Finding Opportunities to Mature Your Cloud Strategy

Cloud continues to be a balancing act

of global organizations say optimizing existing use of cloud for cost savings is their top cloud initiative for next year¹

of IT decision-makers say their organization is defaulting to cloud-based services when upgrading or purchasing new technical capabilities²

How can organizations evolve while keeping costs in check?

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A REAL-WORLD EXAMPLE

Rapid growth causing issues at scale

A network construction and engineering company recently experienced rapid growth due to various acquisitions. While purchasing their Microsoft 365 licenses, they realized a need for a new cloud services provider who could help them scale and reach a better maturity level with their Microsoft products.

Working with CDW, the customer outlined their needs:

Solutions to speed up the employee onboarding process with Microsoft 365

Additional training resources and tools to promote adoption of new Microsoft 365 tools to enhance end users’ overall experience

A path toward simplified billing and reporting to better support their lines of business and reduce monthly licensing costs

THE TURNING POINT

A unique cloud platform powers more value

CDW’s Microsoft expertise, technical skill set, robust local support team and unique multicloud management platform (Inscape) proved a winning combination to achieve the customer’s multi-pronged goals.

As the customer’s Microsoft CSP partner, CDW delivers round-the-clock Microsoft Cloud Support services for their Microsoft licenses. The CDW Inscape platform provides the customer with thousands of training videos as well as insightful dashboards and metrics to help optimize their Microsoft investment. Inscape also manages the customer’s cloud environment as well as providing many more value-adding features.

Microsoft Modern Work and CDW

As a leading global strategic partner with Microsoft, CDW is in a unique position to provide your organization with a holistic, comprehensive, forward-looking IT strategy.

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Inscape by CDW

Simplify cloud management, improve security, heighten visibility, reduce operating and licensing costs, and maximize ROI — all while saving valuable time. Inscape is a CDW-built cloud and SaaS management platform that gives you the information you need to make better business decisions and the tools to implement them quickly.

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THE RESULTS

$48K in annual savings. Faster onboarding. More productivity.

The CDW team helped add significantly more value to the customer’s Microsoft 365 investment. Since leveraging the Inscape platform, the customer has reported cost-savings outcomes, including $24K in annual savings achieved through using Inscape Microsoft 365 Management. Proactive cost optimization by the customer’s operations team resulted in $48K in annual savings.

The customer’s IT team also saved time and boosted efficiency with the new automated reporting process, while the Inscape training platform accelerated the adoption of new hires. Further improvements to productivity came from the customer’s finance department, which can easily identify department-specific Microsoft 365 and Azure expenses with simpler chargeback and show-back processes.

Here’s why it worked:

CDW’s extensive knowledge of Microsoft Cloud, Azure and Microsoft 365, its local support, and the Inscape platform of services ensured the customer had the best-fit solutions for their needs.

Inscape Anomaly identified a rogue administrator running up costs for expensive resources and alerted the customer, who immediately solved the problem.

Inscape Manage provides numerous reports including a custom report that shows their license spend by the lines of business.

What’s next?

Financial reporting will allow the customer to segment their bill by lines of business. The Inscape Microsoft Teams Management platform provides visibility into their employees’ usage of Teams, including those working remotely, and will provide valuable productivity insights.

Amazing happens when cloud pros spark cost savings.

Sources:
¹ Flexera, “2023 State of the Cloud Report”
² Foundry, “Cloud Computing Study 2023”