There are a number of challenges clients face when striving for software compliance. The journey is a long and arduous one, but the end result is a fully compliant estate, with costs optimized and risk mitigated. Here are four key areas to consider:

Data:

First and foremost, getting access to the right data to achieve software compliance can be a significant undertaking. Existing licence discovery tools may not have the capabilities to retrieve the relevant software inventory, non-instance and entitlement data required to carry out a compliance check. Furthermore, once data has been gathered, how does one calculate non-compliance and the level of work required to achieve the desired outcome.

Expertise:

Like anything, experience and expertise can go a long way to improve the efficiency of a project. The issue for businesses is where to find the right expertise with the customer’s best interest at heart. For example, customers are unable to approach vendors or resellers as they have a vested interest in licence sales, and advice is unlikely to be impartial. Once impartial advice has been identified, the issue of competency arises. Some independent consultancies are too focused on one publisher like Microsoft, so the customer must find expertise across all publishers, operating systems and jurisdictions. Finally, every businesses infrastructure is unique, so the expertise must be flexible enough to cope with changing scenarios.

Collaboration and buy-in:

Who cares about software compliance? Words which many an IT manager can relate to. Getting internal buy-in from the key stakeholders across IT, Procurement, legal and the business is critical to success. Once buy-in is attained, the customer must deploy and hire the correct resources. At this point all the organisational and personnel pieces are in place.

Maintenance:

Software compliance is not a one-off project. When success has been achieved, there needs to be a plan in place to maintain the compliant state going forward. Sustaining a healthy software asset management (SAM) cycle is the key. Managing software from requisition to acquisition to deployment and decommission is the panacea of software compliance and SAM.