Inventory Archives - EasySAM https://easysam.co.uk/tag/inventory/ Software Asset Management. Simplified. Tue, 20 Oct 2026 13:35:10 +0000 en-GB hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=7.1.4 https://easysam.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/easysam_icon-60x60.png Inventory Archives - EasySAM https://easysam.co.uk/tag/inventory/ 32 32 The biggest IT compliance risks for 2027 https://easysam.co.uk/knowledge-base/the-biggest-it-compliance-risks-for-2027/ Wed, 21 Oct 2026 08:51:00 +0000 https://easysam.co.uk/?p=38502 IT compliance in 2027 could bring unexpected changes for teams that aren’t prepared. Find out what to focus on now and how to get ahead.

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IT compliance in 2027 could bring unexpected changes for teams that aren’t prepared. Find out what to focus on now and how to get ahead.

Published on 21st October 2026

Ask almost any IT leader how they feel about compliance and you will hear a familiar sigh: it is an exhausting, endless cycle of audit prep, messy spreadsheets and scrambling to show that corporate policies exist on paper.

Yet managing IT compliance is not getting harder simply because lawmakers are writing more rules. The real issue is that the technology beneath those rules is changing just as fast as the legal text.

Machine learning models and AI systems are being spun up across every business unit. Cloud infrastructure, SaaS tools and remote endpoints have pushed corporate environments far beyond the traditional datacenter perimeter. Every custom platform or enterprise software package depends on sprawling software supply chains loaded with third-party libraries, external micro-services and outside vendors. At the same time, regulators have stopped accepting static paperwork: they want real, demonstrable proof of how you find, control and report technology risks across your stack.

That reality makes 2027 a critical year for IT compliance and risk management.

A wave of major compliance regulations is either already live or heading straight for firm implementation deadlines. The phased rollout of the EU AI Act continues, while the EU Cyber Resilience Act (CRA) takes broad effect on December 11, 2027.

The day-to-day challenge for IT leaders, enterprise architects and compliance officers goes well beyond pinning deadlines to a wall calendar. What matters is knowing what technology you have, the risks tied to it, who is responsible for it and whether your compliance controls can stand up to genuine technical scrutiny.

Here are the seven major enterprise IT compliance risks:

1. AI governance must move from policy to proof

Over the past few years, enterprise AI adoption has moved at breakneck speed. Teams across marketing, engineering and customer support rushed to adopt shiny new generative tools to move faster. Corporate compliance programs, caught off guard, have been playing catch-up ever since.

Heading toward 2027, that catch-up game has to turn into an organised, defensible system.

The biggest driver here is the EU AI Act, an expansive, risk-based regulatory framework governing how organisations build, market, deploy and run AI software. It introduces stringent rules for high-risk AI systems, clear transparency requirements for tools that interact with users or create synthetic content and strict oversight for general-purpose AI models.

Do not make the mistake of assuming this only matters to companies registered in Frankfurt or Paris. The Act has teeth outside Europe, applying to providers and deployers worldwide whenever the output generated by their AI system is used within the European Union.

The compliance timeline has also continued to shift. Following amendments under Regulation (EU) 2026/1744 in July 2026, the legislative schedule is locked in: the entire framework is set to be fully applicable by August 2, 2027.

That timeline makes AI governance much more than a routine legal drafting exercise. Before you can even tell which compliance requirements apply to your business, you need a clear, unvarnished accounting of what models are running and what your exact role is with each of them.

This visibility gets complicated fast when employees adopt off-the-shelf AI tools on corporate credit cards without talking to procurement or security. This widespread Shadow AI leaves governance teams with huge blind spots, making it nearly impossible to evaluate data exposure, model bias or intellectual property risks.

How to prepare

  • Build an honest inventory of your AI estate: Run discovery across business units to find active AI software, custom in-house models and SaaS applications with embedded AI features. Record what business problem each tool solves, where its training data comes from and who internally owns it
  • Define your role under the law: Evaluate each system to determine whether your organisation is acting as an AI provider (building or tuning models) or a deployer (putting someone else’s model to work). Your compliance duties look very different depending on which category you fall into
  • Tie AI into your existing IT compliance and governance processes: Do not build a completely separate, disconnected AI silo. Connect AI oversight straight into your existing vulnerability management, data privacy rules and access control systems
  • Create clear, practical guardrails: The point of AI governance is not to kill innovation or ban helpful tools. It is about building enough visibility so you know what is running, understand your exposure and meet your AI regulation compliance duties without friction

2. End-of-life technology is easier to exploit

Ask an engineer why a piece of software is still running on an internal server, and you will often hear: “If we touch it, the whole workflow breaks.”

Software and hardware do not disappear just because a vendor decides to stop supporting them. They stay right where they are: quietly ageing and getting riskier by the day.

End-of-life technology has always weakened security and compliance controls. The growing problem now is how quickly threat actors can discover and expose these weaknesses, frequently chaining together even low-level vulnerabilities in unpatched software to compromise an environment. For regulated sectors like financial services, demonstrating that the operational stack is free of obsolete or vulnerable software has become a direct compliance requirement under frameworks like DORA and FCA standards, where unsupported systems can no longer receive the fixes needed to pass an audit.

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has been plain about this: running unsupported or end-of-life software across critical infrastructure is a dangerous practice that sharply escalates enterprise risk. When a product crosses into end-of-life (EOL) status, security patches stop, bug fixes disappear and routine vulnerability handling ends.

That danger is particularly real at the network edge. In joint guidance, CISA, the FBI and the UK National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) warned that unpatched, end-of-support edge devices, such as older firewalls, VPN appliances and routers, are prime targets for threat actors. Attackers routinely scan for well-known, unresolved bugs in ageing edge hardware to bypass perimeter network security, establish access and move laterally into supported corporate networks.

For IT teams, this creates a major breakdown between written policy and real-world compliance controls.

You can write pristine corporate policies on regular patching, identity management and data protection, but those controls fall flat during a compliance audit if obsolete systems in your environment can no longer take patches or integrate with modern identity-based access control.

