Starting point.
SVA St. Gallen is always available to answer its customers’ questions regarding social security whatever ever their situation in life, and offers excellent service thanks to its OASI branches located in every municipality. But SVA St. Gallen doesn’t want to rest on its laurels.
As an efficient service provider, SVA St. Gallen treats all data and information entrusted to it with the utmost care. It also ensures that all software used with the institution meets compliance requirements and that licences are up-to-date, however, regular compliance checks use up a lot of people-power and money.
Project objectives.
SVA St. Gallen would therefore like to increasingly automate the process of ensuring licence compliance in the future, and so optimise software usage. The software required should record, check and monitor the actual usage of all licences within the institution. In order to do this, all IT systems need to be recorded in a portal and unwanted software rejected by means of a blacklist.
Challenges.
SVA St. Gallen turned to Comsoft direct AG in their search for a suitable solution for the management and optimisation of software licences The companies worked together to analyse the requirements and compare the various Software Asset Management (SAM) tools.
Insured parties’ data are sacrosanct. They must be treated very carefully by the software we use, and so we need to adhere to licence compliance standards and carry out diligent monitoring. Comsoft direct’s solution not only monitors our licences, but also keeps an eye on how institutionwide software is used. This not only cuts down on admin work, but also works to put the minds of management and the regulatory authorities at ease, that the software we use fulfils all licensing compliance regulations.
Bruno Lautenschlager, Head of ICT, SVA St.Gallen
Solution.
It quickly became clear that SVA St. Gallen would have access to all the services they required with the SAM365 Managed Service platform hosted by Comsoft. The platform utilises the SAM tool from Snow Software—the market leader in SAM environments. Comsoft’s SAM365 Managed Service ensures compliance by recording all licences in the portal and then continuously checking them. The Comsoft SAM team first of all supported SVA St. Gallen in the implementation process by entering details of all the licences used across every IT system such as servers and clients.
The Snow License Manager from Snow Software is able to recognise nearly all software available on the market and is available to the institution via the IT portal and registers if and when an employee uses particular software. Software that has been installed but never used is de-registered by SAM365 Managed Service, thus automatically optimising licence costs.
The Comsoft SAM Team can create yearly reports enabling SVA St. Gallen to see which software is affected and which programs have been blacklisted. The blacklist can, however, also be easily managed by the institution via the Snow License Manager. The Comsoft Full Service package also includes data analysis for yearly orders, renewals true-ups and contract renewals. In this way, Comsoft’s SAM365 Managed Service has now been supporting SVA St. Gallen in monitoring and optimising the software used as well as the corresponding licences for four years.
Customer benefits.
By using SAM365 Managed Service from Comsoft, SVA St. Gallen saves costs and reduces the workload. Not only that, but licence costs have also been reduced as unused software is quickly recognised and the corresponding licences are not renewed. The portal registers and lists newly-installed software, guaranteeing that every single licence within SVA St. Gallen meets compliance regulations.