As the initial rush to comply with government work-from-home (WFH) mandates begins to settle down, asset managers may want to return their focus, with increased diligence, on IT asset inventory.
And while the vision of how organizations will function in the “new normal” is still being determined, the significant impact of COVID-19 on the immediate needs of the organization has required some new approaches on how to handle more pressing short-term inventory decisions.
In an effort to create a productive WFH workforce, organizations have experienced an immediate increase in hardware and software costs.
And even with a completed transition, employees may have found additional equipment or technology needs to maintain productivity, incurring further costs and often without contacting IT.
Additionally, with the current economic downturn, there is speculation that vendors will increase compliance audit efforts. With all organizations emphasizing the need to cut costs and preserve cash on hand, IT asset managers need to do their part to be ready.
Here are a few considerations that companies may have for their inventory checklist:
Long- and Short-term Workforce Reduction
Has the organization experienced layoffs or furloughs? Depending on the length of time of staff reduction, it may be beneficial to evaluate deployed software licenses.
Reclaiming orphaned licenses and reassigning them can help the organization realize cost savings immediately. More long-term gains can be had by reducing the on-hand licenses altogether.
Consider Possible Application Redundancies
Check for different software titles that serve a similar function and determine if some of them can be retired.
If multiple team collaboration tools are used, such as Teams, GoToMeeting, WebEx, or even Zoom, determine which one is either more commonly utilized or most cost-efficient, and consider removing the unnecessary redundancies.
Eliminate non-essential applications
In some cases, as changes in working conditions have played out, there may be applications that have fallen out of use entirely, either because of a change or elimination of business function, or an application having been replaced by an equivalent traditional or cloud-based solution.
Now would be a good time to recover these unused applications while they see the least usage.
Maintain Control of SaaS Sprawl
As organizations scrambled at the onset of the pandemic, out-of-budget purchases were made to cover immediate needs, and rollout the usage of multiple SaaS applications increased overnight.
As crisis-driven spending slows down, it is an ideal time to optimize purchased and potential licensing needs for the short-term, and deal with unused monthly license purchases, saving crucial budget dollars.
Now is the time
According to Gartner, there is an urgent need to cut costs with a more short-term outlook.
“Look for costs that can be impacted immediately. Think here in terms of in-year impacts. Eliminate, reduce or suspend items that will impact in one, six or even nine months, not in years.”
Open iT provides a suite of IT asset management tools can help organizations understand their IT landscape by providing metrics on utilization of applications, servers, storage, databases and services across the entire enterprise. For more information, please contact an Open iT representative today, and see how our solutions can help you realize your cost-cutting goals.