Regulators are paying closer attention to this lifecycle reality. The EU Cyber Resilience Act (CRA) establishes mandatory cybersecurity requirements across the entire lifecycle of products with digital elements, focusing heavily on vulnerability management and requiring vendors to be clear about their product support periods. The goal is to give buyers the transparency they need to stop buying blind and manage hardware and software lifecycles responsibly.

How to prepare

  • Keep your asset discovery current: Make sure your hardware and software inventory captures everything on your network, separating active, fully supported products from assets that are approaching or already past their vendor support dates
  • Actively search for undocumented edge devices: Follow CISA, FBI and UK NCSC guidance by auditing your network perimeter for forgotten, outdated edge hardware. Check that your firewalls, nextgen firewalls and intrusion prevention systems are running supported, patchable firmware
  • Connect asset lifecycle data to your vulnerability scans: An end-of-life spreadsheet tucked away in an IT drawer helps no one. Link your lifecycle tracking directly to your security tooling so unpatchable assets are flagged and prioritised for replacement
  • Ask the tough operational questions: Stop settling for knowing that an unsupported application exists. Find out: Where does it sit? What critical business processes depend on it? What temporary compensating controls protect it? And what is our actual plan to replace or decommission it?

3. Software supply-chain obligations reach deeper into the technology stack

Virtually no enterprise builds applications completely from scratch these days.

Modern software is assembled from open-source packages, external libraries, commercial frameworks, and cloud APIs. If any single piece of that upstream chain contains a critical flaw, that vulnerability flows straight into your production environment. That reality has dragged supply chain security out of the procurement office and placed it right at the heart of IT risk and compliance.

The EU Cyber Resilience Act makes this shift impossible to ignore as 2027 approaches. The regulation covers hardware and software products with digital elements, requiring manufacturers to manage cybersecurity and vulnerability handling throughout the entire lifecycle of their offerings.

The bulk of the CRA takes effect on December 11, 2027, but treating that date as a distant problem is a mistake. Certain obligations, like early vulnerability reporting, arrive much sooner and reworking software pipelines, vendor agreements and vulnerability processes takes significant time.

A big part of meeting these expectations comes down to software transparency, which is where the Software Bill of Materials (SBOM) comes in. Think of an SBOM as a comprehensive ingredients list that spells out every component, library and dependency used to build a piece of software. NIST emphasises that SBOMs bring much-needed visibility to software supply chains, helping teams identify and remediate newly discovered vulnerabilities much faster. Yet an SBOM is not an automatic security shield.

NIST specifically cautions against ditching everyday cyber supply chain hygiene, like regular vendor risk reviews and active vulnerability scans, just because you collected an SBOM. An SBOM is simply a document; your team still needs the systems and workflows to ingest that file, analyse its contents and act when a problem turns up.

That distinction is everything. Passing an audit is not about proving you saved a vendor’s SBOM to a shared drive. It is about proving that your IT and security teams can take that component data, check it against your deployed software and make fast, defensible decisions to fix vulnerabilities before they are exploited.

How to prepare

  • Map out your software dependencies and key vendors: Pinpoint your most critical software applications and figure out which external libraries, open-source packages and third-party vendors they rely on
  • Integrate SBOMs into your active vulnerability workflows: When software vendors provide SBOMs, do not treat them as static compliance paperwork. Ingest that component data into your vulnerability management systems so new Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVEs) trigger automated alerts
  • Review vendor contracts and security commitments: Update your vendor agreements to clarify expectations around support windows, component transparency and rapid vulnerability disclosure
  • Lean on solid IT asset management (ITAM): You cannot trace a vulnerable library if you do not know where the parent application is installed. Reliable asset management connects an abstract list of software components to the actual servers, virtual machines and cloud instances running inside your business

4. Fragmented technology makes compliance harder to prove

The days of managing IT out of a single server room are long gone.

Today’s technology estate is split across multiple public clouds, SaaS platforms, on-premises datacenters and remote employee laptops. Data travels back and forth constantly, while employee identities, privileges and access control systems span dozens of separate environments.

Where data resides adds another layer of complexity. Compliance teams must navigate strict data residency requirements, where certain regulations mandate that sensitive data must be held in-country or cannot be stored in public cloud environments. Under GDPR, transfers of personal data outside the European Economic Area are subject to specific legal safeguards rather than a blanket requirement that all personal data remain within Europe. In a fragmented cloud and SaaS environment, IT teams need direct visibility into the applications handling regulated data, where that data is processed and whether local residency rules are met.

This fragmentation creates a massive headache when it comes time to prove that your compliance controls actually work. Regulatory frameworks rarely accept good intentions. They demand clear, demonstrable proof that your security measures are live, configured properly and protecting the systems they are supposed to protect.

Take the NIS2 Directive across the European Union. It introduces widespread cybersecurity risk-management and reporting rules for covered entities in critical industries, including energy, transport, banking, healthcare, digital infrastructure, cloud computing and managed service providers.

NIS2 does not let teams focus on a single isolated security control. It demands broad operational capability across incident handling, supply chain security, access control and active vulnerability management.

This is where many IT teams run into practical trouble: having a well-written policy on a company wiki is not the same as having the day-to-day visibility needed to apply and prove those controls consistently.

When auditors ask tough questions, disconnected systems make it nearly impossible to answer with confidence:

  • Can your team produce an accurate, complete list of every digital asset on your network?
  • Do you know the exact versions and builds of software running in production right now?
  • Can you tie every server, cloud workload, and application to an accountable business owner and supplier?
  • Can you quickly surface every piece of unsupported software and unpatched vulnerability across the company?
  • Can you show where regulated data is stored or processed and identify the applications and providers responsible for it?

