itcloudmasters-blog

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3 REASONS WHY YOU SHOULD REVIEW YOUR MICROSOFT COMPLIANCE POSITION

It is true that with the entering of software asset management, there has been a paradigm shift in the IT industry. The industry has certainly witnessed a lot of changes which has somewhere helped them better their internal systems as well as help them with saving costs. Not just software, it has also made transformation to Microsoft cloud offerings an easier task for the companies. This has helped the industry grow to another level. Apart from this, this has also helped in the compliance and licensing issues of software.

Microsoft license compliance verification (commonly known as “audit”) is a formal, mandatory compliance review of a company's use of Microsoft products and services, and it is part of the Microsoft license and contract compliance program. Microsoft conducts industry-standard compliance reviews with its business customers through an independent auditor pursuant to the terms of their agreement. Between software license audit threats, true-ups and software contract renewals, there’s a constant need to be on top of your Microsoft licenses and deployments. If you’re still not convinced, here are 3 common scenarios in which having a firm understanding of your Microsoft license compliance position can give you a leading edge when it comes to your relationship with Microsoft.

3 reasons to review your Microsoft compliance position

1. Software license compliance audit

Any customer with a Microsoft volume license can be selected for a software compliance audit at any given time. Microsoft software license compliance audits usually consist of a time-consuming data collection process followed by an on-site audit that can last over a week. Legal counsel may even be required to aid in the process.

Since software license compliance audits require a lot of time and internal resources, those same resources are pulled away from the day to day concerns of your business. While you may attempt to refuse an audit, doing so may be a breach of contract depending on your Microsoft licensing agreement which could result in losing your rights to Microsoft software.

If you have an up-to-date Microsoft compliance position, there will be no surprises in store when Microsoft comes knocking. You’ll also have the data in hand to back up any disputes you may have to Microsoft’s findings.

2. True-up

Microsoft’s Enterprise Agreement provides you with the flexibility to deploy new software over the 3-year contract. This agreement means that every year you must evaluate the software deployed over that year and submit the results to Microsoft. This is called a true up and, in some cases, may lead to a software audit depending on what results are submitted to Microsoft.

Knowing your Microsoft license compliance position in advance gives you quick and easy access to accurate numbers you can submit to Microsoft for a painless true up without overspending.

3. Software contract renewals

Your software contract renewal can provide an opportunity to reduce your software spend on Microsoft software you may not be using. Knowing your Microsoft license position going into a contract renewal offers two big benefits:

a) Software license compliance

b) Cost savings

Contract renewals often include lengthy negotiations with a plethora of agreements from which to choose. It can be an overwhelming process. Having a firm grasp of your Microsoft compliance position is the ultimate negotiation tool since you’ll know exactly what licenses you need and how many.

So, when is the best time to review your Microsoft license compliance position?

As often as possible! With time-consuming annual true-ups, software contract renewals that require lots of preparation and negotiation, and the threat of looming software license audits, it’s important to always have an up to date Microsoft compliance position handy. Not knowing your software license compliance position when talking to Microsoft gives them all the power, leaving your company financially vulnerable.

Ideally, you are reviewing your Microsoft software license compliance at least once every 6 months. However, this can be much easier said than done.

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CLOUD COMPUTING AND THE RISKS INCLUDED IN IT

Cloud computing is the delivery of services through the internet. These resources include tools and applications like data storage, servers, databases, networking, and software. Rather than keeping files on a proprietary hard drive or local storage device, cloud-based storage makes it possible to save them to a remote database.

Cloud migration is the most important services which is being preferred by people in the IT sector nowadays. They are offering them more space, which has always been an issue in any organization, be it small or big. With cloud migration coming in, there are many companies which have started to offer cloud migration managed services to the customers to help them shift to cloud easily.

 In today’s world, managing software has probably taken hype as earlier people used to purchase software and forget about the fact that it needs to be managed as well. With SAM services and other such services pitching in, this has now become an easy task for the companies.

 Cloud computing is named as such because the information being accessed is found remotely in the cloud or virtual space. Companies that provide cloud services enable users to store files and applications on remote servers and then access all the data via the Internet. This means the user is not required to be in a specific place to gain access to it, allowing the user to work remotely.

 Cloud computing can be both private and public.

 Public cloud services provide their services over the Internet for a fee. Private cloud services, on the other hand, only provide services to a certain number of people.

