Licensing

In an age of remote working and hosted services, it’s more important than ever to keep track of your licences. Nik Rawlinson looks at the challenges – and offers some practical advice to help you avoid accidental non-compliance

Keeping track of what software you’re using – and what software you’re entitled to use – might not sound like rocket science. But when NASA audited its own usage in 2023, it made some sobering discoveries. In the absence of a centralised licence-management process for software, the audit report estimated that the agency had wasted around $15 million over the previous five years on unused licenses.

And if that sounds expensive, there was worse to come. Auditors also found that the organisation had “historically experienced a large influx of software into its network environment that is not sufficiently tracked for licence compliance, resulting in more than $20 million unnecessarily spent on software fines and penalties over the last five years.”

If such a high-tech, risk-averse organisation as NASA can make such mistakes, what’s going on in your business?

Licensing complexity

While few businesses are as big as NASA, the licensing challenges it faces are shared by every organisation. For one, licensing is typically managed centrally, by an IT or systems team – but expecting a single department to understand the needs of all stakeholders is a big ask. This is particularly true as BYOD and hybrid working models become more and more common.

An alternative option is to delegate procurement or licence management to department heads. But while this might give you a better, closer view of what software your business is actually using, it requires those department heads to understand legal and technical specifics, such as the difference between perpetual, subscription, open-source, by-network, public, permissive, database, site and other licence models. Realistically, their expertise is more likely to lie elsewhere.

And regardless of what processes you have in place, empowered workers will very often come up with their own workflows, either ignoring software that’s been provided for them or using unofficial tools that they’ve selected and installed themselves – so-called “shadow IT”. Without careful administration – often with help from a dedicated software licensing management platform – you could be not only wasting money on unneeded licences, but exposing the organisation to penalties for licensing violations.