When different departments rely on contradictory spreadsheets and fragmented tools, answering those questions feels like conjecture. Auditors also require detailed information about asset lineage, provenance and historical perspective rather than just a snapshot of what the environment looks like today. Organisations need historical records showing how assets, configurations, ownership, lifecycle status or controls changed over time. When that history is scattered across spreadsheets and disconnected systems, producing reliable evidence becomes much harder.

As NIST outlines in its SP 1800-5 guidance on IT asset management, having clear, unified asset visibility forms the foundation of enterprise security. Tying physical, virtual and cloud assets together gives leadership a dependable view of what exists and where it lives, giving security analysts the context they need to investigate threats and defend the organisation.

How to prepare

  • Treat your technology inventory as a compliance essential: Stop looking at your IT inventory as just an operational IT database. A complete, accurate view of your hardware, software and cloud assets is the bedrock of your entire compliance program
  • Enrich asset data with real operational context: Bring together raw hardware and software inventories and link them with business services, asset owners, vendor lifecycles and known security vulnerabilities
  • Map controls directly to specific assets: Stop treating compliance rules like abstract ideas. Connect specific statutory requirements, like data encryption, privileged access and logging, directly to the systems and workloads within their scope
  • Get your cross-functional teams onto one page: Break down the walls between security, infrastructure, legal and risk teams. When everyone works from the same reliable technology data, evaluating risk becomes faster, cleaner and far more accurate

5. Overlapping reporting obligations test disconnected processes

When a major security incident strikes, stopping the bleeding and restoring backups is only your first hurdle.

Right behind the engineering response comes a wave of urgent legal questions: Does this event cross a regulatory notification line? What customer records or internal data were exposed? Were third-party vendors involved? And who internally is authorised to make the official reporting call?

These questions get messy when an organisation is subject to multiple frameworks, each with its own definitions, triggers and deadlines.

In the United States, public companies answer to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) rules on cybersecurity disclosure. Under these rules, domestic registrants must disclose a material cybersecurity incident on Form 8-K generally within four business days.

Keep in mind that the four-day clock does not start the second an analyst spots strange network traffic. The countdown starts once the organisation officially determines that the incident is material. That determination requires swift, coordinated communication between technical responders, financial leaders and corporate legal counsel.

The SEC rules also require annual reporting covering your broader approach to cybersecurity risk management, strategy, and leadership governance.

Across the Atlantic, European regulations enforce their own aggressive reporting timelines. Under NIS2, covered entities face an early warning requirement within 24 hours of becoming aware of a significant incident, followed by detailed formal notifications. At the same time, the EU Cyber Resilience Act imposes strict reporting obligations on manufacturers of digital products to report actively exploited vulnerabilities and serious incidents to authorities within tight windows.

The reality is that there is no single, universal reporting timeline.

Instead, organisations face a tangled web of differing thresholds and deadlines that depend heavily on your industry, geography, and the nature of the breach. If your incident responders, risk managers, and legal counsel work in disconnected silos, that friction can cause you to miss mandatory reporting windows and face major regulatory penalties.

How to prepare

  • Document all applicable incident reporting rules: Review your regulatory and contractual obligations (including the SEC, NIS2, CRA, GDPR, and PCI DSS) and document exactly what constitutes a reportable event, what the deadline is and who receives the notification
  • Establish clear internal escalation workflows: Clarify how security incidents get escalated from the technical operations floor to legal counsel and executive leadership. Make sure everyone knows who leads materiality discussions and who makes final reporting decisions
  • Give incident response teams immediate technical context: When an incident occurs, responders cannot afford to spend hours guessing which business processes rely on a compromised server, what software version it runs or which suppliers support it. They need that context instantly
  • Run tabletop simulation drills: Test your escalation paths and reporting protocols before a real crisis hits. Bring security, IT, risk, legal and executive teams together to work through realistic scenarios, ironing out friction points before real reporting clocks start ticking

6. AI agents create a new identity and access challenge

AI governance gets harder when AI moves from answering questions to taking action.

AI agents can interact with enterprise data, invoke tools and APIs and carry out multi-step workflows across different systems. That introduces a new layer of risk around identity and access control: Which agents can access sensitive resources? What actions can each agent take? And who is accountable for that access?

Least privilege becomes particularly important. Agents should have access only to the data, systems and actions required for their approved purpose rather than inheriting broad permissions simply because the person or team creating them already has that access.

The risk can also grow as agents connect to more systems. An agent with individually limited access to email, files, business applications and other tools may accumulate much broader capabilities when those permissions are combined. Current Microsoft security guidance warns that AI agents can experience permission creep, excessive aggregate privileges and overly broad tool access when identity and authorisation controls are not designed carefully.

Ownership matters too. An agent’s business purpose, permissions and accountable owner can change over time, especially when employees change roles or leave the organisation entirely. Without proper lifecycle management, orphaned agents can continue running in the background with persistent access to data they no longer need. Organisations therefore need lifecycle governance that makes it clear who is responsible for an agent, treats agents as managed identities and ensures ownership and access are reviewed, transferred or revoked when personnel depart.

How to prepare

  • Give AI agents distinct identities: Maintain visibility into which agent is accessing enterprise resources and make sure its activity can be attributed and audited
  • Apply least-privilege access: Give each agent only the data, tools and permissions required for its approved task and review those privileges as its responsibilities change
  • Assign clear ownership and manage off-boarding: Every enterprise AI agent should have an accountable human owner responsible for its purpose and access. When an employee leaves the company or moves teams, include agent ownership and access permissions in standard off-boarding processes so orphaned agents do not retain access to corporate data
  • Review agent access throughout its lifecycle: Reassess permissions when an agent’s purpose changes and remove access that is no longer needed
  • Keep an audit trail: Maintain sufficient visibility into agent identities and actions to support security investigations and compliance reviews

7. Sustainability reporting puts IT data under greater scrutiny

IT compliance is increasingly connected to another source of enterprise reporting pressure: sustainability.

In the European Union, companies within the scope of the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) are required to disclose information about sustainability-related risks, opportunities and impacts using European Sustainability Reporting Standards (ESRS). The framework has continued to evolve as the EU refines and simplifies its sustainability reporting requirements.