Everything has its advantages as well as disadvantages, with all of the speed, efficiencies, and innovations that come with cloud computing, there are, naturally, risks.

Security has always been a big concern with the cloud especially when it comes to sensitive medical records and financial information. While regulations force cloud computing services to shore up their security and compliance measures, it remains an ongoing issue. Encryption protects vital information, but if that encryption key is lost, the data disappears.

 Although the cloud service providers implement the best security standards and industry certifications, storing data and important files on external service providers always opens up risks.

   Some precautions can avoid cloud computing risk:

a)    Make security a core aspect of all IT operations.

b)    Keep ALL your teams up to date with cloud security best practices.

c)    Ensure security policies and procedures are regularly checked and reviewed.

d)    Proactively classify information and apply access control.

e)    Prevent data exfiltration.

f)    Integrate prevention and response strategies into security operations.

g)    Discover rogue projects with audits.

h)    Remove password access from accounts that do not need to log in to services.

i)    Review and rotate access keys and access credentials.

j)    Follow security blogs and announcements to be aware of known attacks.

k)    Apply security best practices for any open source software that you are using.

 Many organizations benefit from the agility, scale, and pay-as per-use in what cloud services offer. However, as with any infrastructure service, the suitability of cloud computing for your specific use case should be assessed in a risk-based evaluation.

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SOFTWARE ASSET MANAGEMENT AND COMPLIANCE AUDITS: THE DIFFERENCE

There came a time in the technological industry that the SAM services and compliance was being preferred worldwide. We all are aware that software asset management is a practice which involves managing and optimizing the purchase, deployment, maintenance, utilization and disposal of your software applications within an organization. As it helps in easily managing the software applications within the organization which in turn helps in the cost saving, it has taken a great hype in the industry.Not just these, with software asset management coming into the game, it has made the life of most IT managers a lot more easier. They do not have to rush after every person for their software details as it is just one click away with SAM.Bringing SAM and Compliance into Context Most organizations which offer SAM services are committed to helping organizations maximize value, minimize risks, and achieve more with their IT investments. These organizations recognize the importance of clear guidelines and support for the customers to reach their goals as easily as possible.

What is the difference between a SAM engagement and a Compliance audit?

The core difference is that SAM programs are voluntary services designed around industry standards that help customers gain data insights, optimize licensing, minimize risks, and be more productive with their IT investments.A compliance audit is a mandatory review of a company’s use of its products and services designed to help customers achieve and maintain license compliance and to protect the intellectual property rights.

What are the benefits of SAM Programs for your business?

Implementing a SAM program can help organizations save on cost and free up time and resources to focus on accelerating their digital transformation journey. These benefits are significant to the long-term success of businesses and are worthy of a closer look.

1. Money Saved: By eliminating waste and empowering IT departments to centralize licensing contract management, IT managers understand their software inventory better and can streamline operations and gain efficiency.

2. Accelerated Cloud Adoption: In many cases, the insight learned from optimizing inventory often shows that even more money can be saved by moving to cloud solutions, creating the much-needed impetus to grow into digital.

3. Increased Security: Another benefit lies in compatibility and security. SAM helps the business owners sleep a little better at night, as our programs help them mitigate risks associated with products that do not receive regular updates. Ensuring their company infrastructure and workforce are all using software that’s compatible across the board goes a long way to keeping their business secure and booming. With the need for increasing levels of cyber security on the rise as well, SAM engagements have proved invaluable in identifying holes in IT infrastructures which could have proved costly had they been penetrated by criminal elements. Business confidence is further boosted by knowing that a solid SAM plan can help them recover quickly should their business suffer any kind of outage. Disaster recovery can be expedited if there is a centralized inventory of software and offsite data backups have been set up correctly.

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Microsoft Azure provides cloud services that helps your organization in meeting the business challenges. Azure provides a range of cloud services for computing, analytics, storage and networking.

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IT Cloudmasters helps its customers with Microsoft value assessments across North America. We're based in Toronto. Our Team Consist of experts which deal in services like Software Asset Management, Server Optimization Assessment, Cloud Productivity Assessment, Cyber Security Assessment and Baseline Assessment.

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Software asset management (SAM) is the service that helps in the procurement and optimization of your software licenses, Server Optimization, Cloud Productivity, Cyber Security and GDPR Assessment.

