SLAM | Service Management | Data Intelligence| End User Computing |EATS

Software Compliance

A key component in Asset Management is that of managing the software assets. There are a number of tools that will deliver software to desktop and servers automatically like Microsoft's SMS, Altiris, Zenworks and many others. Although some are able to deliver a portion of software compliance capability, we backend our software compliance / asset management service offering by utilising Managesoft's Compliance Manager product. This enables us to deliver a complete compliance service by matching software installations with the actual license agreements.

In addition, we can implement a complete solution within your organisation or offer a managed service.

The Challenges

IT Compliance challenges can include:

Compliance Manager Solution

Complexities

As quoted in the ITIL SAM publication – “Best Practice Software Asset Management” version 1.2, SAM is more complex and more demanding than Hardware Asset Management and therefore the SAM processes need to be greater in scope and more comprehensive in content.

Software by its nature is more complex and has the highest cost. Organisations need to be sure that they are keeping track of all their license types and actual installs of the software. In addition, supporting multiple environments and the need to match purchases to the actual inventory and usage really makes it difficult.

Our Approach

With so many things to have to consider, the best way is to break up the problem and solution into a four step process:

Discover - Gain Control - Optimise - Predict

Discover: Discover and populate the asset database with relevant information. Plenty of tools can search and report back information, the problem is in being able to interpret and make sense of the information that has been gathered!

Gain Control: Capture contract, purchase details and processes, organisational details. In addition, establishing a Configuration Management Database (CMDB).

Optimise: allocating the IT assets to the specific configuration items. Compliance, consolidating, license harvesting and auditing what you need. The ability to identify assets using a current software recognition library that can be easily updated with your custom applications. Finally, assisting with regulatory compliance requirements such as SOX.

Predict: This is when you are able to better estimate your software requirements and not be kept at the mercy of vendors when it comes time to renew and invariably over provision and over spend on software.