For IT leaders, the important point is that sustainability reporting can create another demand for reliable operational data. As technology estates span physical hardware, datacenters, cloud infrastructure and other services, organisations need confidence in the information feeding their sustainability reporting processes.

The challenge will sound familiar to compliance teams. Hardware inventories can become outdated. Cloud environments change constantly. Technology ownership is split between teams. Different data sources can produce different answers.

When technology information contributes to formal corporate reporting, inconsistent or incomplete data becomes more than an IT housekeeping problem. Organisations need data that can be traced, explained and governed consistently.

How to prepare

  • Understand what sustainability requirements apply: Work with sustainability, finance and legal teams to establish which reporting requirements affect your organisation
  • Identify the IT data used in reporting: Determine which technology-related information feeds your sustainability reporting processes and where that information originates
  • Improve asset data quality: Maintain reliable hardware and infrastructure information rather than depending solely on manually reconciled snapshots
  • Establish clear data ownership: Identify which teams are responsible for providing, validating and maintaining technology data used in sustainability reporting
  • Keep supporting evidence: Maintain the underlying data and methodology needed to explain how technology-related sustainability information was produced

IT compliance checklist for 2027

Because every enterprise runs a unique technology stack and answers to different regulators, there is no universal, magic checklist that guarantees compliance.

However, addressing these practical checkpoints will put your team in a far stronger position heading into 2027:

  • Inventory your technology estate: Maintain an accurate, up-to-date accounting of the hardware, installed software, cloud workloads and SaaS tools across your organisation
  • Inventory AI systems and determine regulatory scope: Uncover where AI tools, models and features are deployed across departments, identify designated system owners and establish your organisation’s legal classification (provider vs. deployer) under the EU AI Act
  • Govern AI agent identities, permissions and off-boarding: Treat autonomous AI agents as distinct machine identities governed by least-privilege data access and embed agent ownership into standard employee off-boarding so access is revoked or reassigned when personnel leave
  • Track asset lifecycles to catch end-of-life risks: Keep a close eye on vendor support dates to spot end-of-life and end-of-support hardware and software early, prioritising remediation based on operational risk
  • Track relevant data locations: Connect applications and providers with information about where regulated data is stored, processed or accessed to ensure compliance with in-country data residency requirements and international transfer rules
  • Preserve historical context: Maintain auditable records of asset provenance, configuration changes, ownership transitions and lifecycle status over time rather than relying solely on today’s inventory
  • Connect IT assets directly to vulnerability data: Make sure your vulnerability management tools talk directly to your asset inventory so you can quickly see whether a newly disclosed CVE affects systems in your environment
  • Strengthen software supply chain transparency: Track component dependencies, ingest SBOMs where appropriate and review security expectations with your third-party software vendors
  • Link compliance controls to real infrastructure: Make sure your mandatory cybersecurity controls, such as identity-based access control, network segmentation, firewalls and encryption, are mapped directly to the systems they protect
  • Clarify applicable regulatory requirements: Take the time to figure out which compliance regulations actually apply to your operations (like NIS2, CRA, DORA or SEC rules) rather than relying on generic, surface-level guidance
  • Define incident reporting roles and escalation paths: Document who evaluates incident severity, who makes legal materiality calls and who owns communication with regulatory bodies
  • Move from static audits to continuous tracking: Stop relying on once-a-year snapshot audits in an enterprise environment that changes every single day. Implement continuous visibility that catches compliance drift in real time

You can’t govern what you can’t see

The biggest IT compliance risks heading into 2027 share a fundamental truth.

Whether your team is dealing with AI governance, unsupported edge devices, software supply chain obligations, distributed security controls or high-stakes incident reporting deadlines, compliance breaks down when you do not have a reliable, current picture of the technology you run.

That does not mean asset visibility is a substitute for a compliance program. Visibility on its own will not draft policies, conduct risk assessments or manage legal reviews.

What it does is provide a dependable foundation. When your IT compliance, risk and security teams work from an accurate picture of your technology estate, they can evaluate risk realistically, apply controls where they matter and generate audit evidence that stands up to scrutiny.

Meeting modern compliance demands cannot be solved by a single tool or dumped onto a single department. It takes active, coordinated work across IT asset management, cybersecurity, enterprise architecture, procurement and risk teams.

Heading into 2027, organisations do not need another isolated compliance dashboard or another unread policy document. They need clear, trustworthy insight into their technology environment so every stakeholder can make smarter, safer decisions.

Because the most dangerous compliance risk heading into 2027 might not be the next major regulation. It might simply be the technology already running inside your business that nobody is watching.

Is your software estate a compliance risk waiting to happen?

Take control before the risks become reality. Our software asset management solutions help you gain visibility of your software estate, optimise licence usage and maintain compliance with vendor agreements — reducing risk while keeping costs under control.

Get in touch

Source

https://www.flexera.com/blog/it-asset-management/it-compliance-risks/

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]]> Azul launches JVM Inventory to accelerate Oracle Java migration https://easysam.co.uk/news/azul-launches-jvm-inventory-to-accelerate-oracle-java-migration/ Tue, 29 Apr 2025 11:28:06 +0000 https://easysam.co.uk/?p=35049 The additional feature of Azul's Intelligence Cloud platform is designed to address the challenges associated with migrating from Oracle Java.

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The additional feature of Azul's Intelligence Cloud platform is designed to address the challenges associated with migrating from Oracle Java.

Published on 29th April 2025

Azul has introduced JVM Inventory, a new feature of its Intelligence Cloud platform designed to address the challenges and risks associated with migrating from Oracle Java.

JVM Inventory, when combined with Azul’s Migration Toolkit (AMT) or other software asset management (SAM) discovery tools, allows Azul’s Migration Advisory experts and channel partners to gain detailed, runtime-level visibility across Java deployments. This new solution aims to accelerate the process of classifying, migrating, and tracking Oracle Java instances by delivering actionable information that cannot be obtained through SAM tools alone.