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HOW THE INDUSTRY HAS CREATED A SAM MERRY-GO-ROUND

It is true that the industry has created a SAM merry-go-round. It is right that the effective software asset management requires a combination of technology and process. They require it in the form of services which can be delivered by the skilled resources (either external or internal). The key issue that needs to be looked upon is the identifying and agreeing the ideal balancing point.

This is a proven fact that only one thing that any Software Asset Management provider must focus on is, first, delivering the value for money and second, is complete satisfaction. Unfortunately, this general view is not the case with most industry commentators and due to this, their customers keep losing out. Such a thing is completely unacceptable in the industry. With such an environment, it seems that the SAM industry has created a merry-go-round and time has come to help our customers get off this thing.

There are various examples of service providers which deliver SAM managed services underpinned by a particular tool. In such a case, the services don’t come close to be fully utilized. While the services provided by most companies include providing the customers with access to the tool, the purpose of the same is often superficial. Whenever it comes to the key service deliverables, the provider always prefers to use their own time-consuming and manually intensive processes to analyze the data in spreadsheets, produce cost saving reports etc. This situation becomes more extreme when it comes to the delivery of timely projects, where the specialist providers rely on even more heavily manual process and complex set of activities.

But the question still remains, why does this happen? A cynical view to this might be that it’s because the service provider revenues are majorly dependent on the skilled workers required to deliver their solutions. The more resources are utilized, the higher will become the cost which is later passed on to the customer. But then, why would a service provider be willing to take the time to understand and utilize the high levels of automation available from an advanced SAM tool?

On the contrary, another generalized view is that the tools are simply not up to the mark of the job. Yet it is true that some of the claims by “leading” tool vendors is said to be “mis-leading”. It has become an alarming issue that most of the tools out there which profess to be highly automated actually depend on the back office teams manually, crunching the data with a simple aim to populate and hand-crank the system. In addition to the same, there are also challenges of implementation.

Deploying the SAM tools has traditionally been a very frustrating yet lengthy and complex process, which does not always make them an ideal tool for delivering one-off projects. Sometimes, the service providers might have some valid points after all.

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ALL YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT MICROSOFT AZURE

Storage is a concern for all the cloud users and we are here to help you with the same. Microsoft Azure helps in providing different features in the Azure Storage for storing as well as accessing your data existing in the cloud.

 The Azure Files provides a proper SMB interface, libraries to the client and a REST interface that permits the access from anywhere to the stored files. It also tends to offer a compelling alternative to the traditional Direct Attached Storage (DAS) and Storage Area Network (SAN) solutions, which are often known to be complex as well as expensive for installation, configuration and operation. Azure Blobs exist to give client libraries and an REST interface that allows the unstructured data to be warehoused and accessed at a massive scale in block blobs. It supports Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2 for the purpose of providing enterprise big data analytics solutions. Similarly, Azure disks, provides the client libraries and a REST interface. However, it allows the data to be persistently stored and accessed from an attached virtual hard disk.

 When compared, each of these has its own unique features to hold on to. However, there also exist areas where their shortfalls lie. Let’s take a look at their features with a strong comparison to help you make the right choice for your cloud storage:

 Durability: Durability can be one of the acing factors that need to be noticed before making a choice for your storage. If you are into choosing an option that holds a versatility in endurance, then Azure Blobs would be a good option as it holds a good durability of data in LRS, ZRS, GRS, RA-GRS when compared to Azure Files that holds a comparatively less endurance of data in only LRS, ZRS, GRS. However, when we talk about Azure files and disks, the durability lies in the scope of their storage. Where the disks are exclusive to a single virtual machine, the files aren’t exclusive to a single one and the access can be shared across multiple virtual machines.

Accessibility: Both Azure Blobs and files can be accessed by the REST APIs. However, the latter involves the standard fine system APIs, namely SMB 2.1 and SMB 3.0.

Connectivity: When talking about connectivity, both Azure Blobs and files offer REST APIs that connect worldwide. However, it is the latter that also enables the SMB 2.1 within the region where the storage is made. However, when the Azure files and disks are compared, the connectivity of the files hold a good power as it gets connected as soon as the machine starts, whereas the disks get connected after the virtual machine has started working.

