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Simplifying your Software Asset Management Journey

Thu, 23 Sep 2021 19:50:39 Z

Software Asset Management (SAM) involves a complex set of challenges, requiring high levels of support and engagement blending the right mix of people, processes, and tools.

In the face of this complexity, in organizations that lack the required sponsorship or dedicated SAM functions, managing software assets can disproportionately fall into the asset management tools themselves. When such solutions are left to their own devices (no pun intended), the organization typically doesn’t realize their full value. The tools end up either not used at all or used in a very limited capacity, often just as a discovery tool.

Organizations need a clear, simple view of software assets to ensure they are being managed properly and to mitigate risk. But trying to create that simple view can require a great depth of research, knowledge and intelligence of all devices and applications across the IT environment. With changes such as the recent move to remote work, which probably reflects a permanent shift, the environments themselves are also becoming increasingly complex and growing exponentially without boundaries.

Increasingly, the role of decision-maker and even purchaser of new technologies is moving out of IT. Recent Gartner research shows that the response to the COVID-19 pandemic and the move to remote work models has made digital business the dominant technology trend, with new initiatives “increasingly funded outside the CIO budget.” (Gartner, Forecast Analysis: IT Spending, Worldwide.) This trend is only going to make managing IT Assets harder and more cumbersome.

Deploying a solution to gain insight and a greater understanding of what you need to know can be kin to using a satellite navigation system when driving to a new destination. You know where you need to go, but not how to get there. The navigation system gives you the data required to get you there step by step.

Discovery

Data, data, data!! A sat nav system needs to understand all roads and conditions to plan the optimum journey. Step one for understand Software Assets begins with good Discovery. This gives you the ability to cover your bases, consider all aspects of technology that need to be discovered, normalised, reconciled and presented back to the business in a meaningful format. Wouldn’t it be good if we could see what we had, where each piece is located, and what gaps currently exist in these solutions?

Visibility

So much data, which way to turn? It’s all very well brining in lots of data, but we need to make sense of it. When driving, we can’t make our way just using GPS coordinates. Similarly, product and executable names on their own won’t tell you much. You need context.

A resource such as Ivanti’s Definitive Software Library can provide that contextual information: software deployments, license requirements, who has what software installed, what SaaS applications are in use (or not!). With this information in hand, you are equipped to reduce waste, mitigate risk, and increase compliance. Easy, right?

Manage

Well, no, it will never be easy – any more than driving in heavy traffic is “easy” because you’re using a sat nav system. In neither case can you solely rely on the tools to get you there. In driving, you need your own skills as a driver and a well-maintained vehicle. In managing assets, you need processes and people to manage data.

Like your vehicle in traffic, your IT environment is in constant motion. Just as you can’t avoid road hazards that you can’t see, you can’t control, secure, or manage assets that are not made visible—nor can you consider the risks or opportunities these risks represent for your organization. Driving blind is never a good idea.

Like with your satnav, a predetermined route can be changed during the journey to avoid an unforeseen event. Data is the key driver here. By having all the information on hand, you can make decisions related to software assets with increased confidence. “What are the impacts of doing X? How do we budget for project Y?”

Such information can help accelerate transformation projects or increase resources to make that cloud-first strategy a reality. Whether the IT organization is managing infrastructure projects, managing software subscriptions, or planning a datacentre migration, informed decisions can make all the difference. Starting with discovery, and augmenting all business data such as contracts, agreements, warranty, invoices, purchases and more, your organisation is better positioned to proactively monitor and manage IT Assets, especially complex software ones.

Risk

Gartner reports that the disruptive shift to remote work has introduced whole new vectors for risk in an already uncertain landscape. (Gartner 2021 Planning Guide for Security and Risk Management.) While, as noted above, IT spending may be moving out of IT, ensuring management of a vast expanding IT estate by the IT organization itself significantly mitigates risks.

Risks will come in different guises:

Provisioning of hardware and software – correct policies and user rights need to be deployed. Ensuring no wastage on hardware or user subscriptions.
Unapproved applications, security risks, patching requirements.
Ongoing support of all IT Assets, ultimately ensuring user productivity has minimal impact as well as maximising investments on all IT Assets.

