Keeping tabs on a sprawling software environment can be challenging. With a surge in work-from-home users, overwhelmed IT teams scrambling to respond, and a proliferation of Software as a Service opportunities that end users can quickly jump on by keying in their corporate credit cards, this problem has the potential to spiral out of control.

These problems can be solved with the right mix of technologies and practices, but unfortunately, simple barriers often stand in the way. Here is how to identify those barriers and overcome them.

Many organizations struggle with IT asset management even during the best of times. In fact, according to a CDW survey, nearly 1 in 5 businesses incorporates Post-it notes as part of its asset management strategy. Now, add a worldwide crisis that has forced organizations to roll out countless laptops and software licenses in a matter of days to enable remote work (often outside of their normal procurement and budget processes), and you have a recipe not only for massive inefficiency, but also huge software license compliance liabilities.

It’s important for organizations to get in front of this now by applying appropriate asset management tools and practices to their new environments. At CDW, we have four main ways of helping customers to better manage their IT environments.

Organizations are always looking to save money however they can. One commonly neglected approach to savings is software asset management (SAM), which implements practices and tools to manage the acquisition, deployment, use, maintenance and disposal of software. When used to its full potential, SAM can lead to impressive savings, particularly for organizations that have never…

Most clients, if pressed, will say that the most valuable Software Assurance benefits they receive from Microsoft are Planning Services Vouchers and Training Vouchers. If you’re not an Enterprise Agreement customer, and these are unfamiliar terms to you, here is a quick rundown: 

Years ago, Microsoft created a specialized Enterprise Enrollment called Enrollment for Application Platform or EAP.  It was designed to help provide better pricing on Microsoft’s platform products (SQL, Visual Studio, SharePoint and BizTalk).  Because traditional Enterprise Agreements are limited to organizations with 250 or more users, many customers with large platform investments were not able…