It may come as a surprise to you that 69% of companies reported over-spending on their cloud budget by 25% or more in a recent survey by Lead Market. Given the complexities of Office 365 license management, it’s understandable why so many organizations are overspending. With so many options, it often feels like you need a PhD to figure out where the savings are.
When it comes to F3s, E3s and E5s (not to mention trying to understand the benefits of bundles vs. add ons) it’s can sometimes be difficult to stop your head from spinning long to enough to make an educated decision.
Optimize your Office 365 License Costs
We understand how overwhelming navigating Office 365 licenses can be so we put together 4 simple Office 365 License Management tips to help you save on your license costs!
Assign Appropriate Licenses
It’s important to understand what apps your users are actually leveraging. It’s highly possible you would be able to move some of your users down to a cheaper license without affecting their day to day at all. In some cases, whether or not a user utilized their calendar in the past month could be the difference between spending $20 or $4 a month on a license.
Reassign Inactive Licenses
Oftentimes employees need add-on licenses like Project, PowerBi, or Visio for one off projects. Add-on licenses can be a great alternative to bundling in some cases. However, once the projects are complete, it’s important to remember to remove the add-on license. This is something that can be easily overlooked and can be very costly in the long run. It's important to regularly review license add ons to ensure users aren't being given access to services they are no longer in need of.
Decrease License Reserves
Many organizations have a large reserve of inactive licenses on hand resulting in license waste. Although it can be beneficial to have some inactive license reserves available, reducing your reserves by just 5% could result in substantial savings. It's likely that your organization is able to cut back on their license reserves by a decent amount without having any affect on the organization other than cutting back costs!
Audit Licensing Assignments
Licensing errors happen more often than you think. Users may have duplicate or overlapping licenses resulting in a major increase in costs over time. When users are given duplicate or overlapping licenses this is ultimately just throwing money out of the window and can be easily avoided with some due diligence.
Office 365 License Management
Managing Office 365 licenses is no easy task and forecasting for future needs can be exhausting. At ENow, we believe in ‘buy only what you need, and adopt all that you buy’, and our solutions can help you achieve just that.
Efficiently and effectively optimize your Office 365 licenses to make informed licensing decisions with ENow Office 365 License Management reporting, including: customizable trend analysis, real-time licenses user lists, license addition history, and much more.
Access your free 14-day trial today! Be the IT hero and drive out any hidden costs.