“You’ve arrived at your destination”

Unlike taking a trip in your car, managing software assets doesn’t have a final destination. At the start of this story, I mentioned the traditional reliance on people, process, tools for successful management of software assets. Like a sat nav system in the hands of an experienced driver, Ivanti Neurons for Spend Intelligence gives you the insights required to manage your software estate and keep on driving into the future.

Schedule a demo to see how Ivanti Neurons for Spend Intelligence can guide you on the journey of getting your software assets under control.

Software Spend and the 80/20 Rule

Wed, 04 Aug 2021 15:00:01 Z

A common theme running through a variety of management techniques and methodologies, everything from Agile to Lean to Six Sigma is the Pareto Principle – also known as the 80/20 rule. Named after economist Vilfredo Pareto – who observed that 20% of the pea plants in his garden produced 80% of the peas, and that 80% of the land in Italy was controlled by just 20% of the population – the Pareto Principle tells us that, generally speaking, about 80% of effects tend to come from about 20% of causes.

Productivity guru Kevin Kruse of the Extreme Productivity podcast explains it this way:

While it doesn’t always come to be an exact 80/20 ratio, this imbalance is often seen in various business cases:

20% of the sales reps generate 80% of total sales.
20% of customers account for 80% of total profits.
20% of the most reported software bugs cause 80% of software crashes.
20% of patients account for 80% of healthcare spending

In business, applying the 80/20 rule means looking for those opportunities to get the biggest possible bang for your buck. It means constantly striving to find that 20% of what you do that can deliver 80% of the results you’re looking for.

When it comes to managing software spend, most businesses face what could be described optimistically as “tremendous opportunity for improvement.” Gartner analyst Stephen White writes that 80% of companies surveyed report that between 1 and 49% of their licensed software is “shelfware.” That is to say, they’re paying for it, but they aren’t using it.

And ponying up for unused software is only part of the equation. In an average month, an organization may spend 40 hours or more per SaaS vendor managing usage, overall spend, and contract renewals. Preparing a Microsoft Enterprise Agreement true-up can take two months and consume up to 120 hours of productive time. A full contract renewal may take 300 or more hours to complete.

The seemingly obvious remedy to these challenges is to implement a Software Asset Management (SAM) solution. A good SAM system will automate a lot of the tracking, monitoring and research required. But there’s a catch. In fact, there are several catches. To be effective, the typical SAM solution requires extensive knowledge, managed services, licensing expertise, and tool administration training. So, to manage (and potentially reduce) the costs associated with managing your software assets, you have to incur the costs not only of implementing the system, but also of training, supporting and maintaining a whole team of SAM experts.

This is where the 80/20 rule comes in. What if you could get 80% of the benefit of implementing a full Software Asset Management team at only 20% (or less) of the overhead?

It may sound too good to be true, but it’s not.

The trick is to take a lightweight approach, without compromising on the need for complete and timely software asset information. While most SAM efforts are focused on enabling you to create time consuming ELP (Effective License Position) reports – which tend to fall quickly out of date and which, it turns out, are not always what you need, anyway – a growing number of organizations are finding that what they really need is a solution that captures the software asset information and provides quick and intuitive access to it. A summary of software asset data, continuously updated and presented in dashboard form, provides immediate insights to support renewals and to mitigate against the dreaded shelfware. Quick and easy access to asset data also ensures a more secure environment, enabling IT managers to isolate and exclude out-of-date software versions lacking the most recent security protections.

And just imagine what you can accomplish, both in terms of managing software assets and elsewhere, with that 80% savings on overhead.

Businesses are finding exactly this combination of capabilities in Ivanti Neurons for Spend Intelligence, which provides instant insights into your software landscape and application spend for on-premises, cloud, and edge environments. Spend Intelligence helps you improve operational speed, asset visibility, and utilization. It provides detailed analysis within minutes, presented in dashboards showing your licenses, purchases, and instances so you can track your purchase history, upcoming license renewals, contract expirations, and ongoing spend more effectively.

Schedule a demo to see how easily Ivanti puts the 80-20 rule to work for you.

Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff but Consider This with Sweating IT Assets

Thu, 04 Mar 2021 17:33:46 Z

Sweating IT assets, ever heard of them? It might seem nonsensical to imagine an IT asset perspiring from being overworked, but it’s actually not a far-off analogy. When a business delays the purchasing of new technology as long as possible, it’s called ‘sweating assets.” Companies have their reasons for this strategy, but it usually comes down to one thing: an attempt at cost-savings.

Do sweating assets actually help to achieve this and where do they miss the mark?

Let’s imagine you just bought a brand-new car. One thought guaranteed never to cross your mind as you drive off the lot, “Will this get me home? Will I arrive on time, without issue?”

New and shiny products are now considered to be so reliable that we do not give it much thought about them going wrong. However, as things age it is inevitable that it will start to fail. Most things begin to deteriorate along with our confidence in their ability to do the job they were meant to do. As consumers, we are increasingly leaning towards replacing instead of repairing; buy a replacement and avoid the concern of reliability and time wasted to repair. Problem solved.

But everything comes at a cost.

More than ever, CIO’s and CFO’s are looking to avoid, or at least delay, the cost of replacing items. The term “sweating assets” has long been a discussion point with customers due to the consequences (and sometimes, unintended consequences) of stretching out the life of IT assets. You may have experienced this first-hand when you joined your organisation and computers were replaced everything 3 years. You may well be reading this on a corporately owned device that’s well past that. (Don’t all submit requests at once!).

A recent article published by CIO.com highlights the ways that 2020 has reshaped and permanently transformed IT, transitioning their role from a supporting function to a business partner.

Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff, Do Sweat the Big Stuff

‘Day Zero’ is the perfect state of any IT asset; the hardware is at its peak, coupled with approved software that is up to date, patched and configured per your organization’s IT policy. From this day onwards, ‘Day Zero + N’, begins the decline in performance, reliability and security.

Laptop batteries start to degrade and remove their portability for the end user, system bugs appear, applications crash, drivers fail, and that dreaded blue screen of death starts to appear on a regular cycle. Declining hardware performance also impacts software ability to perform as it needs to. As devices age there is a direct correlation in the time taken to support and maintain them.

Impacts to the Business

Increased support costs – High incident rate against an asset, replacement parts, increased Service Desk time to support.
Lost productivity – End user downtime has a direct impact on the business and can directly affect bottom line.
Unplanned outages – The data center is also one that can have a detrimental impact to the business where servers or even network devices can fail due to age related factors.
Security concerns – Hardware and software require continuous vulnerability assessment, updates and patching. Older assets can become increasingly harder to manage and secure.

So, what’s the solution and what can businesses do today to support the age of digital transformation?

With Ivanti’s secure, manage and service capabilities, new and aging devices will always maintain a continuous lifecycle of being able to ensure assets remain effective in service and as close to a ‘Day Zero’ state as possible.

Our priority to you, is to maintain a positive security posture throughout the entire lifecycle from the operating system down to third party applications. Organisations see a comprehensive insight to security gaps, where to plug them and deliver on the results.

The customer experience is something that also needs to be carefully managed and safe guarded throughout an asset’s life, minimizing the need for support and making it as effective and efficient as possible. Better still is to detect and remediate before the end user is even aware of an issue. Support is made easier and efficient through reduction in the number of analyst tools, the number of applications and screens and having effective actions at hand for remediating end user issues with seamless integration with Service Management practices. This additionally supports auditability and trends that can be acted on to further improve the customer experience and avoid negative impacts to an organisations bottom line.

IT can look to Ivanti Neurons to provide a hyper-automation platform that empowers enterprises to proactively, predictably and autonomously self-heal and self-secure devices and self-service end users. So don’t sweat the small stuff but before you sweat IT assets, consider the impact it will have on making your Everywhere Workplace possible.

Your Personal IT Assistant: Ivanti Cloud

Fri, 01 May 2020 20:51:53 Z

For many IT organizations, widescale remote working brings new requirements for supporting both end-users and assets. This is stretching resources and capabilities for many IT teams as they adapt to this change without compromising quality or security.

