How Secure Code Warrior Cut 15% of Their Software Budget
"During our evaluation process, even our CEO was impressed with how easy it is to save on software spend and deliver a fantastic end user experience. I was sold on Lumos within 30 minutes. This is an incredibly valuable product."
The Challenge
I was tasked with managing the IT needs of a growing organization. I was trying to figure out how to reduce the burden of manual tasks for my IT team while increasing cost savings for our organization. Unfortunately, we didn’t have much of a process in place.
We were drowning in busy work that was only growing by the day, app license costs were slowly climbing up, and we had no real visibility into app usage in order to take any real cost cutting measures.
Our SaaS environment was overwhelming to manage and expensive to maintain, and we needed to find a solution quickly.
The Priorities
1. Savings
Costs were slowly increasing across the board. A simple solution to find continuous savings for my organization was key.
2. License Reduction
I knew we had too many redundant applications. I needed better visibility into which applications to remove.
3. Renewal Management
Renewal conversations were the best time to find potential savings, but I didn’t have good enough data to make my case.
The Solution
“Lumos was exactly what we needed. With all the different cost-cutting features, we were able to find significant cost savings for our organization.”
Driving Cost Savings by Reclaiming Licenses
One of my favorite features of Lumos is time-based access. My team was able to reduce license count by creating a small pool of flexible licenses through the Lumos platform. Users could request access to these for a short period of time instead of gaining permanent access.
We also made use of inactivity workflows. If an employee wasn’t using an application within a 90 day period, Lumos could automatically deprovision access and reclaim the license automatically across many of our apps.
Removing Duplicate Apps Through Shadow IT Finder
Managing an ever-growing tech stack is no easy task. So, Lumos helped me find all our Shadow IT, which allowed me to easily see where we had duplicate or unauthorized apps, and remove them.
We were able to find significant cost savings just by getting rid of these applications and encouraging our employees to use approved apps and request them through the Lumos AppStore.
Better Data for Renewals
Lumos armed me with visibility into how our SaaS applications were actually being used. With robust usage data, I could go into several vendor renewal conversations feeling more confident.
I was able to negotiate hundreds of thousands of dollars in savings because of the data in Lumos helped me rightsize my apps and even predict how many licenses I might need in the future.
The Impact
“We cut down various licenses by 50-84%, and found over $300,000 in cost savings.”
Reduced Licenses by 50-85% Across Various Applications
By leveraging features like time-based access as well as inactivity workflows, we drastically reduced our need for expensive licenses by 50 to 85% for certain applications.
Reducing license count has allowed us to be more capital efficient, yet still ensure our employees are getting access to the applications they need to do their work. It was a win-win situation for us.
Reduced SaaS Spend by 15%
Armed with more application usage data like last login for our top applications, I could walk into renewal conversations with better insight into how many licenses I actually needed.
During our most recent renewal conversation, I was able to save over $300,000 for our company which was around 15% of our entire software budget.
100% Visibility of Shadow IT Apps
Before Lumos, it was incredibly difficult for my team and I to know if employees were using funds on apps that we hadn’t approved of, or if we had any redundant applications.
The Shadow IT Finder of Lumos allowed us to create a source of truth of all the apps used at Secure Code Warrior, which helped me remove multiple unsanctioned applications and reclaim any lost costs.
