1.2.18
Flexera the company that’s reimagining how software is bought, sold, managed and secured, today announced it’s teaming up with KPMG Australia to provide an end-to-end Software Asset Management (SAM) solution, leveraging Flexera’s market-leading SAM technologies and KPMG’s worldwide team of software license management professionals.
SAM is no longer just about software license compliance. Today’s focus is on a solution that helps organizations optimize software usage and control costs. With trends such as migration to cloud, SAM helps organizations better understand what they own and use. This lets them determine what should be migrated to the cloud, and how to allocate these costs across the organization.
SAM can also mitigate security risks by reducing the ‘attack surface’ through software portfolio consolidation, and help meet compliance with General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR). If organizations don’t know what software they own, deploy and use, they open themselves to risks in these areas.
KPMG has extensive experience in assessing and enhancing SAM and Software License Optimization solutions, utilizing over 300 subject matter experts from their global team with specific and detailed knowledge across multiple vendors license agreements, models and metrics.
Together, Flexera and KPMG:
• Reduce license consumption, which cuts software costs
• Lower ongoing spend on software licenses, maintenance and SaaS subscriptions
• Lower the risk and cost of software license audits
• Reduce the software footprint through rationalization and consolidation – removing redundant, unused and End-of-Life (EOL) software. This decreases support costs and security risk associated with software vulnerabilities.
• Identify security and cyber threats and support their remediation
• Identify, assess and support the mitigating strategies to comply with GDPR
• Gain control of the software estate with repeatable, automated SAM processes
• Manage Bring Your Own Software and License (BYOSL) programs to move on-premises software to the cloud; track and manage cloud-based software
• Negotiate favorable contracts by understanding software usage and needs
• Provide IT Strategy and Operations groups visibility into software licensing and usage data to help understand how their applications are being consumed, support migration to cloud, and help with cost allocation of software and cloud services across organizations
Checklist to Assess SAM Maturity
Organizations answering ‘no’ to the following questions could benefit from an increased focus on SAM:
• Do you have a designated SAM function armed with effective tools?
• Are license entitlement details gathered in a single repository?
• Are software deployments regularly quantified and reconciled with entitlements?
• Are you ready to renew your license contracts with large vendors like SAP, Microsoft, IBM or VMware?
• Do you provide senior management regular reporting on software effective licensing positions?
• Do you know what software should be migrated to the cloud?
• Does your business have control of the costs related to software and cloud services?
• Have you considered how software and cloud services fit into your three-to-five year IT strategy?
• Do you understand what software could expose you to current and/or emerging security risks?
