Optimize Your Cloud-Based Investment
As organizations continue to migrate from desktop and data center environments towards mobile, cloud and hybrid cloud environments, legacy methods for detecting the installation and usage of software applications become less relevant for license management purposes. Likewise, traditional discovery and inventory approaches for hardware devices do not work for tracking the utilization of cloud-based computing platforms.
New management methods are required to ensure that your organization:
- Maximizes the value received from its investment in a cloud computing strategy
- Remains compliant with subscriptions and license agreements
- Does not contract and pay for significantly more computing capacity than it needs
- Optimizes its cloud-based software subscription levels and costs
- Successfully completes effective cloud migration projects
Solution Overview
Since almost all billing for cloud-based services and software is tied to expected and actual usage, having visibility into usage metrics and trends is critical. This information can help you find a balance to make sure that your organization has the computing capacity that it needs without oversubscribing and paying too much just to be safe.
Eracent’s solutions provides this level of data and reporting, which supports initial cloud migration planning and verification, as well as ongoing usage level metrics and subscription validation to optimize your cloud spend.
Cloud-Based Infrastructure Utilization Reporting
Eracent’s IT Management Center (ITMC)™ provides detailed metrics around the utilization of all leading cloud-based computing platforms like Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft® Azure, Google Cloud Platform, Oracle Cloud and others. Whether your organization is committed to 24×7 Reserved capacity or is utilizing On-Demand capacity, you can be sure that you are making an optimal decision and are only paying for the computing power that you actually need.
ITMC Discovery™ provides reports that show:
- Relationships between virtual instances and dedicated host machines, where applicable such as with AWS
- CPUs, storage capacity, IPs, and bandwidth
- Cloud subnets
- Cloud billing information
The Eracent system also provides hypervisor-level details and offers faster availability of data compared to tools provided by the cloud platform vendors.
SaaS Application Management
The Eracent solution provides tracking of user access and utilization tracking around SaaS applications, with at-a-glance dashboards as well as detailed reports that reconcile and compare usage versus subscription levels. Eracent makes it possible to manage all aspects of your SaaS software in one place, including subscription agreements, assignments of licenses to users, and all associated costs, payments and chargebacks.
By utilizing multiple approaches to gathering application usage information, the system can provide details about any SaaS-based application, offering broad product and platform coverage in a single solution. These monitoring methods include out-of-the-box Eracent Data Extractors (EDEs) that gather key usage and licensing data for major applications such as Salesforce and Office365, discovery of any locally installed components, or following URLs that clients access for certain applications.
The system provides tracking of user assignments for each SaaS-based product, and it monitors user access and usage activity to determine who is actually using each application. By reconciling transactions with assignments, it can report on any exceptions and overages, enabling license managers to quickly address any potential problems.
Subscription Validation
Any organization that utilizes SaaS software such as Microsoft Office 365 or Adobe Creative Cloud can use the Eracent solution to ensure that users have the functionality that they require without spending more than necessary.
The system makes it possible to:
- Match subscription plan levels to actual application usage
- Identify assigned users who may no longer require a subscription
- Bring attention to redundancies where a user may have both a perpetual license and a subscription license.
Continuous License Reconciliation (CLR)™
Eracent’s Cloud Infrastructure Utilization Monitoring and SaaS Application Management are provided using specialized functionality in ITMC Discovery™ and ITMC Lifecycle™. Reporting for cloud-based platforms supplements the broader data from Eracent’s Continuous License Reconciliation (CLR)™ family of license reconciliation and optimization tools. The CLR modules provide Effective License Position reports and license optimization recommendations for products from any publisher. This helps ensure license compliance, minimizes publisher audit risk, and identifies opportunities to reduce licensing expenditures.
CLR modules are available to manage complex license models including:
- IBM’s Processor Value Unit (PVU) and Subcapacity-based products
- Oracle® database applications
- SAP® Applications and Engines
- Microsoft SQL Server
- License manager-based applications, including Engineering-oriented products
- and many more.
For more information on Cloud Infrastructure Utilization Reporting and SaaS Application Management or any of Eracent’s automated license management and optimization solutions, contact Eracent today!
