Activating a SaaS often requires little more than a sign-up form and a credit card -- and that means many decision-makers are deploying SaaS applications without consulting their IT departments or service providers. This is especially true within businesses leverage outsourced IT partners. Those customers either don't want to pay for extra time or extra projects -- especially when they believe they can manage SaaS setups on their own. This can create leave IT departments in the dark about what kinds of solutions are in place, which ones are being used, and the costs associated with the solutions.
To mitigate those challenges, Snow Software recently launched Snow for Cloud and enhancements in Snow’s Oracle Management Option and Snow for ITSM. The company claims that Snow for Cloud provides IT leaders with actionable views of their SaaS environment so they can easily assess and manage cloud usage and spend. Through the insight provided by Snow for Cloud, IT leaders can identify overspend from duplicate, unused or underutilized SaaS subscriptions, the firm says.
According to the company, Snow for Cloud features include:
Discovery
- Automated discovery of over 1000 SaaS applications
- Discover virtual machines across public cloud environments
- Usage detail of SaaS applications and IaaS environments
- Collect data such as license positions automatically
Managment
- View application, environment, and device usage across on-premise, public, private clouds and mobile
- Reduce cost through automated entitlement import for SaaS vendors like Office 365, Zendesk, Google's G Suite and more.
- Examine insight into cost drivers for departments and users
- Highlighted risks associated with software usage in public cloud environments
Optimization
- Identify and reassign duplicate and unused SaaS subscriptions
- Assign cost-efficient SaaS subscriptions per user
- Identify and deprovision zombie VMs running in public clouds
- Proactively manage and negotiate SaaS renewal agreements
Governance
- Automatically identify overentitled SaaS subscriptions with detailed, component-level usage information
- Reduce administration costs with self-service access requests for SaaS subscription and IaaS environments
- Build governance and cost containment with role-and-responsibility based access for IaaS environment creation
- Avoid wasted spend with time-bound provisioning of expensive subscriptions and IaaS environments.
There are also new enhancements to Snow’s Oracle Management Option and Snow for ITSM. These platforms provide CIOs and IT leaders with an overview of Oracle databases deployed in their environments, the company claims. Snow for ITSM can identify assets, software, and users from multiple data sources which can improve CMDB data accuracy and help improve Help desk efficiency.
Cloud Cost Management Tools Proliferate
No doubt, cloud cost management tools are catching on with customers and service providers that want to get a handle on such costs. Recent examples include:
- ParkMyCloud recently extended its cost management tools across Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform.
- Botmetric integrated a cloud cost savings calculator with Alexa voice.
- Nerdio launched an Azure Cost Estimator.
- Both BMC and IBM introduced multi-cloud cost management tools in 2017.
- And Kaseya acquired Unigma for cross-platform cloud cost management last year.
