The root cause of software licensing risks

The vast majority of licensing risks and are formed when software is selected, purchased and installed, long before a SAM discovery tool can hope to find them.

Preventing new risk is just as important as discovering existing risk, as part of an effective SAM strategy for data center and cloud.

As a sample of how risk and overspend is created, at Selection, unvetted license designs create problems by over or understating requirements. Software is picked without regard for IT strategy, duplicate functionality the organization owns is ignored, creating wasted spend.

When Software is purchased, too many or too few license are purchased, creating waste or new risk. T&C's that restrict usage are missed, license types that are incorrect or bad value in comparison to other types are selected without review. Entitlement is not shared.

When software is installed, the people installing are unaware of the restrictions, creating licensing problems like virtualization risks, or they do not care about the licensing impact, installing to an overpowered machined. Once the software is deployed, unapproved changes create risks.