SaaS Management

  • 6 min read

5 Questions to Ask For Selecting the Best SAM Tool for Your IT Team

Ritish Reddy

1st May, 2023

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Choosing the right Software Asset Management (SAM) tool is necessary to manage your IT software assets in one place. However, with so many options available, it can take time to determine which tool is right for your organization.

From 360-degree view dashboards to integrations with other apps, what are the ideal features you should look for while choosing the best SAM tool for your business?

SAM tools have varying features, and knowing your requirements and what to look for will help you select the best SAM tool for your company. 

You can find below some of the existing features of SAM tools through which you can manage your IT assets in a better way. 

• Software inventory: An efficient SAM tool keeps track of all software assets, including installed software, licenses, and related agreements, everything in one place.

• License management: It helps you track and manage software licenses, including monitoring the number of licenses in use and ensuring compliance with licensing agreements. Also, it tracks and manages software vendor contracts, including renewal dates and terms. 

• Integration with IT systems: A SAM tool supports seamless integration with other IT systems, such as IT service management (ITSM) and configuration management databases (CMDBs), to provide a complete view of software assets.

An ideal SAM tool contains all the above three integral components to manage software assets. Choosing one will help you enjoy the following benefits: enhanced visibility over your SaaS stack, compliance management, and more. 

Benefits Of Using SAM Tool 

Using a Software Asset Management (SAM) tool can bring many benefits to an organization. Here are some of the most important ones:

• Cost-effective: By using a SAM tool, you can avoid overspending on software licenses you don't need and ensure you're using the licenses you have to their fullest potential. This can result in significant cost savings.

• Stay compliant: SAM tools can help you keep track of your software licenses and ensure you're using software legally. This helps avoid the legal and financial consequences of using unlicensed software.

• Enhance collaboration: An effective SAM tool can improve collaboration between different departments and teams within your organization, ensuring everyone can access the information they need to make accurate decisions about software assets.

• Gain better visibility: It provides a complete view of your software assets, including installed software, licenses, and agreements. This helps you make informed decisions about your software investments.

Using a SAM tool can help your organization save money, stay compliant, streamline processes, make informed decisions, improve security, enhance collaboration, and gain better visibility into your software assets.

Ask These 5 Questions While Choosing A SAM Tool For Your IT Teams

To make an informed decision, it's crucial to consider a range of factors, including your organization's needs, budget, and existing IT infrastructure. By carefully evaluating your options and considering key points, you can choose a SAM tool that meets your business needs and helps you streamline certain processes. 

Here are a few critical points that you must consider before buying a SAM tool for your organization:

1. Does it Provide a 360-Degree View of Your Software Assets & Inventory?

An adequate SAM tool helps you manage your software assets and inventory by providing a complete, centralized view of all software assets within the organization. This includes information about software licenses, usage, deployment, and other relevant data, such as vendor contracts and purchasing history. 

This helps you understand your software landscape and optimize the software spend by identifying underutilized assets, compliance issues, and areas for cost savings. 

Also, it provides detailed insights on software upgrades and renewals, ensuring that you stay updated with the latest software versions.

How can you discover SaaS apps with a SaaS Management Platform (SMP)?

Zluri being a SaaS management platform helps discover and monitor all the SaaS apps used within your organization with its 5 discovery methods.

Along with its discovery engine, Zluri has the world's largest app library, with over 225,000 apps, which empowers it to gain visibility in your SaaS landscape and provides 100% SaaS discoverability.

The platform seamlessly integrates with SSOs like Okta and Google Workspace to collect various data types, including directory information and lists of authorized apps.

Once Zluri identifies the SaaS applications, it provides a complete overview of the entire SaaS landscape on a single platform. This includes information about the number of licenses, apps, users, and their costs.

By providing this information, Zluri helps you to manage your SaaS applications better, eliminate redundancies, and optimize costs. 

2. Does It Come With License Optimization & Management Capability?

An efficient SAM tool can optimize software license spending by identifying underutilized licenses and suggesting alternative license models that align with user needs and usage patterns. 

For e.g., You purchased 100 licenses for a particular application, out of which only 75 are used. With the help of an efficient SAM tool, you can identify the 25 underutilized licenses and assess the reasons for the underutilization. 

It can automate many manual processes involved in license management, such as tracking license expirations and renewals, which helps you to be more efficient and proactive in the license management process.

How does Zluri help here?

Zluri's dashboard gives in-depth info on licenses, subscriptions, contracts, and perpetual, including the cost and numbers of apps, allowing for better decision-making. 

The platform also displays the total number of licenses per user, renewal date, license type, cost, and payment method, giving you full control and visibility over your SaaS applications and licenses.

Not only for your employees, but you can also keep track of licenses assigned to users external to the company, like freelancers, consultants, etc. By helping you optimize and manage your software licenses, Zluri ensures that you get the most value from your software investments.