Azul highlights findings from its 2025 State of Java Survey & Report, which reveals that 82% of respondents are concerned about Oracle’s Java SE pricing and licensing policy, with 88% considering a move to OpenJDK alternatives. Rising per-employee subscription pricing reportedly increases the total cost of ownership by two to five times for many organisations, prompting enterprises to evaluate alternatives and accelerate migrations.

Customer data from Azul suggests that, on average, an Oracle Java migration takes between six and nine months without automated assistance. This duration is largely a result of the fragmented and manual nature of discovering and classifying Java Virtual Machines (JVMs) using traditional asset management tools. These tools often do not account for runtime context, making it challenging to determine which Oracle JVMs are actively being used, which ones are bundled under a permitted licence, or which are installed but idle. Such gaps can result in unnecessary licensing expenses and increased non-compliance risk.

Azul’s Migration Advisory experts and channel partners leverage the JVM Inventory and the Migration Toolkit to provide a complete view of an organisation’s Oracle Java footprint. The data is gathered directly from the JVM, including information relating to vendor, version, installation path, and the specific applications utilising the JVM. This runtime insight allows advisory teams to validate and enrich reporting, identify active Oracle Java instances even in complex environments such as containers, and pinpoint unused installations for removal.

With this detailed visibility, organisations can identify Oracle Java usage that is subject to commercial licensing terms and focus migration efforts on those areas. The approach is intended to enable enterprises to accelerate their move to alternatives like Azul Platform Core while more effectively reducing audit risk and licensing costs.

Addressing the complexity faced by larger organisations, the tool is capable of mapping estates containing tens of thousands of Oracle JVMs. By focusing only on those instances actively in use, migration teams can streamline their projects and inform application owners about upcoming changes. Azul states that this can significantly reduce the time required for enterprise-wide migrations, potentially cutting weeks or months from the standard project timeline.

As migrations progress, JVM Inventory also manages and tracks the usage history of JVMs to support trend analysis and ongoing compliance monitoring. This reduces the need for repeated manual scanning and spreadsheet-based reporting often required by SAM processes.

The product is also designed to maintain compliance post-migration. Through continuous runtime detection, it can identify and flag instances where Oracle Java is reintroduced into environments, empowering organisations to quickly take corrective action and automate compliance processes, including alerting and removal or replacement of unauthorised Oracle JVMs.

Evan Boyd, Vice President, Global Operations at Software Licensing Compliance, commented: “Azul’s new JVM Inventory is a game-changer for partners, either discovering active Java licensing for ITAM advisories or accelerating Oracle Java migrations. It gives our team and our customers the clarity and runtime intelligence we need to quickly identify where Oracle Java is actually in use, dramatically shortening what used to be a long and painful discovery exercise, and instead now leads to quicker actionable insights. For partners like us, JVM Inventory allows us to deliver faster, higher-value advisories, JDK migrations and better ongoing compliance services that reduce risk for our clients. Azul is giving us the tools we need to help enterprises get Oracle Java out — and keep it out — with confidence.”

Key features of the solution include discovery and inventory of Oracle Java instances, accurate classification and prioritisation for replacement or removal, continuous tracking throughout the migration process, and ongoing compliance monitoring to detect reintroduction of Oracle Java instances. Azul states that pairing JVM Inventory with the Migration Toolkit yields the most comprehensive Oracle Java discovery, helps reduce migration risks through accurate classification, accelerates identification of application stakeholders, and supports compliance and audit defence efforts.

Scott Sellers, CEO and Co-founder of Azul, said: “Azul has always been committed to solving the hardest Java challenges for our customers, and JVM Inventory paired with the Azul Migration Toolkit is a perfect example of that innovation in action. By giving enterprises unprecedented visibility into their Java environments with actionable intelligence from runtime data, we’re not only simplifying Oracle Java migrations, we’re also helping organisations take control of their Java subscription costs, reduce audit risk and ensure long-term compliance. It’s a powerful step forward for companies looking to future-proof their Java strategy.”

JVM Inventory functions alongside Azul Platform Core to detect and eliminate Oracle Java, maintaining compliance and supporting ongoing migration efforts. The feature is available as part of Azul Intelligence Cloud and is licensed with a base charge and according to the average number of JVMs monitored monthly.

Source

https://itbrief.com.au/story/azul-launches-jvm-inventory-to-accelerate-oracle-java-migration

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]]> How endpoint visibility trims IT costs and boosts performance https://easysam.co.uk/knowledge-base/how-endpoint-visibility-trims-it-costs-and-boosts-performance/ Fri, 08 Sep 2023 10:38:15 +0000 https://easysam.co.uk/?p=28396 Enhance IT efficiency through endpoint visibility - cutting wasteful spend while in turn boosting productivity.

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Enhance IT efficiency through endpoint visibility - cutting wasteful spend while in turn boosting productivity.

Published on 8th September 2023

Post-COVID, the hybrid work model has proven that it is here to stay. Many organizations have invested in digital workplace tools, such as cloud-based productivity apps and digital collaboration tools, to accommodate a radically evolving work environment. These tools ensure workers stay connected with colleagues, increase efficiency, and work seamlessly on-site and off-premises.

In this new normal, CIOs have been challenged to enhance the employee experience (EX) while keeping expenditures in check. This is particularly important in the current economic climate. The good news is that many areas have room to slash costs without impacting performance – CIOs just have to identify and eliminate wasteful spend.

