminate attack vectors.
To proactively investigate free or licensed SaaS applications used in your environment that are not going through your SSO platform, organizations can invest in a cloud access security broker (CASB) or leverage an IT asset management platform that provides this level of insight via a browser extension. The benefit of using an IT asset management platform is that it can normalize software titles (clean data) and provide additional insights into application redundancies.
Weak passwords Complying with data privacy regulations such as GDPR and HIPAA Software misconfiguration Access control
SaaS software is easy to try and buy. As a result, a majority of technology purchasing is now done outside of IT. Though this self-sufficiency alleviates some of the burden on IT, it also creates an entirely new set of risks. IT must eventually face these challenges, especially when it comes to SaaS security. Issues related to SaaS usage include:
“You can actually see what you have on your estate, who’s got it, how they’re using it and when they’re using it, and it makes a massive difference.”
Most organizations have a list of applications they don’t want around. With SaaS applications, it’s everyone’s job to prevent bad applications from running in the environment. Even with all the education, there will be some employees who don’t pay attention and won’t adhere to your security policies. As a result, you’ve got to inspect what you expect and report on denylisted applications that are being used. Then, you’ll have a targeted report of users to re-educate.
Identify employees using denylisted applications.
of IT leaders report that reducing security risks is of high priority”
“24%
Patch management tools have been on the market for years, but some only cover certain platforms (Windows only) and don’t include all third-party applications. If your organization has not invested in a patch management tool, then the chances are even higher that the organization has systems and applications exposed. Some software asset management tools pull in vulnerability data from the National Vulnerability Database and can help you report on what vulnerabilities exist in your organization, their severity and where those vulnerabilities reside. Armed with this data, security professionals can help their organizations prioritize where to focus patch management efforts to which they may be blind. Snow Risk Monitor can help provide more coverage and visibility of IT assets than any other tool in your environment. We make it easy to support asset data requests and for security teams to extract the insights they need.
“The top barrier to patching vulnerabilities is the inability to manage updates in one place and prioritize them effectively.”
To better prioritize applications to patch or remove from the network, filter vulnerable applications with PII risk. PII data leaks are not only a PR nightmare, but can also get organizations out of compliance with industry and governmental regulations. See our Snow Risk Monitor solution in action.
“We are able to identify software that is out-of-date, remove it and replace with a secure version of the software.” Memorial Health
“In 2021 we improved our risk avoidance by 50%.” Motorola Solutions
Read more on how to identify and tackle SaaS security issues.
Identify your SaaS risk with a complimentary 14-day discovery service.
Armed with this information, security operations teams can help IT Operations teams prioritize the most critical assets to upgrade or remove from their networks.
• IT assets already at EOL status • Those IT assets that will have EOL status within 12 months • How many devices are impacted • The recommended upgrade path and where these assets are located.
IT asset inventory tools (and some IT monitoring tools) can scan your environment to uncover:
It seems like a no-brainer to retire these legacy systems, but the effort to do so is normally laborious or expensive, and not a top priority when revenue-generating application projects are on the roadmap.
Using end-of-life (EOL) assets is akin to leaving your windows wide open when you’re not at home. With EOL applications and devices, there are often known vulnerabilities with no patch available. One of the largest examples of this problem is the WannaCry attack that began in 2017 and infected over 200,000 systems over 150 countries.
Get visibility into end-of-life assets.
Proactively reduce critical risks with Snow Risk Monitor.
Snow Software is changing the way organizations understand and manage their technology consumption. Our Technology Intelligence platform 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. Gartner is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and is used herein with permission. All rights reserved. Windows is a trademark of the Microsoft corporation.