Capacity: The capacity of Azure Blobs exists up to 2 PiB Account Limit and of the files, it is 5 TiB file shares.

Thus, if you are someone who is keen on “lifting and shifting” and to store development and debugging tools that need access from many virtual machines, then blobs may surely be your cup of tea. If you are someone who wants the application to be supportive to the streaming and random access scenarios and wishes to access application data from anywhere, then using files maybe apt for your storage. However, If you are keen to lift and shift applications that use native file system APIs to read and write data to persistent disks and are interested to store data that is not necessarily required to be accessed from outside the virtual machine to which the disk is attached, then Azure Disks may be your perfect choice.

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MAKE YOUR ORGANIZATION CLOUD READY WITH THESE STRATEGIES

Introduction of cloud services has benefited everyone in a number of ways. Now people do not have to spend thousands of bucks on buying hard drives and increasing the RAM of their laptops or systems. They can now easily store their data in cloud without any worries for running space. With the introduction of this service, organizations have been benefited a lot. They now have ample of space for storage of their software and other data. Apart from the storage factor, cloud services also offer you security of your confidential data, which has become a must with the increasing risk of security and data breach.

Organizations looking to opt for cloud migration managed services must be aware of the fact that is their organization cloud ready or not. For this, IT infrastructure must be maintained as it helps an organization keeping up with the rest of the business. When a company grows, it faces serious problems in maintaining its IT infrastructure. By using cloud service, any business can gain scale and keep up with the growth ambitions.

Leveraging the cloud strategies can provide huge benefits to any company which is currently facing challenges. A good technology strategy helps in making a difference between success and failure for the company. An organization must always opt for the best strategy, which caters best to their company environment and needs. Choosing the best strategy might be a hectic task, but this will benefit your organization later.

To make your organization cloud ready, here are some strategies which will help an organization for getting prepared for the same:

1.Upgrade to the latest technology: Move up to the latest technology possible. Cloud provides you solutions at various levels like Saas (Software as a Service), Paas (Platform as a service) and Iaas (Infrastructure as a Service). While Paas is more efficient and less complicated, Saas greatly simplifies the process of deploying, scaling and managing your applications.

2. Don’t make large scale shifts: Any organization must not make large-scale shifts to public cloud provider all at once to avoid risk. Identify the lower risk levels and high reward areas for initial deployments first, as this will help in building experience.

3. Choose the best according to your business: Cloud services offers access to self-managed infrastructures and high-end features which are usually high priced for a small organization. Rather than purchasing a high end cloud service, IT professionals can make use of the cloud services which will help them focus on higher-value technology projects.

4. Extend data center: Cloud service providers offer you multiple ways to extend your on-premise infrastructure with the help of cloud-based offerings. One can choose to spread its applications between local and cloud services which allow them to communicate with minimal reconfiguration.

Overall, a systematic and the best cloud strategy can provide your organization multiple technological improvements. All you need to do is plan thoughtfully, implement and manage the new services in such a way that it benefits the organization in all aspects.

#cloud #Microsoft #software #AssetManagement

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COMPANY OPTING FOR CYBER SECURITY? 5 REASONS WHY YOU CAN’T MISS IT

We all are aware that the world is hopping on to technological advancements. With the rising advancements, there have come a lot of responsibilities for the companies as well on their part of taking care of their internal systems. Companies look for saving their systems with bigger solutions, like opting for Software Asset Management or other SAM services related to it, but forget that the smallest of the things can create big problems for them. They do not focus on the small things like cyber security which is as important as the rest of things for a safer and secure software environment.

It is true that as the technology is rapidly advancing, companies are moving to complete digitization process. From storage to communication, everyone is turning to online for details. With advancing technology and people depending on the internet, cyber security has become of paramount importance. Moving towards the digital side has increased the risk of data stealing, data leaking and other problems. Organizations have to now be aware in terms of data and cyber security.

NEED OF CYBER SECURITY

Cyber crime is rising constantly and its effects have become extremely vulnerable due to the lack of cyber security. It has become important for all business as they have become dependent on the internet for day-to-day digital system operations. It is a proven fact that many companies ignore cyber security and are adversely affected by its consequences. To avoid this, your organization must organize a cyber security assessment to ensure that their software environment is safe from any kind of threat.

