With IT budgets shrinking, organizations are looking for ways to reduce costs. Software asset management (SAM) is the process through which you can manage, maintain your software assets. It helps IT organizations identify areas of potential cost savings and optimize their software resources.  In this blog, we discuss 5 ways SAM helps reduce costs.

1. Improved Planning

Firstly, software asset management can help your organization reduce costs by providing insight into your organization’s existing IT assets. It allows you to maintain accurate records of purchases, terms and deployments. As a result, you’ll be able to better understand your organization’s actual software requirements and more accurately plan for your short-term and long-term software needs. Therefore, eliminating the costs associated with over-licensing or over subscribing.

2. Optimized Contract Management

Organizations often end up paying reinstatement fees for software licenses because their renewal or expiration dates have lapsed. However, a software asset management tool can help you avoid unnecessary reinstatement fees. Specifically, by alerting you when your software licenses are approaching their renewal or expiration dates. Therefore, ensuring you have enough notice to effectively manage your options and avoid costly reinstatement fees.

3. Re-Harvesting & Reusing Licenses

You can reduce costs by re-harvesting or reusing licenses. However, only if you have the necessary visibility into your organizations license usage. A software asset management tool makes it easy identify software licenses that can be re-harvested or reused. So, when a user moves to a new role, gets promoted or leaves the organization, instead of investing in a new license, you can simply re-harvest the license and assign it to another user.  

4. Avoid Penalties and Fees

Being found to be out of compliance in the case of an audit can result in costly true-ups and contract penalties. A software asset management program maintains accurate records of license usage, so you can more easily identify compliance issues. Allowing you to address them in advance and minimize financial risk.  

5. Robust Security

Lastly, a properly implemented software asset management program can help improve your organizations security. This is because a software asset management program provides an added layer of visibility into your software estate. So, you can ensure the software you have installed is healthy and up to date. Failure to keep your software up to date can leave your organization exposed. All of this puts your organization in a better position to reduces the chance of the costs associated with a major security breach.

Need help implementing a software asset management program? Check out our Savings as a Service solution! We help you gain complete insight of your software, cloud and SaaS portfolios and continually work to save you money.