January 17, 2022
One year on: 365 days of PRISM for Office 365
One year on: 365 days of PRISM for Office 365
Released in January 2021, PRISM for Office 365 is Trustmarque’s Digital Intelligence platform that is designed to give you greater visibility over your IT estate.
PRISM uses data from multiple sources and through Microsoft’s Power BI visualisation tools, turns it into important information which supports your business decisions, proactively answers questions, and highlights areas for cost savings and efficiencies within your IT estate. Since its inception, we are proud to have assisted multiple customers to simplify M365 user and license management. Leveraging the power of PRISM, the team has uncovered valuable insights highlighting hidden opportunities for improvement and significant cost savings.
Today we hear from Trustmarque’s James Moran, Solutions Architect and Damien Masterson ITAM Consultant, about how PRISM has shone a light on customers’ IT estates in 2021 and what’s next:
PRISM for a pandemic
Trustmarque’s Digital Intelligence platform, PRISM for Office 365 was already in development before the Covid-19 pandemic, however, the events of 2020 and the disruption which followed sped up the release of the solution for Trustmarque customers. According to James Moran, “When we launched PRISM for Office 365 last year (2021), we set out to try and make IT asset management easier for our customers. Before it was launched, many organisations were dealing with multiple data siloes, running complex PowerShell and analysis in spreadsheets. This complex analysis took up valuable time and resource that simply wasn’t available.
The emergence of PRISM for Office 365 opened up a whole world of usage information, which helps realise cost avoidance and wastage, and highlights any potential savings.
“With Covid-19 and the switch to homeworking, everyone suddenly needed to onboard Office 365. Having PRISM for Office 365 sped up this process dramatically but also empowered customers to keep track of their licenses as well.”
James Moran, Solutions Architect at Trustmarque
Proactive licensing management with Prism
Prism gives you a holistic view of your licensing subscriptions and takes the burden off IT managers who would have previously done this manually. Damien Masterson, ITAM Consultant, comments, “The biggest challenge was that organisations needed to be more proactive in terms of how they managed Office365 subscriptions, this is driven by a change in the license model. Just like the many applications we have on our mobiles, often with subscriptions, and often unused! Do you stop paying for them when you’re no longer using them? Most people don’t, and very often a few months have passed, and you realise you’ve been paying for those applications but have never actually used them.”
“Digital intelligence enables you to manage your subscriptions proactively as opposed to being reactive. It has real end-user benefits from ensuring people have the right software as well as keeping an eye on the costs.”
Damien Masterson, ITAM Consultant at Trustmarque
Finding cost savings for the NHS
During the pandemic, PRISM allowed NHS trusts across the country to locate and act upon inefficiencies within their enterprise agreements, giving back visible savings to the public purse. This is something that James and Damien are very proud of and for good reason: “We’ve had a lot of success for NHS customers, supporting them when money and resources have been tight over this last year”, adds James.
“We have identified huge amounts of overspend for our customers, and tackled that swiftly”, says Damien. “We were able to shine a light on ways that Knowsley Council could simplify their organisation, drive efficiencies and reduce costs, by opting for PRISM.”
The Future of PRISM
Looking ahead at the next 12 months and beyond, James says: “It’s an exciting time in ITAM as we are using everything, we have learned from PRISM for Office 365 and applying it to Azure. We will be consulting with our customers to help keep track of their Azure spending, and giving them a birds-eye view of their solutions.”
Written by Julia Bluckert.