BENEFITS

Here are 5 reasons why a company needs cyber security:

1.Protects your business: Cyber security helps in providing comprehensive digital protection to your business. This further allows the employees to surf the internet and as when they want and need.

2. Protects personal information: Personal information is one of the most valuable commodity in the digital world. No one can afford that their personal information gets leaked. They take information regarding your employees or customers which they can even sell or use to steal their money.

3. Allow employees to work safely: Your employees can’t work properly if they don’t get proper cyber security and are prone to frequent cyber attacks. You must ensure that your employees must work safely to avoid any sort of cyber security issues.

4. Protects productivity: Frequent virus attacks can slow down the speed of your personal computers and make them practically impossible to work.

5. Denies spyware: Spyware is a form of cyber infection which is designed to spy on ones computer actions, and relay that information back to cyber-criminal. A good cyber security prevents this spyware from taking effect and ensures that employees’ actions remain private and confidential within the organization.

One must ensure that they get the best cyber security assessment as a cyber attack in the organization can lead to a lot of damage and loss of data, which a company, on such level can’t afford!

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EVERYTHING ABOUT SOFTWARE SELF AUDITS

It is true that technological advancements have drastically changed the way we earlier used to see things. With the coming in of this advancement, there has been an ease in our lives in a lot many ways. Now everything is just a click away, communications have become easy, sharing ideas is just one tap away and a lot more day to day things.

With the introduction of top software, work life has eased in some ways. Even on the work front, it’s the software that help in making our job easy. With technological advancements in the recent years, the software has also updated, providing the customers with more benefits and easing their life.

To keep your software environment up-to-date, you need to organize certain software audits. Software self-audits are necessary to happen in an organization as it is a component of a good Software Asset Management program. There are a lot of benefits that an organization enjoys by performing periodic self-audits. Some of these are listed below:

 1. Well positioned for vendor audits: This is the point that can convince most of the IT organizations. Being prepared here means that your SAM team is well aware of the software that is being used, how it is being deployed, what are the things being purchased, what the license terms are and who the primary stakeholders are. This will also help you understand whether your organization is compliant or not. Doing a software self audit will save you from the publisher’s audit notice in the future.

 2. Good handle on your license position: There are times when the organizations aren’t aware of what software is being used within their organization and knowledge about their licenses. With the help of a software audit, you will have detailed information of the software. This will further help you in making certain decisions about your software and their licenses. This will let you know what are the software required in the organization, which ones are unnecessary, are they according to the terms and conditions, should we go for renewal and a lot more. A software audit helps you investigate and then negotiate for the best possible solutions which will benefit your organization. All of this will relatively give you a good handle on your license position.

    3.Gauge the success of your SAM program:

The results of the audit help in providing a simple and easy way to track your cost savings opportunities and cost avoidance. It also helps in exposing the compliance risks, and this is what you would want your SAM team to do. If any of the above deficiencies continue to show up, then it’s time to re-evaluate the program completely or start with a new

ITAM

communications campaign. With software audits, you will have an eye on your SAM program and you will in turn indulge your time to make it better. This will help in gauging the success of your SAM program and creating a good software environment for your organization.

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HOW TO IMPLEMENT A SOFTWARE ASSET MANAGEMENT PLAN

We all are well aware of how the introduction of software and technology has brought a big change in our life. With people relying more on the software, it has helped them in a number of sectors like communication, organization, day to day operations. In this technologically dependant era, Software Asset Management (SAM) has become an important business process. For those who are unaware of what SAM does, software asset management is known as a set of integrated procedures, team members and tools which monitor and provide visibility into each software asset and its usage in the organization.

With the amount of risks increasing, every organization tends to organize a software audit within to have the numbers and visibility of all the working software in the organization. This gives the organizations a clear idea of the cash flow and other relevant information related to software and helps them in organizing the system in a better way and cost reduction. To make sure this happens, companies make and implement software asset management plans for their organization. But the question is, how do you implement it? What are its benefits? Let’s find out.

Mitigate risks with SAM plan

A good software asset management plan prepares the organization for forthcoming events. With a lack of visibility into the software assets, this can further have a negative impact on your organization in a number of ways like compliance, security, overspending etc.

