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Snow Atlas

Score8 out of 10

12 Reviews and Ratings

What is Snow Atlas?

Snow Atlas is a cloud-native platform built from the ground up to provide Technology Intelligence for today’s hybrid enterprises. Based on a microservices architecture and standardized APIs, Snow Atlas provides a unified foundation for Snow’s IT asset management, SaaS management and FinOps solutions.

It can be used to display all of the technology in an enterprise's IT stack, or to find opportunities to enhance, optimize and efficiently manage technology assets and share data with stakeholders across the organization, identifying cost savings to achieving sustainability goals.

  • Insights - Discover unassigned, unused and non-compliant software licenses. Displays applications that are nearing end of support or end of life.
  • Cost savings - Eliminates software overspend and redundancy, and matches users with the appropriate license tier.
  • Risk mitigation - Uncovers shadow IT, including free and trial SaaS applications. Displays prohibited software that remains in your environment.

Top Performing Features

  • Software and hardware inventory tracking

    Discovery and management of hardware and software inventory

    Category average: 8.6

  • License management

    Tracking license agreement compliance to ensure that infrastructure is neither over nor under licensed

    Category average: 7.5

  • Asset lifecycle monitoring

    Monitoring asset lifecycle from acquisition to retirement

    Category average: 7.7

Areas for Improvement

  • Contract management

    Tools to assist in managing purchase orders and contracts

    Category average: 6.9

  • Asset relationship management

    Asset relationship management is the ability to see relationships between assets to help with troubleshooting

    Category average: 7.9

Great Product, with rooms for improvement

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Software License Management of on-prem products SaaS Usage of Cloud products

Pros

  • Visibility of Applications, User, devices in your estate
  • License compliance reports
  • SaaS Usage Visibility
  • Shadow IT Visibility

Cons

  • SaaS connectors are not always kept up to date usually when Publishers make changes to their Portal API's. Appears to be little active monitoring on Flexera/Snow Atlas' side unless a customer reports an issue with the data being returned. Fixes are normally implemented as as quickly as possible, depending on whether it is considered a Bug Fix or a Feature Enhancement.
  • Users - Snow on SAM - No ability to add or bulk import manually. Completely reliant on AD Discovery or Entra ID Discovery
  • Users - SaaS module - No ability for bulk update of Users for things line 'Online only' or 'Qualified' user accounts. This is an issue in larger companies where you have thousands of SaaS Users being reported through connectors like Microsoft E365.
  • SaaS module Dashboard does not allow for filtering of insights to a specific Publisher.
  • Not all Back end SMACC functionality form Snow License Manager have been exposed to the front-end access, as Snow Atlas does not allow customer Administrators access to the back end or SQL databases.
  • If you are migrating from on-prem Snow License Manager to Atlas, migration tools have not been created by Snow and will require a Project to handle your migration. Without Migration tools, we had to use a Managed Service Partner who had to manually create a lot of their own scripts to retrieve data that cannot be downloaded via reports and imported into Atlas. Any attachments documentation on Agreement or License Records has to be manually re-attached/uploaded to the relevant Agreement/License records in Atlas as the migration was performed.

Return on Investment

  • Rationalising renewal numbers down to only what you need, factoring in people who request software and hardly/never use it
  • Tracking Named User license assignments

Usability

Alternatives Considered

Snow License Manager

Snow Atlas review

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Snow Atlas is used to gain ELP's for our vendors, giving us a view of risks and opportunity's. With Snow Atlas we're able to see where our issues are located to be able to target them easily.

Pros

  • Providing a full view of deployments
  • SaaS connectors are brilliant for our cloud applications

Cons

  • I'd like to see more criterias in the reporting of device information e.g., not just picking up a device name

Return on Investment

  • We're new to the Atlas version, time will tell

Usability

Snow Atlas Review

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Snow Atlas to gain visibility of infrastructure, the applications in use and license compliance. This helps us optimise the investment in software and to ensure we reduce shadow IT and prevent license compliance. We also capture all purchases across the organisation as agreements which allows us to effectively manage renewals and consolidation of similar subscriptions

Pros

  • Discovery
  • SaaS visibility
  • End of Life

Cons

  • M365 Copilot usage

Return on Investment

  • Cost reduction
  • Usage and optimisation
  • Renewal management

Usability

Essential Tool for Improving Asset Management

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

There is a saying, 'You can’t manage what you can’t measure, and measure what you can't see'. Snow Atlas has provided the much needed visibility we need to demonstrate good stewardship over the entire lifecycle of our digital assets and services, to rationalise, standardise, and optimise of assets, reduce our exposure to risk, improve both licensing and security compliance, reduce costs, and maintain warranty and utility.

Pros

  • Visibility of traditional desktop and web based applications
  • Reminders when agreements and annual renewals are coming up in the next 90, 60, 30 days
  • Helps us identify similar application types, where they are being used, so we can better understand the capabilities they provide businesses
  • Provide usage trends over time to inform renewals and compliance
  • Reclaim software that is note in active use

Cons

  • Dashboard reporting so we gain insights over time
  • The ability to add both desktop and cloud applications not in Snows database directly
  • Alert Snow when the application type needs correcting
  • Ability to add new periods and rates for M365 and still have previous periods
  • Ability to log calls to Snow via Snow Atlas

Return on Investment

  • Made it a lot easier to determine annual Microsoft renewal numbers and only renew what we needed reducing costs
  • Helps us identify potential software that can be rationalised reducing costs
  • Helps us identify unapproved software and people aware of the the risks

Usability

Other Software Used

Microsoft Power BI, Microsoft Excel