3. Does it Allow Seamless Integration and Scalability?

An effective SAM tool must be able to integrate with other enterprise systems, such as service desks, IT service management (ITSM) tools, and configuration management databases (CMDBs). This helps you to streamline your IT operations and improve the flow of information between different systems. 

It must be able to integrate with other systems and data sources as needed, so you can easily scale up and add new assets and users. 

Due to their seamless integration, these tools help to improve collaboration between different teams and departments within an organization, as they provide a single source of truth for software asset information.

Zluri's seamless integration & scalability 

Zluri's seamless integration and scalability allow it to fit well within an organization's existing infrastructure and accommodate growth. 

Zluri is built on scalable architectures that can accommodate the growing needs of organizations. Hence, it provides support for increased numbers of software assets and users. 

Zluri supports in-depth integrations, with over 800 applications growing monthly. As a result, the platform can be easily integrated into an organization's existing systems and processes without causing disruptions or requiring significant changes. This leads to improved efficiency and a more streamlined workflow. 

4. Does it Automate Vendor Management 

A SAM tool with automated vendor management can help you automate the tracking of vendor licenses and contracts, ensuring that your organization remains compliant with vendor agreements and avoids penalties for non-compliance.

By automating the vendor management process, the SAM tool helps you have centralized vendor information, automates tasks, and ensures complete transparency between both parties. It can also automate contract and renewal management, making you stay on top of contract expiration dates and negotiate better terms with vendors.

Efficient vendor management with Zluri

With zluri, you can get the most out of your vendor management process; from negotiating prices to keeping track of renewals, Zluri does all. It helps to store software vendor contracts and purchasing history, making it easier for organizations to track software renewal dates and negotiate better pricing.

Zluri is a single source of truth for vendor contracts, and it helps you get easy access to metadata to cut down software spending and improve overall ROI significantly.

5. Can It Help You Mitigate SaaS Risks?

A SAM tool with risk management capability will help you to identify, analyze, plan, mitigate, and monitor any risk in your organization.

It tracks, monitors, and analyzes every app and user to identify any app-related risk and the users that caused improper resource sharing. This prevents risk and safeguards your organization's IT assets.

How does Zluri help you mitigate software risks?

Zluri is capable of managing your organization's risk and gives emphasis on security. It first thoroughly assesses the applications to identify any potential security risks. This assessment includes a range of checks, such as reviewing the application's architecture, configuration, and data flow and conducting vulnerability scans.

Once the assessment is complete, Zluri provides a dashboard that summarizes the findings and presents them in an easy-to-understand format for critical apps and critical users. From events to data-shared information, it provides unparalleled security and compliance information for all the SaaS applications used within your organization. And with thorough auditable logs of important activities, you can always stay informed and in control of your security posture.

This dashboard includes details about the identified risks and also assigns a risk score for every SaaS app to help IT admins prioritize their efforts.

1. Events (Recent Security Breaches): Zluri continuously monitors security breaches related to SaaS applications. Whenever there is any news related to security loopholes or data breaches of an application on the internet, Zluri fetches that data and displays it under the events tab. This includes the date of the event and an assessment of its impact (high/or low impact) on the application's security. This affects the overall risk score of that particular application. 

2. Data shared: Secondly, Zluri assesses the threat level of an application by evaluating two factors:

• What kind of access does a user have?

• What kind of data is shared with the user?

The higher the level of access and the more critical the actions, the higher the threat level assigned. For instance, an application with access to delete data from Google Drive is considered more of a threat than one with access to only read data from Google Mail.

3. Compliance: Thirdly, compliance with numerous compliance standards and regulations is also considered when determining the risk score. An application's level of security is directly proportional to the number of compliances it adheres to. Slack, for instance, is compliant with all major global compliances, making it more secure than applications with fewer compliances.

4. Security Probes: Lastly, Zluri collects security information by technically scanning from third-party websites like ssllabs, Immuniweb, and imirhil. It then calculates the weighted average of these security grades and displays the results on its dashboard, rated from A (highly secure) to F (low security). Also, it gives you real-time scanning whenever you click on the Rescan button.

Additionally, Zluri provides reports of inactive users, restricted 

Choose a revolutionary platform that will make your IT processes streamlined. Choose Zluri, and schedule a demo today!

About the author

Ritish Reddy

Ritish is one of the co-founders of Zluri, the SaaS management tool for IT teams. He leads the Marketing and Partnerships as part of his role. Before Zluri, he was part of the founding team at KNOLSKAPE and Co-Founder at Cranium media. Ritish is an MBA graduate and is passionate about building, and scaling businesses ground up. He is an avid reader and loves exploring book stores and libraries in different parts of the world. He loves painting with his 4-year-old daughter.