To avoid any of these pitfalls, organizations of all the sizes must build and implement a Software Asset Management (SAM) strategy. A good and well-planned strategy helps in avoiding such disastrous situations which can create hindrance in the work. There are certain attributes wherein an can run into issues. With the implementation of SAM, they do not have to worry as they will then have a clear idea of what things are working, what all they further require and what all they do not require. Once a mature SAM program is established, the organization will enjoy a lot of benefits like cost effectiveness, compliant resistance, maximizing ROI, etc.

Implementing an effective SAM plan

If you wish to bring your SAM program to the top level of maturity that it enables the organization to align the business needs with software budgets and licensing, your organization requires to establish a good SAM team that will help them in selecting and managing the tool properly and bombard them with knowledge about the contracts and entitlements with major vendors.

There are majorly three main stages to SAM- namely planning, building and running. Every stage is important as going through the stages, you would understand which SAM plan will suit best to your organization and which will not.

Conclusion

Building and implementing an effective software asset management plan requires good amount of time and resources. It requires the in-depth review of the procedures and processes, technical capabilities and expertise which is being offered within the organization. However, a properly implemented SAM program can drastically reduce spending and maximize the ROI for your organization.

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Safeguard your Software environment with SAM

With the world advancing in technology, there have been a lot that the people are experiencing. From enjoying the benefits of technology to safeguarding from the threats, people have eventually understood that technology is not a child’s game. One has to be extra careful while entering into this world, protecting themselves from the threats while enjoying the benefits at large.

It is true that protecting your software environment from dangerous viruses can be a problem. Viruses not just pose a threat to the computers by hampering them, they also pose a threat to your privacy and software. Just like our body needs extra care to function in an excellent condition, in the same way, the software environment also requires extra care. The doctor for the care of our software environment is nonetheless Software Asset Management. As the name suggests, Software Asset Management or SAM is a service which provides the big firms best solutions on handling the software. This service expands its branches to other services namely:

 -         Server optimisation Assessment

-         Cloud productivity assessment

-         Cyber security

-         GDPR approach

-         Baseline assessment

 Server Optimisation Assessment

A Software Asset Management (SAM) Server Optimization Assessment causes you capitalize on your server remaining tasks at hand and applications while giving experiences on the business, authorizing, and innovation advantages of moving them to the Cloud.  Data examination assesses your general server state in connection to your server system, helping you to enhance your present server condition and layout the best computerized methodology.

Cloud productivity assessment

A Software Asset Management (SAM) Cloud Productivity Assessment rearranges cloud adoption and reduces risks by offering you a far reaching examination of your work areas and end client profitability devices to set up your condition for the Cloud. Working off of your Cloud methodology and generally business objectives, we take an Audit of your present programming organization and utilization and afterward evaluate your Cloud-prepared state to decide the best choices for relocation now and later

 Cyber security

With the rise of the cloud it has become much easier for IT users to bypass enterprise IT to run their own software, opening up organisations to greater cyber risk. But Software Asset Management can be a frontline of defence

 GDPR approach

General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is a comprehensive reform of data protection rules that will replace the Personal Data Act (PUL) in May 2018. All organizations that manage personal data are affected by GDPR.

 Baseline assessment

The basic and the foremost functionality of software asset management is to understand status of each license –deployed. Sam baseline provides program by highlighting compliance risks and providing expert advice on how to prevent overspending.

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WHY YOUR COMPANY NEEDS SOFTWARE ASSET MANAGEMENT?

In today’s world, the business environment depends on a variety of software for the smooth and efficient functioning of an organization. As the failure to proper management of software licenses can become costly, companies are constantly looking for different ways to control their technology budgets. No company wants their software to worn out before time as well as not spending money which exceeds their technological budget. To avoid this, they look for the best asset management software, the one that best cater to their needs and help them in the best possible way.

With the ever changing environment, there are companies which have started businesses to cater to the needs of such companies. They provide them with best solutions at minimal costs which helps these organizations to control their budgets and costing easily. One such service which has taken a leap is the Software Asset Management (SAM). It is a set of proven IT practices uniting processes, people and technologies to optimize the use of software across the organization. It helps in controlling the costs as well as managing the legal and business risks of the company.

Seeing the benefits of this service, now every organization is hopping on to organize a SAM assessment within it, to have an exact idea of how many licenses are working and how many are not. This benefits the organization in a number of ways, like they won’t be paying more for the unused licenses and would have the exact number of how many licenses are in need and how many are not. This caters to all the needs and wants of the customer.

