6 Best Practices for Software License Management

6 Best Practices for Software License Management – All you need to know about Software License Management | Spending by businesses on SaaS technologies increased by 50% in 2021. SaaS waste is also growing. Imagine that your business is expanding quickly without a protocol for managing licenses. The number of duplicated and orphaned software packages you discover might surprise you.

Successful IT asset management (ITAM) involves optimizing the hardware and software in your company. However, without the proper tools, managing your company’s software license can be a herculean process. Effective software license management can help with that. You can automate your SLM (Software License Management) to save time and money with the correct tools.

In this article, we are going to discuss the best practices for Software License management but before we dig in deep, let’s understand what Software License management is.

What is Software License Management (SLM)?

Software license management refers to the procedures and tools a company employs to track and manage its software licenses in an effort to comply with the terms of the developer’s software license.

Software license management provides you with visibility over the software assets, use, licenses, and contracts in your company so that you can determine what software is being used, how much, where, and by whom. You can optimize your licenses, reduce costs, and safeguard your upcoming software investment with complete visibility into your organization’s overall software usage.

Why Software License Management is essential for Enterprises?

Software license management offers many more advantages for your company, much like how being aware of the many kinds of software licenses and how they are used can help you plan your IT budgets more effectively. Software licensing management is a crucial component of IT asset management that, among other things, increases the overall effectiveness of IT operations and the commercial value of IT initiatives.

The top 4 advantages of setting up a software license management system are shown below.

a) Cost Reduction
Software is frequently underused within a business. These “additional” permits might quickly rise to a significant hidden expense. In this situation, software license management can help you keep an eye on how many licenses are being purchased compared to how many licenses your organization truly needs, which can help you save money.

b) Improved Budgeting
Instead of investing in bulk licenses at wholesale prices that you might or might not utilize, use SLM inside the ITIL framework to better match IT spending with organizational needs. With SLM, you may reduce waste as well as buy licenses that are the “best fit” for your business’s needs, improving the accuracy of your budgeting.

c) Efficiency
In the long term, manually maintaining and managing software licenses can be expensive, time-consuming, and vulnerable to cybersecurity concerns. Software licensing management can automate these processes to improve organizational efficiency and free up resources to work on projects that add greater value.

d) Risk Mitigation
Compliance with software licensing laws also lessens your possible responsibility in the event that a software vendor does a usage audit. Penalties may be severe.

Top 6 Best Practices for Software Licence Management

1) Standardize and Record your Buying Procedures
Knowing who and how each business unit purchases software licenses is crucial. Be sure to specify standardized procedures and guidelines for acquiring licenses and to set up regular procedures for archiving licenses and licensing certificates.

2) Keep it Ready to Show what you’ve got
The ability to demonstrate your eligibility for all of your organization’s licenses is crucial once you have gathered them all. If your company is audited, you will need to be able to show proof of purchase, and this will depend on the specific vendors. Verify which vendors demand certain types of proof documents and compare these to the corresponding licenses for each vendor.

Do not rely on your email inbox to hold license documents; instead, make sure they are kept in a prominent and central location, such as a system for managing licenses that have been installed or a different tool for the job.

3) List your Software
Utilize your discovery and inventory tools right now to learn exactly what software is installed in your environment. To ensure that you can match a license to program titles, normalize them.

4) Maintain Ongoing Cost and Spending Tracking
Due to a lack of awareness about how to control these expenditures, many firms discover that they are unintentionally wasting money on licenses. To understand the total cost and cost per user clearly, break down your software spending. Create reports to better understand past, present, and future spending so that you can identify patterns and make informed plans.

5) Don’t Forget to Add a Reminder
It can be challenging to recall every duty that needs to be done during a hectic workday, and some inevitably go through the cracks. Use this procedure to create licensing reminders, just as you would when scheduling regular meetings on your desktop calendar.

All reminders for license subscription renewals, maintenance windows, and approvals ought to be set up by email or another channel of your choosing. Without reminders, these important occasions can go undetected, which would put your compliance and license management out of date.

6) Stay Updated with your Current Inventory of Licences and Software

This is when detective work is needed. Make sure to measure usage to ensure compliance while you search for licensing options that best suit your software consumption patterns and IT environment. You’ll continue to provide updates while:-

• Program names to monitor when users download new software, update existing software or use the cloud.
• Information on software usage and the IT environment.
• The license inventory records new purchases and modifications to licenses, such as upgrades or downgrades, and keeps track of contract milestones.

Concluding Note For Enterprise Software License Management Best Practices

The IT staff will have more time and resources to dedicate to other business requirements after implementing complete compliance licensing management software that includes support for mobile devices. The automation of software compliance is a crucial step to save time and money, whether it’s to monitor the use or distribution of software or to have visibility of all the software installed across the network.

Search