Poor Visibility Obscures Needless Spending

There are many causes of wasteful IT spend, especially for larger corporations with massive IT budgets. Ultimately, though, four key factors generally drive excessive IT costs today:

  • Outdated hardware: When devices become slow, they can hinder employee productivity. However, organizations are often unsure whether to upgrade their existing devices or perform a company-wide hardware refresh, as they need insight into device performance. Replacing devices prematurely, especially when tight budgets, can result in unnecessary IT expenses, mainly if the organization is dealing with more pressing employee experience issues.
  • Inefficient license management: With the rise of hybrid work, companies are increasingly subscribing to more applications, leading to significant wasted spend due to poor license management. A recent studyOpens a new window shows that unused software licenses cost companies $537 million yearly. This is often caused by a need for more visibility into subscriptions or maintaining active subscriptions to prevent data loss.
  • Need for issue resolution: IT teams who rely on manual processes without AI or automation cannot handle their workload effectively and need additional support personnel to maintain current service levels. In addition, using unproductive tools wastes engineers’ time and increases IT support costs.
  • Shadow IT costs: Shadow IT refers to unauthorized applications, software, devices, and other IT assets not approved by the IT department. Since Shadow IT cannot be monitored and often goes undetected, its costs cannot be controlled.
Although these issues may appear distinct, they all ultimately stem from a shared problem: insufficient visibility into organizational endpoints.

Endpoint Visibility Unveils Hidden, Wasteful IT Expenditures

Better visibility is central to identifying and eliminating wasteful IT spend. There are many unified endpoint management (UEM) platforms for this purpose. IT employs UEM solutions to manage and monitor all the company’s end-user devices from a centralized location. Since employees have gone fully or partially remote during the COVID-19 pandemic, IT administrators have continued to rely on their existing UEM platforms to provision employee devices remotely.

However, these technologies weren’t designed for today’s hybrid work world, leading to inevitable problems. In short, these technologies do not offer the necessary visibility to uncover hidden endpoints and IT assets, such as desktop computers and mobile devices (bountiful in employees’ homes). This lack of visibility into endpoints increases resolution time per ticket, thus increasing the cost per ticket. This has all sorts of cascading effects: Hardware refresh costs go up since the planned refresh of hardware under warranty is not visible. The cost incurred for licensed software becomes higher compared to the actual usage of the software.

In the current environment, merely tracking metrics and static details is insufficient. IT teams require more endpoint insight to map out these complex, highly distributed hybrid settings accurately. That means they need tools to connect metrics and the employee experience. The answer is solutions that provide automatic endpoint mapping capabilities and deliver contextual details to IT teams.

Better Visibility With Automatic Endpoint Mapping

End-user experience monitoring (EUEM) software employs AI to automatically map every enterprise endpoint, reducing the complexity and burden of manual processes. These tools use a lightweight agent deployed on all end-user devices to gather telemetry data, presented on a user-friendly dashboard for analysis. With these insights, IT teams can monitor every IT software and hardware asset across the enterprise while swiftly identifying flaws and abnormalities to prioritize upgrade initiatives. Auto-remediation at the endpoint can further streamline the user experience by preventing IT issues from disrupting their workday without involving help or service desk personnel.

Endpoint visibility through EUEM software can provide IT teams with insights that can help them make informed investments and reduce operational expenses. One key benefit of endpoint visibility is the ability to optimize hardware lifecycles. For instance, if an IT administrator cannot determine the root cause of low device performance or repeated application crashes, they may decide to upgrade or replace the device prematurely. With endpoint visibility, IT teams can determine whether a replacement or upgrade is necessary.

Additionally, endpoint visibility allows IT teams to track all enterprise licenses and identify which ones have been unused for an extended period. They can then create alerts to deactivate those licenses, resulting in cost savings that can be used to enhance the hybrid work model. Auto-remediation at the endpoint, without requiring software development personnel to be involved, can also streamline the user experience by preventing IT issues from disrupting the workday.

EUEM’s advanced visibility can benefit enterprises of all types. For instance, imagine a bank manager having trouble accessing a database hosted offsite. EUEM technology can quickly pinpoint exactly where the issue lies – the employee’s device, the WiFi router or the database software itself. The rapid resolution of the problem minimizes the disruption, allowing the worker to focus on delivering value rather than troubleshooting.

Here’s another example: Consider industries with highly seasonal flows of users to onboard and offboard, such as universities, hospitality, and retail. Even simple actions such as new user account creation, allocating laptops, issuing badges, and managing permissions can become massive time-eaters when multiplied by hundreds or thousands. However, accurate endpoint visibility and smart automation can simplify joining and leaving processes while improving efficiency and reducing manual overhead.

Cutting IT Costs Without Harming Productivity

With the economy stuck in a temporary rough patch, enterprises are mandating that CIOs freeze or curtail their department’s spending. IT operations are very different in today’s hybrid work world compared to the traditional workplace of yesteryear. That means the tools and strategies for reducing IT spend are also different. By utilizing intelligent EUEM software to achieve end-to-end visibility into each endpoint, organizations can shrink IT expenses without eliminating the services and systems employees need to do their jobs effectively and productively.

Source

https://www.spiceworks.com/tech/it-strategy/guest-article/how-endpoint-visibility-trims-it-costs-and-boosts-performance/

Image Credit

Carlos Muza via Unsplash

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]]> Keep an eye on your software estate to avoid the ‘Great Software Swindle’ https://easysam.co.uk/news/keep-an-eye-on-your-software-estate-to-avoid-the-great-software-swindle/ Mon, 27 Sep 2021 10:45:00 +0000 https://wptest.easysam.co.uk/?p=15605 What is the great software swindle? Freelance consultant Martin Ogden says you must keep an eye on your spending to avoid an unexpected bill.

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What is the great software swindle? Freelance consultant Martin Ogden says you must keep an eye on your spending to avoid an unexpected bill.

Published on 27th September 2021

Every year that I have held a leadership position in IT, I have been challenged with keeping budgets flat or reducing them.

Given the amount of time, attention and money that has been given to business transformation and digitalisation over recent years, this must be seen as somewhat ironic, but that’s the way of the world!

The typical approach is to renegotiate contracts, squeeze suppliers and reduce or move headcount offshore. However, an area that is often overlooked is the software estate.

The great software swindle

Businesses must ask themselves several questions about their business software; do you have a full inventory of the application portfolio, do you know the total cost of the portfolio and, most importantly, how much value is the business getting from it?

