Addressing 'unruly' SaaS spend

Snow Software has launched Snow SaaS Management, a new version of its award-winning software-as-a-service (SaaS) management solution to support IT leaders’ need to take control of their sprawl, manage surprise SaaS costs, mitigate compliance and security risks, and optimize overall spend. Leveraging Snow’s significant experience in managing SaaS and available exclusively on the Snow Atlas platform, Snow SaaS Management provides complete visibility across an organization’s IT environment to accurately identify and manage SaaS usage with the most comprehensive discovery engine in the market.

Empowering IT to take control of shadow SaaS

According to a recent Snow survey, 44% of IT leaders said ‘employees adding new SaaS applications without notifying IT’ is a top concern when managing SaaS applications within their organization. With increasing end-user purchasing power, SaaS vendors have created even more self-service demos, trials and purchasing ability for their customers – agitating and broadening blind spots for IT teams. By removing friction in the purchasing process, end-users bypass most controls that may have been in place previously to assess the suitability and security of an application by IT. Without centralized visibility into SaaS application usage (whether authorized or unauthorized), SaaS cost, application sprawl and security risks can quickly spiral out of control. And IT teams still maintain responsibility for managing these pain points, even if they are not the internal owner of the application itself.

“We believe that organizations need a SaaS management approach that eliminates the silos between users, departments and technologies that yields more insights into what applications are being used – and their overall impact,” said Sanjay Castelino, Chief Product and Customer Officer of Snow. “With our years of experience in SaaS management and rapidly expanding capabilities available on our Snow Atlas platform, Snow is uniquely positioned to deliver further value to organizations for decades to come. This is a significant moment for Snow as we broaden the reach of our SaaS management solution to the market, taking us another step toward achieving our larger vision of delivering Technology Intelligence to all organizations.”

More impact with comprehensive visibility and verified usage

Snow SaaS Management provides market-leading visibility into an organization’s SaaS environment with the most comprehensive discovery engine – a combination of API connectors, agent, single sign-on (SSO) and browser extension – revealing paid, free, known and unknown SaaS applications to eliminate blind spots.

Along with comprehensive discovery, Snow SaaS Management provides organizations with verified usage data that offers not only data on application logins but details the duration of time spent in the application down to each individual user. This is an essential feature for organizations to go beyond surface-level understanding of license allocations and highlights opportunities for optimization based on actual usage. In addition to maximizing optimization, this capability supports organizational security by identifying usage of unsanctioned and free applications.

Powered by Snow’s market-leading Data Intelligence Service (DIS), Snow SaaS Management automatically recognizes, normalizes and augments SaaS application data for more than 23,000 SaaS applications. Armed with this insight, organizations can approach renewals with confidence, eliminate waste and redundancies to save costs and secure their SaaS environment to mitigate risks.

Single, consolidated view into SaaS use

Built on Snow Atlas, the only unified cloud-native platform delivering insights across entire IT landscapes, Snow SaaS Management consolidates comprehensive details on SaaS applications used within the organization, regardless of discovery method, in one place. With a streamlined user experience, IT leaders can see the organization’s SaaS application portfolio and act on the insights provided to drive value from their SaaS investments.

Formerly offered as an add-on to its award-winning software asset management (SAM) solution, Snow SaaS Management is now available as a standalone product. As organizations’ Technology Intelligence requirements grow, they can adopt additional capabilities leveraging the shared services of Snow Atlas.  Other capabilities and benefits of Snow SaaS Management include:

• Optimize costs for expensive enterprise hybrid applications. Snow SaaS Management provides organizations with optimization for complex enterprise applications like Microsoft 365 or Adobe Creative Cloud. With hybrid applications, organizations need to understand online as well as installed usage to identify opportunities for downgrading from premium tiers to less expensive tiers.  

• Immediate ROI with automated data normalization, augmentation and configuration of vendor portal API and SSO connectors. In addition to providing usage data for more than 23,000 SaaS applications, IT leaders can configure SaaS API connectors in minutes and immediately see areas for optimization within their organization such as licenses assigned versus licenses purchased. Snow SaaS Management also improves time to value by leveraging Snow’s DIS to recognize, clean and enrich SaaS application data from multiple discovery sources.