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Software Asset Management of the Future

Related products:Freshservice
  • August 27, 2019
  • 8 replies
  • 115 views
M
Contributor

Not long ago, procurement, roll-out, and management of software was completely owned by the IT teams. This enabled them to lay the foundations of Software Asset Management (SAM)  practice to track, manage and optimize software utilization and spend. One of the main objectives of SAM was to ensure that organizations remain compliant with the license terms they had negotiated with vendors.


Over the past few years, SaaS has exploded in popularity. In the current scenario, employees want enterprise applications to be well designed, easy to use and less clunky. This has led to a rapid adoption of SaaS to meet enterprise software needs.

For IT Teams, the rapid adoption of SaaS means

  • Licensing is simplified since most SaaS vendors offer a “pay as you go” model

  • Overhead on maintaining the applications is minimal as the SaaS vendors maintain and update all the applications by themselves. 


However, this shift to cloud and SaaS presents some new challenges.

  • Traditional discovery methods do not work for SaaS. IT teams do not have any way to understand actual utilization of SaaS applications and optimize the available licenses and spend on the applications

  • SaaS has led to decentralized purchasing decisions. Anyone in the organization can start using a SaaS product (paid or free). 

  • Terminated employees sometimes retain access to applications as IT teams do not have the information needed to de-provision users from all applications. This results in wasted license spend and can also result in data security risks as a terminated employee might still have  access to sensitive data.

 

All these challenges are leading to a shift in the focus of Software Asset Management. SAM practice is becoming more relevant than ever. IT teams are now expected to manage the spend and utilization of SaaS applications, just like how they used to manage on-premise applications in the past.

 

 

Help us build the right solutions for you


As we gear up for this future (indeed, it’s already upon us!), we’d like you to help us build the right solution for our users. Please take a few mins to help us understand the challenges you face in managing SaaS applications by filling out this survey. 

8 replies

L
Contributor
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Hi,


This is something I am currently looking at as part of the bigger on and off boarding process, I have been struggling to come up with a work around in Freshservice to do this and have spoken to many software suppliers who do this but has more functionality than we need ie single sign on and MFA, whats the timescales?


I'd also be happy to get on a call to talk through the use cases we have been trying to satisfy.


Thanks


Laurence

M
Contributor

Hi Laurence, Let's set up a call. I'll reach out to you offline. 

N
Contributor
  • nvergin_20100
  • Contributor
  • December 11, 2019

Leveraging SSO, Just In Time (JIT) provisioning and service/app integrations with a Directory-as-a-Service (DaaS) provider wherever possible can help IT with onboarding and offboarding of employees.  It would be nice to be able to reflect those workflows and dependencies within Freshservice so that we know, for instance, when a new JumpCloud (DaaS) account is created and group memberships are assigned, what additional accounts get created as a result of that or which services are dependent upon JumpCloud for account creation.  So basically having software/account hierarchy of dependencies would be helpful.   For instance, Zoom accounts are not created on their own but as a result of JumpCloud group memberships and JIT provisioning.   Conversely, there are some instances where the creation process is automatic but deprovisioning is manual.  For example, Office 365 accounts can be created and driven from JumpCloud, but we need to go in manually and remove them during employee offboarding.  Having those sorts of details stored centrally and readily available to agents would be helpful.




michael.christopher
Community Debut

Add the ability to create some custom fields when defining the Saas application. 

And expose those fields in reporting. I like this product, but the lack of being able to report on a custom field is frustrating.


We need to capture not only the application, but the user's access level within the application.

M
Contributor

Thanks for the feedback, Michael. User access levels is a great suggestion and we are looking at adding this soon. Custom fields and Reports are also on our backlog. More on this soon.

D
Community Debut
  • dominik
  • Community Debut
  • July 5, 2020

Would love to add some insights on this feature from a Managed SaaS Ops provider to our customers.  We have both the insight into the companies themselves and our own use cases for Freshservice. Happy to have a call as well! 

We currently also work with Torii and Intello on SaaS Discovery as well as Bettercloud for automation. 

Would love to have those as integrations available.  

D
Skilled Expert
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  • Denise.S.P
  • Skilled Expert
  • July 28, 2021

User access levels would be exactly what we are looking for with our organization!  Please keep  us updated with when we might see this available.

ronalmorgan
Community Debut
  • ronalmorgan
  • Community Debut
  • October 31, 2023

As the business landscape evolves, Software Asset Management (SAM) is becoming increasingly automated and integrated to streamline operations and ensure compliance. Just as MOFA Attestation Dubai is essential for legal compliance, partnering with SAM experts in Dubai is vital for future-ready businesses.

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