Join our webinar for 10 tips to help you manage your hybrid environment, erase waste from your IT spend and reallocate spend to critical initiatives – enhancing your bottom line and accelerating your company.
Focus on what areas will resonate most with a given stakeholder and engage in conversation on the complexities they are managing.
It is no wonder IT executives are feeling this way….bringing an organization’s IT landscape into the current and future is no small task. So what does this mean for you and what you are facing?
Could use a better “rack image” – these 2 images were open source
Or maybe we use thtangle ball on the left
And yet IT has to do it all. Make sure all of your critical business systems continue to work while charging forward on new technologies that help you compete and win.
See Everything: Accurate and augmented insights to your complete technology landscape.
Spend Efficiently: Understand and optimize your technology spend across on-premise, SaaS, and cloud.
Act Automatically: Leverage automation to streamline and govern all of your technology use.
Source: Gartner
However, today most companies struggle to be cost-effective with both their software and their cloud spend.
From our experience working with customers - and industry analyst data also supports it – companies are wasting 30-35 percent of their cloud and software spend.
Because software and cloud represent 40% of your IT spend, by eliminating that waste, you can free up 12% of your IT budget to redirect to your critical business initiatives.
The biggest areas of wasted cloud spend are:
Idle or underutilized cloud instances
Dev instances running 24x7
Not leveraging discount options
Not meeting usage commitments
Unused storage
Expensive regions
Out-of-date instance families
And Flexera helps you continually optimize your IT assets across the technology lifecycle - from request to provisioning to operations to retirement.
You can speed up request, approval, and purchasing,
Ensure secure, governed provisioning & ongoing operations.
Eliminate wasted spend from unused software and cloud resources
Securely retire resources and reclaim re-usable licenses and capacity.
It’s all about People, Process and Technology
People, Process and Technology—as with traditional SAM, these are the cornerstones of a successful software license optimization program. Let’s briefly consider each one:
People—this encompasses defining the team and their roles and responsibilities for managing the software estate—from IT procurement to IT operations and compliance.
Process — Software License Optimization requires defining best practice processes for the organization to effectively manage software assets throughout the product lifecycle—from initial procurement, to ongoing management, upgrades, maintenance renewals, and finally retirement.
Technology — Software License Optimization requires using next generation tools to manage the complexity inherent in software licensing, IT environments and today’s global enterprises. Organizations must identify and implement the tools required to achieve business objectives, such as gaining visibility and control of the software estate, reducing license compliance risk, minimizing the cost of software licenses and maintenance, and enabling IT to innovate to achieve other strategic business goals.
Because many buying decisions have shifted to each line of business, IT Procurement must also consider the possibility of redundant subscriptions across the organization and missed opportunities for pricing discounts. It can be costly and time consuming to track down whether multiple individuals or teams are using the same applications if they are simply charging the fees to their company or personal credit card.
Occurs frequently with M & As
Identify redundant applications and functions to reduce SaaS spend
Understand overlaps and educate employees on when to use what tool, what the procedures are, etc.
We’ve found that many Enterprises don’t really know what their subscription position is on their SaaS apps.
For companies with 20k employees, over 40% of respondents didn’t know if they had the right number of SaaS subscriptions for their Enterprise apps. Only 32% stated they had the right amount.
Across the board, only 50% of Enterprises believe they have the right number of SaaS subscriptions for their users. The other 50% have too many, not enough or simply don’t know.
This is why it is absolutely critical that SaaS license management begins with the onboarding process and ends with the offboarding process.
So how do you go about doing this?
Start with profiling usage of existing SaaS users. Understand how frequently they are accessing – is it read vs. write (where possible), is it just a few times a month? Perhaps a shared account may make sense?
What parts of the SaaS product are they using? Do they need a full SaaS license or can they get away with a lower tier license?
What org is using the SaaS application and what kinds of roles?
These kinds of metrics should be collected over 90 days, to get an accurate profile of usage – what is normal vs. what isn’t.
Once a profile has been defined, map it to the employee onboarding/offboarding process. Also
From the SOTC 2019 survey this year, Governance has emerged as the number 1 challenge for the first time, represented by 79% of. This indicates more enterprises are adopting cloud but more importantly, their usage has matured beyond basic dev/test environments to full production environments.
Governance and compliance become more of a challenge in the last 12 months.
What we have found over the years is proactive governance is key to reduce cost, risk and improving service delivery/quality. This means setting up guardrails well ahead of provision new or re-provisioning existing workloads.
Typical activities include setting up or configuring existing cloud accounts with the correct permissions, IAM policies. Tagging is the most important area to get right after setting up permissions. Tagging drives billing, configuration management, governance and to some extent analytics. Once you have IAM policies defined, org and role permissions set and your tagging schema implemented, you can now implement appropriate onboarding/offboarding processes.
From talking to various customers and analysts, we’ve found that Enterprises use a lot different services and tools to deliver business critical services to their customers. From the number of public/private clouds to the sheer number of tools being used to manage various aspects of service delivery. Service and tool sprawl is a real challenge for centralized governance and this is why you need an integration strategy.
So what are the key benefits of integrating enterprise tools into your governance solution?
I think the numbers speak for themselves, recently we had an trusted 3rd party conduct an ROI analysis with many of our customers.
We found that by integrating our solutions into various IT tools within the service delivery tool chain, we could help our customers move faster, increase revenue, reduce overall management overhead, while reducing security risk across the board.
Furthermore, through integrations – IT siloes are broken down – teams work better together with a shared purpose. IT has better more actionable information that can lead to significant efficiency gains and bottom line improvements.
Technicolor is a great example of where they were able to reduce the time it took to request and deliver service from 4-6 weeks down to just minutes. This required integration into multiple solutions but it was ultimately governed from one place.
Here is another example. BAT uses Azure as their primary cloud provider but they had a bunch of Windows server licenses. By integrating Flexera SAM solution with our Cloud Management solution, we can take advantage of the Azure Hybrid Benefit program. In addition, by integrating with other monitoring tools, we can make better right-sizing recommendations and even shut-down VMs that aren’t being used during certain hours – based on utilization data from those monitoring tools (we have our own monitoring solution as well).
The net impact to BAT was $1M in annualized savings.
Self-service is often regarded as the holy grail or the last mile in streamlining/automating IT service delivey.
There are 3 key benefits associated with self-service enablement.
Unblock your teams and let them move as fast as they need
Simplify the onboarding/offboarding process – which reduces risk and improves efficiency
Automate, automate and automate. This enables IT to move faster and potentially accelerate the speed of the business.
Here is an example of a service catalog and how one defines a given service catalog item.
The reality is move self-service integrations either use an ITSM solution like ServiceNow as the front-end but they will also use the self-service API. The UI is used for administrative purposes. Almost all production self-service implementations are API driven, as part of a broader automated workflow process.