Until recently, the office was the traditional hub of connectivity—not just to business systems, but also among employees. But interaction and collaboration between employees now require technology at many touch points: your laptop, home internet connectivity, collaboration tools such as Microsoft Teams, as well as business critical applications.

With many devices, applications, and variables all requiring remote monitoring and support, traditional IT departments are facing new challenges. A reactive approach to IT issues (finding solutions, testing, and implementing them) has always been time and resource intensive, not just to IT but to end users and ultimately the business.

Increasing the service desk’s capacity and capability traditionally meant increasing headcount, tool sets, training, and sometimes all three at once. Each dimension has their own challenges and complexities when trying to maximize these investments, not to mention the financial implications. A comprehensive approach also should ensure productivity, business continuity, security, compliance and resource optimization. Needless to say, there is no one right approach.

The Need to Shift Left

Service desk teams, the first line of support, often escalate incidents when they can’t resolve the incident themselves. Even after escalating incidents to an already busy second or third line queue, these teams often require several other tools to diagnose and resolve incidents. Tools such as inventory or endpoint management tools, security solutions, all bringing their own associated configurations, installs, and individual profiles to manage users and assets.

However, escalating incidents to second or third line teams often means more delays, complexity and costs. Take for example this typical service desk incident. An end-user is unable to send emails and can’t find anything in the self-service portal to fix it themselves, so they call the service desk. Once taking the call, the first line service desk technician remotely controls the user’s device—using operating system tools to analyze the problem. If the analyst can’t resolve the incident, they escalate it to the second line. The second line analyst remedies the incident by clearing Outlook temporary files and checking connectivity.

It has long been a strategic goal to shift left for most (if not all) organizations, reducing the resolution time and costs of Incidents. In the previous example, it would have been faster and less costly if the first line technician had an automated process to identify, diagnose, and resolve the email incident once it was detected. A recent poll by SDI and Ivanti found that between 61-70% of IT incidents were resolved by first line support and between 11-20% incidents were escalated to second line support, showing there are improvement opportunities.

A shift left approach, as shown below, is the idea of bringing a resolution much closer to the end user, quickly, and efficiently.

The advantages of a shift left approach are well understood:

Reduces unplanned work
Minimizes escalations
Enables teams to be more proactive
Frees practice managers to focus more on key projects

One key requirement is giving IT teams the right tools, driven by automated processes, to enable more shift left outcomes.

Ivanti Cloud Assistants: “Do a lot more for a lot less”

Ivanti Cloud is helping organizations reduce the time it takes first line teams to resolve incidents and reduce escalations to second line teams. Ivanti Cloud recently introduced new self-healing capabilities, such as automated bots that continuously monitors more than 60 key areas (and growing) out-of-the-box. First line staff quickly find they have their own new personal IT Assistants, helping them 24x7.

With Ivanti Cloud, your first line staff will always know what to do next, detecting and resolving issues before they escalate or morph into a growing number of IT tickets. One benefit is you’ll find it easier to eliminate redundant hardware purchases before allocating more budget to something because you couldn’t easily locate it.

Speaking of not locating devices, do you know what devices on your network are unmanaged or unused? Lost devices and assets can open unknown security vulnerabilities. Ivanti Cloud is helping IT teams better understand their current security risks present in real time. When it comes to mitigating security risks, timely information is always at a premium, especially when combined with the actions required to get the job done quickly.

Here are some examples in these areas where Ivanti Cloud can benefit IT teams and organizations:

Security and Compliance

Can you see if devices are being overloaded with non-business approved applications that could impact their performance? Now ensure user devices aren’t in breach of software policy, violate terms, or even contain malware. Automate the identification and removal of blacklisted applications to meet security and compliance mandates.

Resource Optimization

Do you have the insight of virtual machines or licensable software that is not being used? Now automate their removal or provide alerts to the right teams to remediate.

Monitor logon performance for end users or servers, identifying when times may be too long, then remediating and automatically raising an incident. Discover application or device issues that would normally not be reported by users.

User Productivity

Can you get an alert of a laptop that has a near full or failing hard disk? Something a lot of end users are unlikely to be aware of disk issues until it’s too. Now IT can be alerted and have a ticket automatically created with all the necessary details to address the issue before it becomes a problem.

