By John Lipsey
There’s an interesting article that’s worth taking a look at in TechTarget today. Ed Moyle does an excellent job of outlining some of the security and complexity issues surrounding software license management in the Cloud. Moyle notes that while some of the software vendors are providing more flexible licensing to accommodate the cloud, this is not generally true across the application landscape – so organizations moving to the cloud need to be diligent in managing and optimizing their software license positions in the cloud.
Moyle also notes correctly that many software asset management (SAM) tools are of limited value in virtual environments – and therefore it’s incumbent upon organizations looking to migrate to those environments to understand the limitations of those tools.
Moyle notes that FlexNet Manager Platform (part of the FlexNet Manager Suite for Enterprises) is leading in the area of license management for virtual environments:
“Once you have a list of products with challenging licensing requirements, you'll need to update your software inventory to account for the virtual side of your infrastructure. There are some tools that can help you do this. Commercial tools like Chicago-based Flexera Software LLC's FlexNet Manager Platform …come out of the box virtual-aware…”
This is a good reminder to organizations seeking to move to virtual and cloud environments to think about software licensing as a core component of that strategy. Some recent blog posts on the topic include:
- Software Licensing in the Cloud-- Now you have more flexibility
- Virtualization & Software License Management
- License Management in Virtual Environments—It’s a Jungle Out There
- Reaching 99.99% availability of your critical license servers using virtualization
All organizations looking at virtualization and the cloud must consider software license optimization as an essential element in their strategy. Moyle sums it up nicely:
“You won't accomplish these tasks overnight, but starting on software license management when cloud deployments are still small will give you a leg up on controlling this potentially challenging situation before it escalates.”
