Today’s IT organizations must walk a tightrope to deliver a happier digital employee experience while trying to minimize software and hardware costs. With new security threats popping up every second and remote work becoming a norm, IT help desk teams are constantly firefighting to reduce system downtime and improve performance. More than ever, the employees expect their digital workspace to function at lightning speeds without any disruptions during the workday.

Amid these competing demands, it can be difficult for organizations to keep a lid on the total cost of ownership (TCO), due to lack of data on device health, device and software usage, and licensing. The difficulty increases as demands rise for mobile and flexible workspaces, which are harder to maintain control over.

When enterprises don’t have clear insight into all the components of their IT landscape, including their age and readiness, they risk millions of dollars a year in misdirected spending and lost employee productivity. Rogue software upgrades can introduce unnecessary, conflicting, or even pirated applications. Even legitimate software licenses may be either under-or over-utilized due to ad-hoc upgrades. And IT departments may be unnecessarily replacing or rebuilding perfectly functional systems just because they reached a certain age, or unknowingly hampering employee output with outdated, under-performing hardware.

Without good oversight, IT asset management can sprawl out of control, draining budgets, IT teams’ time and energy, and overall staff productivity.

Endpoint discovery and mapping

First and foremost, the IT teams need endpoint visibility. They need software that helps them discover and track all endpoints within the enterprise, from desktop computers and mobile devices to server arrays. End-user experience monitoring (EUEM) software like the ignio AI.Digital Workspace map all the enterprise endpoints using a light-weight agent that is installed on all the devices within the enterprise. These agents collect telemetry data for analysis. These insights are then presented on the dashboards in the form of trends, patterns and other intuitive graphical representations.

IT teams can keep a close track of inventory and distribution of IT hardware and software assets across the organization. They can look at devices by installed operation system, by make or type, and even dig deeper into the version or patch details. The dashboards also allow them to identify vulnerabilities and anomalies quickly so they can prioritize upgrade initiatives.

Software license renewals

Now that the IT teams are aware of what devices to track and monitor, they can look at the software inventory and distribution within the organization using the software metering capabilities that come within ignio AI.Digital Workspace. The tool helps in detecting blacklisted, unused, or unwarranted software and the software usage and versioning information about all the installed applications. This automatic discovery and insights help the IT teams plan their procurement cycle better. They can effectively optimize software renewals while cancelling licenses for those systems which either aren’t in use or don’t require them at all. This improves inventory availability and can significantly reduce the annual license renewal costs.

Take the example of a sales team with several Adobe Creative Suite licenses running into thousands of dollars every year. The team hasn’t touched these software tools in months, as most of the creative work is being outsourced to the marketing team or an agency. Without visibility into the usage information for these software licenses, the IT team would have kept on renewing the licenses, even though they are of zero value to the sales team. Instead, they could assign a few of those licenses to other teams within the organization who would use Adobe Creative Suite tools daily.

Another example is where an employee has installed a pirated version of a commonly used file compression tool for personal use on their official device. The EUEM tool will detect blacklisted software on the machine and immediately raise an alarm. The IT teams can remove the software from the machine immediately to prevent any untoward security or legal incident.

Device-level hardware refresh

Legacy hardware is often a big source of maintenance cost for the IT teams. These outdated and old systems also led to poor digital end-user experience and performance. Very often the IT teams come to know about a failing piece of hardware or crashed device only when a user raises a trouble ticket for it.

This reactive approach is a big reason for escalating replacement or repair costs. EUEM tools generate device health reports and insights which help IT service desk teams understand disk and memory utilization, make and type of device, device boot trends, unusual shutdown or failure and the health of hardware peripherals or auxiliary devices. Proactive detection of potential hardware issues could result in millions saved in hardware refresh costs.

Take the example of an organization that replaces old desktop computers every five years. Without visibility into the performance and health scores of each device, the cost of this hardware refresh could run into millions of dollars. EUEM tools provide proactive recommendations that will indicate which specific devices are in immediate need for repair or replacement.

This will help prevent catastrophic failure events which result in business downtime. With only a handful of devices undergoing full replacements or repairs at any given point in time, the company can optimize hardware refresh costs, saving millions on IT downtime as well as periodic replacement costs. IT teams can be fully in control of their IT budgets and procurement plans.

End-user experience monitoring tools take the guesswork out of endpoint inventory management and IT asset costs. It helps lower the total cost of ownership for the organization. This proactive approach to IT asset cost optimization translates to lesser threats from unprotected devices and software, less business downtime and associated revenue losses, no more under or over utilized IT assets and a happier digital workspace experience for all the employees within the organization.

To learn how to maximize your ROI by driving greater operational efficiencies within the EUC environment by leveraging an end user experience monitoring (EUEM) product, please download and view this eBook- 4 Key ROI Drivers for EUEM Products.