Business Continuity

Can you spot connectivity issues with key and critical business solutions such CRM tools, internal applications or any SaaS application? Ivanti Cloud can continuously monitor defined websites for latency and reachability to make you aware should they fall below defined thresholds.

Ivanti is truly making proactive IT the new norm by identifying problems before the end user is aware and impacted, but also automatically suggesting and implementing resolutions.

A Boost to Your ITSM Solution

Ivanti Cloud integrates with Ivanti Service Manager and other ITSM solutions to ensure all issues and resolutions are logged throughout, ensuring no identified issue, resolution or change occurs without a ticket being logged with the resolution too!

Ivanti Cloud’s shift left approach proactively works to avoid users having to raise tickets and incidents with the service desk. Coupled with widespread remote working, users can no longer walk over to IT for a remedy which could have left them potentially out of action and having to wait to receive a replacement device in the most extreme case.

Since Ivanti Cloud makes it possible to identify and resolve issues remotely without user interaction, the end user may not even be aware of a remedy being applied to an issue before it caused any perceived issues. That’s a better outcome that everyone will appreciate.

Help for the Data Center

Ivanti Cloud also brings capabilities that help manage and monitor Data Center operations. Ivanti Cloud offers Patch Intelligence, allowing detailed discovery and analysis of patching requirements and status.

Visually engaging real-time metrics makes it easier to ensure services continuity and provide insight into security status, including status of SSL certificates or even present an overview of your Security Health as seen below:

Ivanti Cloud, the "always on IT" solution, gives the insight, the visibility and the remedy that can be applied automatically. Providing business continuity whilst also increasing security and governance within the data center and maintaining user productivity all in one, securely hosted solution that supports multiple Operating Systems with remote control abilities and with zero infrastructure requirements.

Make 2020 the Year to Help Your Self-Service

Thu, 02 Jan 2020 15:00:00 Z

When smart phones started to become a real thing back around 2007, they received a number of criticisms that were mainly borne from not realising the revolutionary way we’d start to consume technology. Nobody realised how we’d end up using such tech and how it would be universally adopted and eventually become the new norm.

The old adage “we’ve always done it this way” springs to mind. Touchscreen wasn’t particularly new but wasn’t really liked as much as old fashioned buttons. You’d be a brave person to try and pry away an old-fashioned style of phone that had physical buttons from a corporate executive and try to offer them a touchscreen equivalent.

So iconic are the first touchscreen smart phones now that they fetch many thousands of dollars in the second-hand market as we can now appreciate how they changed the way we consume technology.

Whether we agree with it or not, children are now able to pick up a tablet or phone and work their way through the latest episodes of a well-known loveable pig, and that’s before they’ve even learnt to say their first words.

Here is where the value lies: with zero training and no prior knowledge, this is a platform that allows an organisation’s end user to obtain and request an ever increasing number of services that they need on a daily basis in order to perform their jobs successfully.

Frictionless IT

This is not a new term, but what does it really mean? Forbes describe it as “…friction appears as fragmented customer profiles, departmental silos, inefficient workflows, shadow IT, slow feature deployment, a disparate martech stack, redundant processes and anything else that gets in the way of or slows customer and user experience.”

Ultimately businesses need their employees to have at hand all the resources they need to be effective and productive whilst the business maintains control, security and cost.

Ivanti Service Manager breaks down these silos by offering an Enterprise Service Management platform, allowing end users to request a wider variety of services, quickly and easily.

Whether you want to request an application, onboard a new hire, or a simple break\fix “I need assistance” request, it has never been easier to Self Service your own requirements.

Enterprise Service Management is a significant investment for organisations that makes the adoption and usage vital. Ivanti Service Manager scored highest in the Gartner critical capabilities; two key areas assessed were the “User Experience and Flexibility” and “Self-Service/Request Fulfilment”. This reinforces the principle of how important that user centric IT has now become.

Out of the box, Ivanti Service Manager comes with 80 service request offerings, covering IT, HR and Facilities.

When it comes to IT Service Management, Ivanti Service manager is Pink Verified for 13 ITIL practices.