During a recent analysis of an IT budget, I was shocked to discover that nobody could provide me with a full catalogue of their software estate, while software maintenance costs amounted to 45% of the total OPEX budget.

Additionally, 50% of the that was for applications that were costing no more than $50,000 per year each but had a total cost of $2 million.

Having established the total spend, we began looking at the high-cost items, which led to an intriguing discovery – maintenance contracts were in place, but several of the applications had been de-supported by the vendor.

Therefore, there was no material benefit to maintaining the software support element of the contract, although the contracts do secure the right to upgrade to newer versions.

Next, an analysis was completed to review the use of the software and whether it was fit for purpose or would require an upgrade within the next three to five years.

A conclusion was quickly reached that the organisation had no intention of upgrading, and in some cases, were actively looking to decommission. There was no benefit from the upgrade rights within the support contract.

The bottom line was that contracts were in place that offered no value whatsoever but were costing several hundreds of thousands of dollars per year.

It was believed that the contracts needed to be in place to retain the rights to use the software. This is true for SaaS applications, but not the traditional perpetual model.

Next is to ‘right size’ the agreements, which is especially applicable to SaaS solutions. The organisation employed approximately 800 staff and a large number of contractors, tripling the overall number to around 2,400.

Enterprise Agreements were in place for some applications of around 3,000 users. That’s 600 licences that were not being used.

Using this date to negotiate contract renewals resulted in a saving of nearly $500k per annum.

That was the easy part; the greater challenge was to research the applications that cost no more than $50k per annum, but that amounted to almost 25% of the total IT budget when consolidated.

Such applications had gone under the radar of formal governance due to the low costs. They had been deployed with good intention and business cases being put in place, but no-one had ever circled back to check if the objectives of the business case had been met, but more shockingly, there was no evidence of the usage of the applications.

Change tack to deal with your software budget

The challenge is then to identify where there is little or no usage. This can be difficult because it involves subjective conversations with stakeholders.

Conversations like these become increasingly frequent, meaning that IT departments often struggle to rationalise software portfolios, but keep incurring the costs.

The situation has become worse over the years and will continue to do so with more and more SaaS solutions being deployed. Eventually, the task goes into the “too difficult” pile.

A change of tack is needed. Given that the individual titles are low cost there is often very little appetite to engage with business leaders to perform an ROI on them. Everyone is far too busy doing more important things.

Data from software auditing solutions can be used to identify where software is installed and how much it is used. Most organisations have some form of software auditing too, such as Microsoft Endpoint Configuration Manager that will report install base and potentially usage.

These data are very useful where it is obvious that applications are installed but never or infrequently used. Often a user will need niche products for a discreet piece of work which may only last a few weeks or months.

However, once that piece of work is complete the software is often left on the endpoint; not used but incurring maintenance charges. Usage tools are great at identifying theses cases and allowing IT departments to harvest licences.

The most difficult challenge is in cases where reports show that the applications are in use but there is no objective data to say how much use. For example, a lot of us will start up Outlook first thing in the morning and leave it running all day, or indeed until we choose to shut our machine down.

Auditing software will report that Outlook is being used constantly when the machine is running. The problem becomes more difficult to crack when the software is web based.

In these cases, objective evidence is required to monitor the actual usage of an application. This is by no means a small undertaking and can be time consuming but will result in providing IT with the data to challenge stakeholders.

The task should not be underestimated; it will be take time. You will need at least three months usage data (ideally, 12 months).

There are examples of genuinely business critical software that does only get used once per quarter or in some cases annually. However, it is worth it.

Source

https://digit.fyi/digital-transformation-software-estate/

Image Credit

Pixabay via Pexels

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]]> Troubleshooting your inventory client agents https://easysam.co.uk/blog/troubleshooting-your-inventory-client-agents/ Fri, 19 Feb 2021 13:25:00 +0000 https://wptest.easysam.co.uk/?p=18285 Our newly appointed director, May Turnbull, dives into some simple places to start when your inventory clients just don't want to play ball.

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Our newly appointed director, May Turnbull, dives into some simple places to start when your inventory clients just don't want to play ball.

Published on 19th February 2021

Whilst I by no means profess to be being technically savvy when it comes to inventory tools and their client agents, there are a couple of things I have picked up in my years of dealing with inventory data that I thought I’d put out there into the universe.

When deploying client-based inventory solutions, one would be fooled to think that once you have deployed the software…that that is the end of that chapter. Client agents that once reported fine can fall-over, so these do need to be monitored.

At EasySAM we report monthly on 90-day inactive devices within customers’ inventory tools and depending on their industries; this report can often consist of hundreds of devices.

Now bearing in mind that I’m referring to client agents that did in fact successfully report in the first place and that you haven’t changed anything major (like firewalls) …here are EasySAM’s two insights regarding troubleshooting these client agents:

#1

We would recommend that removal of devices from your inventory tool be included in your current decommissioning processes. Many of our customers remove devices from their inventory tools at the same time as the accounts are disabled/moved to the relevant OU in Active Directory. This clears the waters to be able to identify client agents that are genuinely in trouble.

#2

Before looking into the individual logs for the agents (which can be very time consuming), EasySAM recommend looking at doing two things on-mass first:

Restart the Devices

For Windows devices, this can be co-ordinated through WoL (Wake-on-LAN), and there are alternative technologies here for your Apple estate. Experience has taught us that devices that aren’t restarted for long periods of time can play havoc on some services.

Reinstall the Client Agents

This may sound trivial, but you will be surprised how often this works. Pushing out the latest and greatest will ensure any old versions & corruptions are addressed. This is a task that can also be easily automated for most and should save time in addressing reporting issues on these devices.

2021 might be a good time to review not only your device retirement processes, but also perhaps procedure regarding your inventory visibility/accuracy.

If you are interested in getting a quick MOT of your SAM, be sure to check out our affordable SAMplicity MOT service.