There are a lot of benefits of SAM assessment to the company. Let us look at these benefits in detail:

1. Cost Saving: No company wants their expenses to be wasted anywhere. They want that their money should be used in the perfect way, which not only helps them getting returns, but also there is no leakage. With software asset management coming in, companies are now relieved with their cost saving issues. SAM assessment helps in determining the exact needs and usage requirements. It helps in ensuring that the software is procured in the most cost-effective licensing agreement.

2. Budgeting: A proper SAM solution makes the software cost predictable and easier for the organization. The new insights help an organization in planning the budgetary requirements with software acquisitions. With this, the organizations tend to know whether they need to spend their money on certain software or not.

3. Gain Better Insights: With knowing and buying what you need, SAM assessment help the employees in gaining better insights of their organizations’ software benefits. With this, the organization would be aware of what’s best working for them, what is not and what will in the future. With these insights, they will then know what to go further with and what to stop at the very moment.

4. Reduce Vulnerability: With technological advancements taking over the world, there are also lot of problems that come handy. Proper SAM assessment helps in reducing the vulnerability in the organization by controlling what has been deployed on your network and ensures all the software are properly configured to prevent malwares.

5. Increasing Knowledge: SAM assessment helps in gaining invaluable optics and makes you learn more about the software you use, how it’s licensed, its benefits and what are you exactly paying for.

All of these benefits helps in getting better insights of the company which further helps in optimizing your investment, taking advantage of correct licensing options and reducing costs.

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THE CLOUD WORLD

BENEFITS OF SOFTWARE ASSET MANAGEMENT IN THE CLOUD WORLD

All things considered, we're in a vigorously Cloud (SaaS, IaaS, PaaS, and so on) world and there are a lot of extraordinary subtleties that were not really foreseen earlier. With people vigorously shifting to the cloud, the world has now become cloud-based. People are shifting to the cloud and with this, there has become a need of software asset management in the companies. Companies are doing this to get the most of the cloud benefits. There are a lot of things that happen before an organization takes this step.

For instance, think about your Microsoft condition (constantly one of my top choices as it is so inescapable). On the off chance that you have a Microsoft Enterprise Agreement and are effectively utilizing Microsoft Office 365 then you have likely observed the effect of un-oversaw Active Directory accounts. In the old universe of on reason use, User accounts were controlled by the quantity of people utilizing your Microsoft framework (albeit dreadfully numerous associations mistakenly thought this was only the quantity of representatives at the organization) yet in the online membership world you understand that it is each record expecting to work as a human (not asset accounts, yet in this world you can without much of a stretch locate your brilliant meeting rooms all of a sudden requiring User licenses). Moreover clients who are on Leave of Absence (LOA) are normally now devouring licenses with the goal that their information and settings are safeguarded for when they can come back to work - something that was not required to expend a permit in the on-premise condition. Regularly in our customers we see this to be about a 10% uptick over old on-premise days.

Presently, that is in an intently overseen condition where we are fittingly distinguishing kinds of records and examining to guarantee that numbers effectively relate to headcount and contractual workers and that errors can be clarified dependent on business need. In an inexactly overseen condition we have seen over 30% of overages when we review their records.

The impact of inexactly overseen utilization can wreck IT spending plans. For instance, a company who had a 10,000 client associations, lately discovered that their 3784 records had to have a resource account yet were distinguished as user accounts. Since their User Account month to month charge was $39.73/client/month that was a $1.8m/year misuse of cash. You can't return and recover that cash as it isn't Microsoft's blame, and in the event that you are mid-year (and accepting you right it and report it in the suitable time window so it doesn't convey forward to the next year) despite everything you have to pay for it through the finish of that commemoration year (in spite of the fact that for this situation we are still in exchanges with Microsoft to check whether we can change that since there was some Microsoft contribution in the setup of the earth).

Microsoft is only one of the numerous merchants where one has to have gone to membership based authorizing - the equivalent applies to Adobe, Autodesk, JetBrains, the rundown continues endlessly. The need to recollect licenses and oversee qualifications through legitimate procedures, apparatuses and individuals has not changed in the more than 20 years - each one of that has changed as the place we go to get the information and that the authorization decides that the application will persistently advance. In any case, the requirement for a legitimate Software Asset Management program remains - we just may need to think of another title.

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