Article Better your cloud business? Add transparency to the licensing and IT landscape
By Insight UK / 14 Jan 2022 / Topics: Cloud
By Insight UK / 14 Jan 2022 / Topics: Cloud
No matter where you are in your cloud journey, managing your business as a managed service provider, independent software vendor or hosting provider is more challenging than ever. The more dispersed your IT landscape and licence management becomes, the more of a struggle it is to control operations and optimize infrastructure processes, let alone to develop a future strategy for your business.
How can you still make well-founded decisions when the business is becoming increasingly diffuse?
Every month, the burden of software license reporting takes a lot of time and energy. You have to collect information about users, usage and costs from different tools, Excel sheets or even phone calls to customers to get accurate and compliant reports. With the risk of severe fines for under-reporting or unnecessary costs for over-licensing.
Then there is your business itself. Most service providers are in a hybrid situation, juggling between the traditional model and the cloud to deliver services to their customers. That means different information flows scattered across internal processes. How do you make informed strategic business decisions if you don't have all the information you need ready at hand?
Before you know it, you are stuck in the daily routine. You don’t allow yourself the opportunity to step back and evaluate your organization from an objective point of view. If you are unable to step back, you are unable to look forward and decide where you want to be in, say, five years. A tricky scenario in today’s fast changing market. Is there a way to avoid this pitfall?
One way out is to set up an accurate and transparent overview of your infrastructure and IT licences. This can be done most efficiently with an automated tool. Such a tool is first and foremost a solid basis for software licence compliance and cost management, which in many cases means a cost reduction. It offers full insight into the 'as is' situation.
But the more sophisticated tools take it further. They also identify opportunities for improvement and ways to optimize the infrastructure intelligently by using cloud technology. That's when such a tool starts working for you.
Insights based on clear and accurate assessments allow you to determine exactly which scenarios are best for your customers. And what is good for your customers, is good for you. The tool helps you define individual cloud roadmaps for each customer and therefore forms a solid basis to make strategic decisions for a healthy business future.
Fragmented information has a major business impact, resulting in inefficient processes, wasted time and money, and poorly informed decisions. Visibility is the key to improve. An intelligent tool with a data-driven dashboard gives you all the facts and figures you need. It puts you in pole position to minimize costs and optimize systems and processes in order to be profitable, make well-informed decisions and generate new opportunities. For remember: the better your insight, the more successful your growth.
Contact one of our cloud specialists to find out how we can support you, whether you are designing your first workloads in the cloud, work entirely cloud-based or in a hybrid cloud model.
As a multi-vendor software licensing, workload and platform specialist, we can guide you through all stages of your strategic cloud journey with a series of workshops, assessments, services and best practices. From the first exploration of cloud or hybrid opportunities and benefits to support and optimization after migration. No matter where you are in your journey, we help you to find new ways forward and accelerate your business.
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