The 2020 coronavirus outbreak has meant a significant change to the way the majority of businesses operate. As well as facilitating a steep rise in remote working with collaboration tools like Teams, WebEx, Skype, Zoom and Slack, organizations have also had to rapidly adopt cloud-based and virtualized software applications to keep business running as smoothly as possible.
While this mass adoption of new tools and applications has indeed enabled businesses to remain productive, the after-effects of this change will now need to be handled. For ITAM teams, this means the significant challenge of tracking down what software has been deployed, as well as how it is licensed and whether their organization is entitled to use it. They will also need to determine if any of these applications will be required in future operations to face the changing world of work.
To help these managers get a handle on their deployments, seize back control of their software estates and applications, and ultimately ensure that ITAM receives the attention it requires from senior leadership teams, we have compiled a nine-step guide that will take you through how to:
1. Capture all your recent software & cloud purchases
2. Review your new contracts
3. Predict and plan for your future software needs
4. Optimize your new and future licenses
5. Re-prioritize your approved list of publishers & suppliers
6. Assess whether these new services have impacted organizational security
7. Prepare for an audit of your re-modelled IT estate
8. Expand your ITAM capabilities
9. Update your business continuity policy, to ensure resilience in the future
Our ‘Post-Pandemic How-To Guide’ delves into more detail on each of the above points, and is designed to help ITAM teams take back control of their applications, ensuring they are appropriately licensed and are optimized to meet their current and future organizational needs after what has been a disruptive time for all.
About the Author
Larry Murphy, Licensing Lead, Livingstone North America
Larry Murphy joined Livingstone in August 2019. He is a results-oriented data science professional with 20+ years in the IT industry. 5+ of these years have been in Asset Management, primarily in Software Asset Management and Larry is an IAITAM Certified Software Asset Manager (CSAM) and an IAITAM Certified Asset Management Security Expert (CAMSE). In his previous role Larry played a major role on the Audit Defense Team where he has supported 3-4 audit per year.
In his role at Livingstone North America, Larry is a Team Lead for the Licensing Practice and is the primary delivery resource for our largest US account.