You may have to squeeze into your pants after that holiday dinner – but don’t apply the same tactic to your cloud provisioning strategy! One size does NOT fit all when it comes to choosing the right plan for your cloud services…

We can all recognize the familiar situation that arises when you want to sign up for a cloud service: a chart is presented, usually with around 3 options for which plan and feature set you may require. Many users are likely to go for the “standard” or “most popular” plan, without properly reviewing which specific set of features they need for their role or department. Not surprisingly, this can lead to wasted budget, as some users may be getting more features than they need and overspending.

When provisioning cloud services, it is critical to recognize what functionality a user needs for their particular role. For example, an organization with lots of retail staff or drivers probably do not need the full, feature-rich Office 365 plan, since they are likely non-primary users of the software. In cases like this, automatically assuming to provision the expensive plan is an overload for what they need in functionality.

Let’s look at another example. Suppose a new employee is hired at Company X. She will be working in the Marketing department on the administration side of things. Other members of Company X who are on the creative team have Adobe Creative Cloud provisioned to them, with a plan that includes the entire collection of apps like Photoshop, InDesign and Illustrator. However, this new employee does not require so many creative tools, but she does need Photoshop. This information can be entered in Vizor’s software asset management system, so that the system will know which Adobe plan should be provisioned to her. It turns out that they offer a plan that includes only Lightroom and Photoshop, at a significantly cheaper price than the full range plan. Once her role as Marketing Admin is assigned to her in Vizor upon her arrival at Company X, the basic Adobe Creative Cloud plan will be automatically assigned to her, as it knows she only needs Photoshop.

Vizor makes recommendations such as this one based on the software required for different roles across your organization. Having this system in place saves a significant amount of time and money by knowing exactly which features employee do and do not need. It is easy to overspend on cloud subscriptions by adopting a “one size fits all” mentality, but as this is very rarely the case, take extra care to customize subscriptions based on users, roles, projects and/or departments.

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