Licensing
Licensing tends to be a hot topic in a business. It's always required, you need it for products to work correctly, and to stay in compliance with the software provider, but not everyone in the business actually understands it. And it’s a recurring process, often being done once per year unless license renewals are over a longer period of time.
When purchasing licenses, it’s done upfront with the initial purchase of the product you’re looking at. If, for instance, you’re looking at Symantec Endpoint Protection for your company, it has a specific requirement. This requirement simply is that every endpoint being protected needs a license. In terms of this, it’s a simple case of counting the number of endpoints and then buying the licenses.
But why buy licenses?
- To be legally compliant – if you are audited on the products in use in your company, you need to prove that what you’re running in your business corresponds to what you have purchased in terms of licensing. Failure to do so means it’s illegal, and the software provider is well within their rights to take a variety of actions, including name-and-shame, or heavy financial fines on the business. Neither of which a business should be able to tolerate;
- Common licenses make it easier to manage your license base, especially if you’re using multiple applications from the same vendor. And license management can become exceptionally difficult with the different ways software is licensed;
- Depending on whether or not you’re taking an onsite offering, or something in the cloud, it can mean you move to more of a subscription-based licensing model, meaning when a user leaves the employment of the company, you stop paying for their license;
With the various licensing models for applications, it becomes difficult for someone in IT in a company to either know all the license requirements, or how it works. For this matter, I always recommend reaching out to a solutions provider or distributor for this information as they have specialists who deal with this. The best source of information is simply Symantec, and they will have a team dedicated to answering any of your questions around this.
License renewals can also be a pain, but making sure you are current with your licenses (if you have either increased or decreased the licenses) makes this process far easier, so keep track of what is happening with the licenses, and renew in time. Failure to do so could see support being dropped, or penalties added.
Stay legal with licensing, and avoid the issues by being caught out!
I have added a couple of links below to give you an indication of the various types of licensing models deployed with some of the Symantec products:
Symantec Licensing Portal
https://www.symantec.com/en/in/global/licensing/
Symantec ATP
https://support.symantec.com/en_US/article.TECH235109.html
Symantec Ghost Solution Suite
https://support.symantec.com/en_US/article.TECH110727.html
Symantec Packetshaper
https://support.symantec.com/en_US/article.TECH242115.html
Symantec Endpoint Protection
https://support.symantec.com/en_US/article.HOWTO80796.html#v16222995