Is Software Asset Management the Tonic for your Cloud Headache?

We recently discussed with our Snow Software experts how you can take control of your cloud environment and reduce cloud costs.

According to Gartner’s latest research (cited in August 2018*) 20% of the IT budget is now being spent on cloud-based services. An upward trend that is being driven by more organizations moving workloads to the cloud and increasing adoption of SaaS applications.

Many organizations we speak with are experiencing significant cloud overspend due to a lack of visibility and effective monitoring across single and multiple cloud providers. Cloud sprawl and overspend within organizations is being exacerbated by Shadow IT due to undetected or unauthorized purchases with cloud providers.

Our experienced consultants from SoftwareONE, Antony Attfield and Rhys Williams, along with Mark Lillywhite from Snow discussed the following during the 45-minute webinar, which you can view on- demand here at any time:

• The challenges of monitoring usage and spend of IaaS, PaaS and SaaS
• The disconnect of business needs between IT and Lines of Business and C-Level
• Gaining visibility and control of your cloud estate
• A demonstration of Snow’s SaaS detection and management capabilities
• A demonstration of SoftwareONE’s PyraCloud for IaaS and PaaS cloud spend management
• Best practice governance for budget management and chargeback

As organizations move from on-premises to cloud the responsibilities of who manages what and risks of overspend and compliance shifts. For on-premises software spend compliance risk is high and audits are prevalent amongst many software publishers but there was only a medium risk of overspend. Whereas investments on IaaS, PaaS and SaaS the risk of overspend greatly increases.

As you can see from Figure 1 below, 30% of all cloud spend is in the infrastructure space and the overspend risk really multiplies when moving to the cloud and SaaS accounts for 59% of cloud spend.

In a recent cloud survey that we ran with 300 C-Level IT Decision Makers, 43% stated that their biggest concern around using cloud was high costs. The survey also uncovered that there was a disconnect between what IT Managers believe is their IT budget and percentage dedicated to cloud services and the all up budget that C-Level has visibility into as some cloud spend is outside of IT’s control (there’s that Shadow IT again).

It is very important for organizations to fully understand what is being spent and to have visibility into who is using cloud resources within the business and more importantly gain control of their cloud environment to eliminate that overspend.

Mark from Snow showed a demo of how the Snow License Manager (see the graphic below) can help to identify where SaaS applications are in use. Users can drill down into the dashboards to see granular detail into applications, number of users, which computers are accessing the applications in which part of your organization as well as license requirements and whether users are active or in-active, which will help you rationalize unused SaaS subscriptions and save on cloud spend.

Rhys from SoftwareONE showed a demo of how PyraCloud can give you transparency and visibility into what software assets you have not only within your infrastructure but also your spend — whether that is subscription, infrastructure or platform. He showed how PyraCloud’s Cloud Management module (see Figure 3) can help you understand your resources and optimize your spend.

Users can leverage PyraCloud to understand what resources they have ( storage accounts, reserved instances, networking, etc.) and they can also use PyraCloud to help them manage Azure Hybrid Use Benefits License position.

PyraCloud can be used to help users deploy a consistent tagging methodology across multiple cloud environments at once to enforce governance and to understand which departments, geographies, projects, etc. are using resources so you can start allocating cloud spend across your organization. Users can set budgets and track usage and spend against those budgets. PyraCloud also then allows you to set up chargebacks to invoice the relevant internal group, department or projects for the cloud resources used.

The PyraCloud Consumption Analytics module provides granular detail into who is consuming what across the organization so it is easy to track spend against budget and take back control of cloud spend across your multi-cloud environment.