Harvesting Low Usage Licenses with CloudEagle

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Overlooking SaaS license management will lead to poor license usage and resource wastage. For instance, if you have purchased 200 SaaS app licenses, of which only 120 are optimally used, you are wasting almost 40% of the resources.

To avoid incurring additional costs, you must identify the unused licenses, reclaim them, and harvest them to assign to new employees.

Manually visiting each application and requesting app admins to deprovision users can be counter-productive. You should opt for a SaaS management platform like CloudEagle to streamline the process.

CloudEagle will save time and enable your IT teams to focus on their core tasks rather than chasing stakeholders or app admins to deactivate licenses.

So, let’s find out how CloudEagle helps with license harvesting.
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What Are the Challenges of Manual License Harvesting?

You can recover unused software licenses and allocate them to active users through license harvesting. Still, manual license harvesting comes with several challenges, like,

1. Inefficiency

The IT team spends a lot of time analyzing the application's usage and then has to reclaim unused licenses manually. This is a redundant activity to do regularly.

2. Limited visibility

Without a central system to monitor licenses, keeping an accurate count of software licenses and their usage across the organization is challenging. As a company grows or adds new software, managing licenses manually gets more complicated and challenging.

3. Productivity hassles

IT teams must focus on core tasks like managing the SaaS portfolio, ensuring optimal app usage and security, etc. Visiting each application and deprovisioning users for low usage will impact your IT team’s productivity. Why should IT admin spend more time emailing users and tracking their responses?

4. Increased costs

Manual license harvesting will lead to inefficiencies, increasing SaaS costs.

5. Security risks

Manual license management and reclamation might be vulnerable to unauthorized access, leading to security and contract breaches due to overutilization.
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Automating License Harvesting with CloudEagle

Automate your license harvesting process using CloudEagle. It is an advanced SaaS management platform that analyzes application usage and harvests unused licenses effectively using reclamation workflows.

The centralized license management module at CloudEagle will provide a clear view of your SaaS licenses. Your IT team can configure the workflows and focus on their tasks while you can automatically provision users for low usage and harvest licenses.

How to set it up?

Step 1: Connect your Single Sign-On (SSO) with CloudEagle to see all the apps your team is using. It gives you a clear picture of what everyone is using.

Step 2: Then, identify which apps are crucial. You can connect apps directly with CloudEagle for accurate usage insights.

Step 3: Ensure your app admins can use CloudEagle. This way, everyone can work together efficiently and keep things running smoothly. Also, integrate finance systems from the last 12-18 months to boost your analysis. It will help you understand how much you're spending on apps and make smart decisions.

Step 4: Set up auto-deprovisioning rules for low usage. This workflow will enable you to define criteria for license usage.

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If the user hasn’t logged in to the application for a defined period, they will be alerted initially, and then their license will be revoked and harvested for subsequent use.

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You can also configure a specific time for the users to respond. And if they don’t, CloudEagle will deprovision them automatically. No manual intervention is needed.

Step 5: You can swiftly reassign licenses from inactive employees to others, ensuring efficient license management.

In five simple steps, you can harvest unused licenses and reallocate them to new users, ensuring the resources are appropriately allocated and used.

Automated License Harvesting: How this solution can benefit your organization?

• CloudEagle centralizes all apps and their licenses. License reclamation workflows save valuable time and resources.
• There's no need to maintain and analyze SaaS app usage data manually. CloudEagle’s integrations enable it to manage your stack automatically.
• You can save money by promptly deprovisioning users who are not utilizing the tool optimally. After revoking access, you can reclaim and assign the license to another person.
• No manual effort is needed from you. CloudEagle will automatically reveal the applications with low usage through reports. You can identify the apps with low usage and then set up auto-deprovisioning rules for those applications.

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• You can modify the parameter for app usage and review the applications with usage directly from the dashboard.

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• IT team doesn’t have to contact app admins to deprovision users individually. You can set up workflows to save time.
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What Are the Consequences of Low SaaS License Usage?

Organizations sometimes overestimate the number of licenses required. This is why you should stay within your requirements and not overspend on SaaS licenses.

It will lead to the following consequences,

• Poor ROI: Unused licenses lead to unnecessary spend. As the full potential of software licenses remains unrealized, it will lead to poor ROI.
• Inefficient Resource Allocation: Low license usage indicates resources are not optimally allocated, hindering employee productivity.
• Unauthorized access: If licenses aren't provisioned properly, unauthorized users could gain access to sensitive data, leading to data theft.
• Wasted spend: You’ve invested a significant sum on these licenses. Leaving them unused renders the spending needless, which could’ve been allocated to other resources.
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Why Should You Harvest Unused Licenses?

Unused licenses still hold potential value in them. By harvesting, you can redistribute them to the team who needs them rather than letting them go to waste.

Organizations often purchase extra licenses beyond their requirements. With license harvesting, they can right-size the licenses based on usage and save on spend.

However, doing it manually can be time-consuming. This is why you must use automated workflows, so IT teams can harvest licenses effortlessly and focus on their strategic tasks.

So, book a demo with CloudEagle to free up your IT teams from the burden of manual license harvesting.

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