Founded in Stockholm in 1997, Snow Software has rapidly evolved into a market leader and the largest dedicated developer of software asset management and cloud management tools. Today, it offers a comprehensive set of cloud, software, hardware and infrastructure solutions for organizations around the world.
Most companies today, particularly with the impacts of Covid-19, are paying more than they planned for their software contracts. To deal with this, Snow Software provides solutions SAM (Software Asset Management) such as Snow Inventory, License Manager and Cloud Management Platform (CMP), with the Embotics Commander.
The platform is designed to empower organizations to optimize and improve software licensing and license management while reducing costs by providing insight and control of software consumption across mobile, desktop, on-premises datacenters and private or public cloud.
Today, more than 6,500 organizations worldwide rely on Snow Software's SAM and CMP platforms to manage software licensing and cloud consumption.
The problem of visibility into software consumption and usage
Software asset management (SAM) and cloud governance (CMP) continue to be a topic on the agenda of top executives and especially in the information technology area.
The risk of being audited by software manufacturers, the increase in cloud consumption and resource disruption for information security reasons has never been greater.
Organizations take a long time to identify if they have rights to use the software, or if they have bought too much, wasting millions on unused software.
Using inventory software alone doesn't fit all requirements as we now have a slew of complex licensing types, versions and models for thousands of software titles.
Snow Software and Information Security
Software asset governance cannot be far from information security governance.
“The growing number of applications, software and mobile devices running in IT environments – some without the knowledge of the IT staff – makes it challenging for companies to obtain a complete inventory of their hardware and software assets,” said Peter Björkman, Director of Snow's technology.
“IT asset managers and cybersecurity teams need to work together to achieve full visibility and secure their IT environments.”
Snow Software invests in the information security portfolio to help organizations strengthen cybersecurity and compliance programs with complete insight into their entire technology landscape.
The Snow Software Risk Monitor
Part of Snow Software's complete intelligence platform, Risk Monitor automatically provides a comprehensive, contextual view of where high-risk vulnerabilities and personal information lie, providing the visibility you need to proactively mitigate potential threats.
With Risk Monitor, companies can quickly identify, prioritize and remediate software vulnerabilities based on up-to-date data and intelligence on their current technology ownership
A recent study of Accenture found that the number of security breaches has increased by 67% over the past five years, while the financial impact of cybercrime has increased by 72% over the same period.
However, most breaches still come from cybercriminals exploiting known vulnerabilities. To combat these ongoing threats and help strengthen security protections, Snow's Risk Monitor identifies and prioritizes critical vulnerabilities based on National Vulnerability Database (NVD) of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).
Risk Monitor also helps organizations protect user data and meet GDPR and LGPD goals by identifying applications based on Snow's database.
Risk Monitor uses the same inventory agent for SAM asset management and vulnerability identification, providing organizations with a single source of information that is augmented with trusted third-party data as well as data from software vendors.
Risk Monitor and its capabilities
With Risk Monitor, organizations will be able to:
- Identify and prioritize software vulnerabilities, patches or edge intrusions;
- Audit and enhance the capabilities of existing security software with detailed inventory data from the information technology environment;
- Automate the identification and mapping of vulnerabilities, aligning with schedules required by areas of information security and eliminating manual processes;
- Monitor and support software license management with detailed metrics including end of life, end of support and vulnerability data;
- Discover and inventory software or applications containing sensitive personal information to meet GDPR and LGPD compliance items.
With these capabilities, Snow's platform provides the complete visibility needed for internationally recognized cybersecurity frameworks such as nIST Cybersecurity Framework, the Center for Internet Security (CIS), and those published by the International Organization for Standardization and the International Electrotechnical Commission (such as ISO 27001) .
According to a Ponemon Institute and IBM 2018 study,the average cost of a data breach is nearly US$ 3.9 million. Despite rising costs, security incidents continue to rise at alarming rates, with some reports estimating as many as 5 billion records exposed in the last year alone.
In an effort to minimize cyber threats and incidents, Snow Software's new governance and risk capabilities identify known vulnerabilities linked to software currently deployed and in use within an enterprise.
Out-of-the-box visibility allows companies to prioritize and mitigate data risk across cloud, on-premises and hybrid environments.
Risk Monitor is a SaaS subscription offering, fully integrated with the rest of the Snow platform, but not dependent on it. For more details on Risk Monitor, speak to one of our consultants.
Snow Software for Microsoft and Oracle
THE Snow Software, has enhanced its platform for governance and optimization for Microsoft and Oracle, along with advanced analytics for software vulnerability and compliance risks.
The latest capabilities of the Snow platform provide organizations with the end-to-end visibility and manageability needed to maximize the value of their technology.
With these capabilities Snow Software extends automation to help organizations control their biggest cost pain points in software, Microsoft and Oracle contracts, while unlocking productivity and innovation across the enterprise. New features include:
- Advanced optimization for Windows Server, including automated recommendations for optimal edition licensing and License Mobility Rights;
- Automated entitlement imports to Oracle dramatically reducing the time and risk associated with an audit or governance routine;
- Detailed insights into IBM and VMware partitioning to ensure Oracle license compliance and optimization;
- Dynamic exclusions of assets and compliance risks that are in environments such as production and test;
Snow Software has also created new functionality and advanced analytics to reduce risk across the business of mega-vendors such as IBM, SAP and VMware.
These innovations maintain Snow Software's recognition as a leader in Magic Quadrant for Asset Management Tools of Software and Cloud Management Platform with Embotics, for the second year in a row.
Snow Software for Cloud Management
Cloud management platforms (CMPs) enable organizations to manage multi-cloud services and resources (private and public cloud). This includes providing governance, lifecycle management, brokering and automation for managed cloud infrastructure resources.
Below we list the eight areas that a CMP platform should work in an environment:
- Provisioning and Orchestration
- Automated Service Request
- Resource inventory and classification
- monitoring and analysis
- Optimization of cost and workload management
- Cloud Migration, Backup and Disaster Recovery
- Security, Compliance and Identity Management
- Resource packaging and automated delivery
- Cloud operation cost reduction.
Snow Software Embotics has continually improved its solution's support for containers, intelligent workload placement, DevOps, and expense management.
This includes Kubernetes inventory and core operational management capabilities, along with the ability to automatically deploy workloads to optimally sized cloud environments based on a dynamic multifactor ranking system.
Snow Software Embotics focuses on companies that require a significant degree of complexity to manage public cloud and on-premises infrastructure resources.
The product is delivered as an on premises platform that can be configured on-premises or as a fully managed SaaS offering.
Licensing is based on a per-year subscription model, typically calculated by CPU or instance.
Snow Software Embotics maintains multiple technology partnerships with AWS, Microsoft Azure, VMware and Google Cloud Platform, improving configuration management, IT service management (ITSM) and disaster recovery/migration.
Snow Software also offers a wide range of out-of-the-box integrations for cloud, containers, DevOps and modern application tools.
Gartner estimates Embotics' CMP revenue between US$ 12 million and US$ 17 million per year, with more than 300 customers.
The Snow Software Embotics solution spans most of the functional areas of cloud governance (eg, provisioning and orchestration, service request, cost and inventory management, and classification), with a particular focus on provisioning and orchestrating large and complex virtualized environments , usually found in large companies.