Allow Ivanti to take care of the legwork background, with automation following the business rules and logic that determines how each request needs to be handled and ultimately fulfilled.

These are the workflows (120 out of the box) that remove inefficiencies and will now provide the backbone to the success of effective inter-departmental process, whilst importantly delivering exactly what end users requested in a timely manner.

Finally, we can now offer organisations a pick and choose menu of services for their end users that is just as easy to consume as it is for a toddler to pick and choose hours of cartoons on a tablet before he or she has even learnt to read. Or perhaps better still, be guided to more educational activity-based games.

So just like children with tablets, your organisation can gain instant value by enabling end users to request access to the things they need to get the job done—“Help-Your-Self-Service”.

Software Asset Management – View vs. Do

Fri, 06 Dec 2019 22:19:31 Z

If you can’t see it, you can’t manage it. Any Software Asset Management (SAM) guru will tell you that visibility is a key requirement that forms the fundamental basis for a successful SAM program.

With vast sprawling IT environments that are now without boundaries and with the inclusion of IoT devices, visibility will continue to be the a key fundamental in the discipline of Software Asset Management.

Ivanti Asset Manager: Free Demo

Discovery

The first technical step that needs to be undertaken therefore is Discovery. Discovery is a statement that’s a bit similar to: "I have some stuff out there, somewhere... not sure what or where, precisely."

Discovery then trawls through multiple layers of your IT estate and presents you back with a lot of data on many differing types on hardware assets (desktop, laptops, network devices, printers, etc.) and maybe even details on software assets contained within the hardware.

The more that comes back, the more needs to be managed accordingly—but we’ll get to that shortly.

Inventory

The next technical step is then what’s termed as Inventory. This aligns closely to Gartner’s Six Critical Activities to Optimize Enterprise and Data Center Software License Compliance and Spending.

Inventory gives us even more rich data—not just the highlights, but the detail within. It’s in this detail that we as Software Asset Managers can then start to be strategic and tactical and actively manage the vast mix of assets deployed today.

What we have so far is a fantastic View, and as stated before, this is key as it sets the trajectory for everything that benefits from SAM, e.g., reduce spend, increased security, reduce risk, increase governance.

Many vendors, certainly in the SAM point solution market, will provide these great views, insights and data, but this only forms part of what should be considered a full SAM solution.

Actionable Software Asset Management

Ivanti takes SAM to the next level. Not only does Ivanti provide the View piece but also the Do. From the Discovery and Inventory steps, many datasets and metrics have already been supplied.

As an agile business that wants to ensure harmony across all solutions, a one vendor approach that enables View and Do—automate tasks, business rules, and workflows natively that ensure a consistent and holistic approach to ITAM and more specifically, SAM.

The Do—Actionable Software Asset Management, natively within Ivanti:

Discovery and Inventory, from Datacenters to End User Devices. Ordered and managed through Service Management with ‘out of the box’ CMDB, customers will be able to keep an audit log and track all changes to the environment.

Changes that can be initiated via automated workflows geared toward reclaiming unused software. In turn, updating License Optimizer to reflect within the license records that a license has been released.

Maybe you’re an end user that wants to request software? The Service Catalogue provides a rich end user experience that will allow request and approvals all within one platform for a seamless end-to-end experience.

The approval triggers flow to Endpoint Management—deploy software to the right user and the right device. Ongoing software metering, remote control capabilities to support end users or optimize the end user experience and productivity with built in capabilities to speed up log on times.

Ongoing management of deployed software is also built into the Ivanti solutions.

Security plays a vital role within SAM. With security breaches being the new normal, the rush is on to implement effective security practices and ensure proper patch compliance. And with the rising number of vulnerabilities in third-party applications, this includes solutions that install critical security updates for more than just Microsoft products.

Governance of applications is also possible with Application Control. Now you can manage user privileges and policy automatically, at a granular level, and allow for optional self-elevation when exceptions occur. Plus, you can prevent unauthorised code execution and enforce software licencing. Whilst the View is critical to SAM, the ability to execute on the ‘View’ and thus, ‘Do’ allows you to execute your SAM strategy efficiently, easily and natively with one vendor.