Three Clever Ways to Reduce Your Software Costs

In an age of austerity, many companies are placing their trust in software asset management – SAM for short. After all, a well-conceived SAM strategy and the right tool can substantially reduce the costs for software while at the same time significantly increasing security.

Simple and effective, the following three methods are certain to bring rapid success.

Reduce to a minimum the number of different software products that satisfy identical functions. A classic example is software to edit PDFs. There are stacks of providers that more or less offer the same things. But you can benefit from attractive volume discounts if your company consistently eliminates the large number of providers by using PDF editing programs from just one vendor.

The workload for internal support will grow incrementally with the number of software versions running in your company. Let’s take Adobe as an example. Many companies use different iterations of Acrobat Professional, Acrobat Standard and Photoshop. The various versions have different requirements when updating the operating system, each of which will need individual support. It’s much easier if only one version of your software is installed.

You can probably guess already. Keeping a close eye on all of the software installed on your system will help you discover plenty of potential savings, as well as identifying applications that present a significant security risk. They include games, applications with Internet access, network applications or cracker tools.

Every installation, however small it may be, provides attackers with backdoor access that might make security software pointless.