As more organizations adopt hybrid and multi-cloud environments, there’s an increased need to consolidate and govern this complex digital environment.
To help keep tabs on cloud applications, your organization needs a capable SaaS management platform like Inscape to consolidate all your cloud application management and governance into one easy-to-use dashboard.
What is Inscape?
Inscape is an all-encompassing SaaS cloud business platform of service offerings, designed to help you:
• Govern license usage, cloud spend, and more
• Report on subscription costs from popular cloud SaaS providers
• Optimize usage to fit your budget with step-by-step actions
• Adopt new approaches and new SaaS subscriptions with dedicated dashboards
• Train your team to get the most out of your cloud SaaS via the Inscape Training
• Much more
Inscape is the only SaaS management platform that gives you consolidated information, from all your cloud applications, in one place. This helps you make better decisions and gives you the tools you need to implement them quickly. With access to the most popular cloud and SaaS applications, Inscape acts as a SaaS Swiss Army Knife, combining many tools into one.
In this blog, we’ll look at the new features released on Inscape last year and what’s ahead for 2022. Before we delve into the exciting new features, one key evolution deserves its own mention: Inscape now supports Amazon Web Services (AWS).
Inscape and AWS
In addition to Azure and Microsoft 365 management, Inscape now supports AWS environments for cost visibility, management, and recommendations. Multicloud users will now benefit from value-adding features and easier management, which surpasses Amazon’s complicated and slightly limiting console. Instead of swiveling from different management tools, Inscape allows you to manage everything from a single platform. In 2022, we’re looking to continue creating better monitoring, governance and reporting tools for AWS users, with more features currently in development.
Inscape features added in 2021
The addition of AWS may have been the headline for 2021, but there were plenty of other additions to Inscape.
Inscape Multicloud Cost Management
Cost management underwent perhaps the most significant changes in 2021. But aside from the addition of AWS, here are some of the features added to the streamlined cost management dashboard:
• View cloud spend in near real-time with a simple and intuitive platform
• View pre-built, graphical charts and insights to easily consume and intelligently analyze data
• Slice and dice your cloud spend by account, service, resource, etc. for granular cost visibility
• Get comprehensive recommendations that can potentially help you save you on your monthly bill
• Eliminate the daunting task of examining spreadsheets and dissecting your cloud bills
• View detailed billing information that can be exported
• Evaluate month-over-month spending and utilization trends to quickly identify anomalies
• Create and manage budgets
• Easily keep track of who owns what cloud resources and subscriptions
Another feature of Inscape Cost Management is Recommendations for reducing expenditure, optimizing security, and improving performance. Recommendations show detailed actions you can implement to help you save money and improve your overall security posture.
Inscape Anomaly
Anomaly is a service that allows users to track Azure costs in a slightly different way to Cost Management—helping you to bring costs under control before you even get your bill. Anomaly uses machine learning to forecast your Azure costs, based on the usage of your cloud machine. It provides greater visibility and control over your cloud spend and allows you to make adjustments sooner.
You can also set up email notifications for any cost anomalies (before you receive your bill), including anomalies to your new Azure resources, and notifications of any creations or deletions in your Azure environment.
New Reports in Inscape Manage
Reporting is a robust feature that allows you to easily access more than a hundred reports each offering instant and up-to-date information about all aspects of your Office 365 environment. License cost reports were also added to Inscape Manage—providing greater visibility on where your Microsoft Office 365 budget is being spent.
These reports can be set to run automatically on a daily, weekly or monthly basis for greater consistency and commitment to best practices. They can also be set up to send automatically via email to company heads or parent company directors once completed.
New Training Courses in Inscape Training
The cybersecurity threat continues to increase. In order to arm Inscape users with the knowledge they need to tackle the issue head-on, new cybersecurity training courses are now available in Inscape Training.
New Inscape SaaS Management features arriving in 2022
What does 2022 have in store for Inscape users? Here are some of the plans we’re currently working on for release this year.
Adding Google Cloud to Inscape Cost Management
With the success of the Azure and AWS versions, we’re looking to add Google Cloud to Inscape Cost Management. This will further empower multicloud users to take control of their cloud spending and build more intelligent budgets.
We are also working on improvements and new features for the AWS Cost Management dashboard, that provide more data and visibility – bringing it in line with our Azure dashboard.
Adding AWS to Inscape Anomaly
We’re expanding our AWS offering into the Anomaly dashboard, so users can forecast their AWS spend, as well as their Azure spend, before they are billed.
Teams Sensitivity Label Reporting
The Team Captain service within Inscape simplifies and automates the manual approach to governing, managing, and providing productivity insights of a company’s Microsoft Teams environment.
If you are looking to protect and regulate access to sensitive organizational content, admins can use sensitivity labels—created during collaboration within Microsoft Teams—to do so. Sensitivity labels set the privacy level for teams and control guest access to teams.
Team Captain will also show you how many of your Teams have sensitivity labels, and which ones are for management.
Inscape Manage
To build on the new License Cost Reports—added to Inscape Manage in 2021—we’re expanding the fields that can be used. Where ‘Company’ works well for large parent organizations, medium sized companies may find it more useful to filter their data by department (accounting, marketing, sales, etc.).
This update should help smaller companies drill down into where their cloud costs are being used and allow managers to put cost saving strategies in place where they are needed most.
Try Inscape for Better Microsoft 365 governance and Cloud Cost Management
Inscape adds value to every element of your cloud management approach. To find out more, contact our team for a free trial.
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