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May Turnbull

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]]> Why managing your IT inventory is vital to staying cyber safe https://easysam.co.uk/knowledge-base/why-managing-your-it-inventory-is-vital-to-staying-cyber-safe/ Thu, 13 Dec 2018 11:05:00 +0000 https://wptest.easysam.co.uk/?p=17777 Don't get affected by this growing epidemic by not putting effective IT asset management solutions in place

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Don't get affected by this growing epidemic by not putting effective IT asset management solutions in place

Published on 13th December 2018

Cybercrime is a growing epidemic that affects businesses of all sizes. Organisations have a responsibility to protect the data of their employees and customers. So they are investing in expensive hardware and software solutions. Yet businesses don’t realize that without effective management of those solutions, every component they add to their IT inventory becomes a new point of vulnerability. Cybercriminals can exploit unaccounted and out-of-date hardware and software to hack systems. So companies need to put effective IT asset management solutions in place.

What IT Asset Management (ITAM) Entails

IT managers have to keep track of their IT inventory. They have to deal with contracts, licenses, updates, and regulatory compliance issues. The use of the cloud and mobile devices are adding new layers of complexity. In the early days, managers could get away with using spreadsheets to keep track of their IT assets. Today most sophisticated operations use some form of IT inventory management software. These tools are better suited to deal with various aspects of IT asset management:

Hardware Asset Management: IT departments have been dealing with servers and workstations for a long time. But that doesn’t mean that it has gotten any easier. A good ITAM practice requires that hardware is properly tagged and tracked throughout its lifecycle. The firmware of each hardware needs to be updated regularly. A good IT inventory management software has the provisions to handle the complexity of dealing with various aspects of hardware management.

Software Asset Management: Software provides a different set of challenges. IT departments have to prevent unauthorized software installations. They have to ensure security updates are regularly applied to installed applications and access management rules are followed properly. Good ITAM tools can keep track of software updates, license expirations, and compliance requirements. Regulatory audits are easier with software asset management.

Cloud Asset Management: Cloud-based services like SaaS, IaaS and PaaS are relatively new developments. So IT departments are still trying to figure out how to address various issues. In a pre-cloud environment,  teams had total control over the IT inventory. But cloud environments use the shared responsibility model. Most ITAM tools are still not highly evolved for cloud asset management. So IT teams need to pay special attention in this area.

End-User Mobile Device Management: More companies are adopting bring-your-own-device (BYOB) policies. Even though its great for productivity, its a nightmare for implementing security. Tracking and monitoring BYOB devices through IT inventory management is a high priority for IT departments.

Why ITAM is Crucial for Effective Cybersecurity

For any modern organisation, it’s not possible to create a robust cybersecurity program without having an efficient ITAM solution. There are just too many tools and services to keep track of.

For example, a single employee might have a PC, a mobile phone, and a tablet. In addition, the employee might have access to various servers and cloud applications. If cybercriminals can obtain even one password to any of these endpoints, they can often use that password to hack into other systems to gain more valuable information.

Also, cybercriminals can launch sophisticated phishing attacks, exploit software vulnerabilities or steal employee devices. IT teams need to fight battles on all fronts by keeping software and hardware up-to-date and having the capability to shut down stolen devices. Recent attacks in the UK shows cybercriminals are taking advantage of all these vulnerabilities.

British Airways Hack: Financial information of around 380,000 British Airways passengers were hacked during a 15-day breach in August 2018. Initially, British Airways didn’t know how the hackers got access to the data as there wasn’t any internal breach. Later security experts discovered that the scripts for its baggage claim information page were changed just before the hack started. The cybercriminals exploited the weaknesses of those scripts to intercept customer information. This shows an important reason for having ITAM solution. There is no information available about how BA managed its IT inventory in this case. But good ITAM solution would make finding vulnerabilities like this easier for security experts. Experts would be able to discover problems faster using ITAM historical data. Without proper ITAM, the same task will take significantly longer or even make the problem untraceable. It will increase the chances of future attacks.

NHS WannaCry Attack: The WannaCry ransomware attack of UK’s National Health Services (NHS) caused cancelling of 19,500 medical appointments, locking of 600 computers at GP surgeries and put 5 emergency centres out of service. The damage could have been worse if a security researcher hadn’t accidentally discovered the kill-switch to the ransomware. But this attack could have been prevented in the first place through IT asset management. If NHS had updated their Windows operating system properly, the WannaCry could not have caused this havoc.

Establishing a Cyber Resilient Business Using IT Asset Management

IT asset management will not solve cybersecurity problems automatically. Businesses need to design and implement their IT inventory management software with cybersecurity assessment in mind.

However, cybersecurity-aware ITAM solutions will help your business in multiple ways. Here are some of the benefits:

Visibility and Transparency

ITAM solutions designed with cybersecurity objectives will help you find security risks faster. If you have a configuration management database (CMDB) for your IT assets, you can easily pinpoint when a problem happens. With regulations like GDPR, this becomes more important as you are legally required to report your security breaches.

Early Security Threat Detection

Hardware asset management and software asset management tools keep historical records or logs of various information. This information is a great resource to recognize irregularities or anomalies. This data can help your business early detect cyber attacks and take preventive measures.

Data Traceability

Data is the most valuable resource for businesses in the information age. Your ITAM solution gives you the ability to organize and align the data from your employees, your customers, and your infrastructure. So you’ll have more control. It’s an important tool for tracking and securing data.

Cost Optimisation

Cybersecurity is expensive. Most companies stop tracking their hardware or updating their software due to the associated costs. Initially, an IT inventory management solution might take resources to set up.  But it will save you time and money in the long-run. It will make tracking and updating hardware and software assets easier and more efficient.

In Conclusion

No solution can stop all cyber attacks. But an ITAM solution can help your organisation build the necessary security strategies to improve your chances of preventing an attack. And a robust ITAM solution can help your business stay safer.

Source

https://www.informationsecuritybuzz.com/articles/why-managing-your-it-inventory/

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Polina Zimmerman via Pexels

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