Staying on top of software assets is an endless challenge for modern IT organizations. How many software licenses does your company actually own? Are those assets properly allocated to avoid overspending? What about end-of-life software posing security vulnerabilities? For many companies, lack of visibility into software assets opens the door to compliance audits, unnecessary costs, and risk exposure.
Most of the existing organization’s software spend goes toward unused, forgotten applications. Without full oversight, organizations end up buying capabilities they already own or maintaining insecure legacy platforms. Meanwhile, they remain dangerously exposed to software license audits leading to true-up fees or penalties.
This reactive mode of firefighting issues as they arise is symptomatic of a broken software asset management (SAM) approach. But implementing an automated, IT software asset management best practices flip the script to get ahead of many problems before they happen. A strategic software asset lifecycle management can deliver cascading benefits across IT, finance, security, and operations through better data, improved controls, and reduced waste. The time has come for businesses to take back control of software assets.
What is Software Asset Management?
Software asset management (SAM) is the practice of managing and optimizing the value derived from an organization’s software assets and investments throughout the entire lifecycle. SAM programs aim to provide visibility into license ownership, allocation status, and usage to control costs and comply with entitlements. Moreover, SAM presents a holistic view of an organization’s software asset portfolio, ensuring that these assets are efficiently utilized, fully compliant with licensing agreements, and aligned with the broader business objectives.
With IT environments growing increasingly complex across disparate systems and locations, many companies lose visibility into what software assets they own and how those assets are utilized. This opens the door to a number of problems:
- Overspending – Organizations overbuy software licenses for capabilities they already own but can’t find in siloed systems. Lack of visibility prevents consolidation onto existing licenses.
- Compliance risks – Without centralized software tracking, there’s no way to confirm installations align to licenses owned during vendor audits. Non-compliance exposes companies to true-up costs or legal issues.
- Security vulnerabilities – End-of-life software that remains undetected past planned upgrade cycles poses data breaches and system outages.
- Inefficient processes – Manual, fragmented software management workflows across teams cause delays in provisioning, retirement, and integration.
A software asset lifecycle system brings together people, processes and technology to surface a single source of truth around software ownership and usage. IT leaders gain insights to control costs, employees follow best practices to enhance governance, and integrations automate and optimize workflows across asset lifecycles.
Advanced asset lifecycle management include license optimization, compliance tracking, contract oversight, vulnerability management, and cross-team process alignment. With a reliable IT software asset management, software transitions from being an unreliable cost center into a controlled, strategic asset.
Benefits of a Software Asset Lifecycle Program
Implementing a robust software asset management (SAM) plan across people, processes and technology delivers tangible benefits:
- Cost Optimization
Organizations can eliminate the waste of renewing licenses purchased but left unused, while also preventing overbuying new software when reallocation would suffice. Tighter license reconciliations refine software budgets to optimized levels based on actual usage and business needs rather than guesswork.
- License Compliance
Businesses reduce uneasiness around compliance checks which threaten penalties reaching millions in true-up fees or legal liabilities. Keeping usage aligned to entitlements also minimizes security exposures when audits uncover unlicensed software which likely lacks proper patching.
- Reduced Security Risks
The visibility delivered by SAM allows IT teams to promptly retire outdated software past vendor support lifecycles. Legacy platforms pose tremendous risk of cyber breaches or system outages causing reputational damage and productivity losses. Automated alerts ensure vulnerable software gets upgraded or replaced right on schedule.
- Greater IT Process Efficiency
Streamlining cross-team processes around the SAM system also alleviates the manual burden associated with daily provisioning, change management and more. IT employees can focus less on paperwork and more on strategic initiatives that create business value when workflows integrate through a central SAM platform.
- Strategic Software Maximization
Comprehensiveness translates into better decision making around software investments. Executives can tie spend directly to realized business capabilities, adjust budgets to appropriate levels, and determine build vs buy scenarios relying on data instead of intuition. Every IT purchase informs the next based on maximization of existing assets. SAM allows software to become a strategic asset optimizing present and future spending.
Identifying a Reliable Software Asset Lifecycle Management
Selecting the right software asset management tool is crucial for ensuring the long-term success of your SAM strategy. This involves critically in finding a comprehensive solution that aligns with your organization’s specific needs and goals. When selecting a solution, focus on these key aspects:
Comprehensive Coverage of the Asset Lifecycle
Full Lifecycle Support: The program should encompass all stages of the software asset lifecycle, including procurement, deployment, maintenance, utilization, and retirement. This ensures that every aspect of software management, from initial purchase to eventual decommissioning, is effectively monitored and controlled.
Scalability and Flexibility
Adapting to Growth: The software must be scalable to accommodate your organization’s growth and changes over time. This means it should handle increasing numbers of assets and adapt to evolving business processes without losing efficiency.
Customization Options: Flexibility in customization allows the solution to be tailored to meet specific organizational needs, ensuring that it remains relevant and effective as your business evolves.
Compliance and Risk Management
License Compliance: Effective SAM tools should have robust capabilities to ensure compliance with software licenses, reducing the risk of legal and financial penalties.
Proactive Risk Management: The solution should proactively identify and manage risks related to software assets, such as non-compliance, security vulnerabilities, or end-of-life issues, to prevent potential problems before they escalate.
Integration with Existing Systems
Seamless Connectivity: The ideal solution should integrate seamlessly with other IT management tools and systems within the organization, such as IT service management (ITSM), procurement systems, and financial software, to provide a comprehensive view of software assets.
Advanced Analytics and Reporting
Insightful Analytics: Advanced analytics capabilities are crucial for understanding the usage, performance, and cost-effectiveness of software assets. This includes the ability to track, analyze, and report on key metrics and trends.
Customizable Reporting: The ability to generate customizable reports is important for meeting the specific reporting needs of different stakeholders within the organization.
User-Friendly Interface and Support
Ease of Use: The user interface should be intuitive and easy to navigate, making it accessible for users with varying levels of technical expertise. This encourages widespread adoption and effective utilization of the system.
Reliable Support and Training: Robust customer support and comprehensive training resources are essential for ensuring that users can effectively utilize the software and troubleshoot any issues that arise.
In considering these factors, solutions like those offered by Revnue can be exemplary in meeting these criteria – providing a robust, scalable, and user-friendly software asset lifecycle management. This approach ensures effective management of software assets, aligning them with your business goals and driving growth.
Summary
With hardware and software environments escalating in complexity, organizations lose visibility into IT assets leading to overspending, compliance gaps, vulnerable software, and manual inefficiencies. These fundamental problems expose companies to financial, security, and productivity losses.
Implementing a sound software asset management (SAM) strategy realigns software as a controlled, strategic investment through comprehensive visibility, improved governance, and cross-team process automation. Investments can be optimized, vulnerabilities remediated proactively, license reconciliations conducted in auditable fashion.
However, IT software asset management remains a journey demanding executive sponsorship, employee training, updated procedures, and the right software backbone tying capabilities together. Look for robust discovery mechanisms in leading software asset management software like Revnue to reveal on-premises, cloud, and custom-built applications. Prioritize analytics, process workflows and automation to ensure insights translate into outcomes secured over time.
With growing IT complexity, an effective SAM program is crucial to the health of today’s enterprise. Fortunately, the right SAM strategy and software delivers the visibility and control needed to optimize and secure software assets across the IT journey. Organizations finally have the ability to stabilize software costs and risks. Is your organization up to the challenge of discovering your software?
