Bring Your Own Licenses (BYOL) are an easy, flexible way to modernize your technology without a big upfront investment. Implementing Oracle license management can show you which licenses you have – and how to use them most advantageously. In this case, organizations can use Oracle licenses they’ve already bought and paid for in a cloud environment, without paying for new SaaS subscriptions.

It’s actually a win-win for everyone. Oracle can retain their customers by offering flexible ways to deploy existing licenses in the cloud, especially Oracle Cloud, while you don’t have to buy new licenses for a cloud environment or drop existing Oracle licenses for a cloud software vendor.

Oracle BYOL is responsive, scalable, and easily available. Plus, it takes a bit of pressure off maintaining and managing your IT infrastructure. If you’re looking to shift some software to the cloud and you’re an Oracle customer – which probably means you have a lot of Oracle licenses – Oracle BYOL might be the smart move, if it’s done right.

Use these Oracle license management tips to get the most benefits from Oracle BYOL, so your licenses work for you and not against you.

 Oracle license compliance is up to you

While most of your Oracle licenses give you the right to use the software according to its metric or edition, the license doesn’t define infrastructure you run it on. In fact, most Oracle licenses and contracts say next to nothing about deploying to the cloud. Instead, Oracle relies on supplementary documents to outline its BYOL rules, such as Programs Eligible for Authorized Cloud Environments and Licensing Oracle Software in the Cloud Computing Environment.

Some Oracle products are eligible for the cloud, but not all. Oracle licenses that you can bring to the cloud include:

– Oracle DataBase
– TimesTen
– Berkeley DB
– WebLogic
– Data Integrator
– GoldenGate
– Oracle Java

This puts the onus of maintaining Oracle license compliance in the cloud on you. You will have to know your entitlements inside and out, and how to accurately track licenses that you deploy to the cloud. Oracle won’t do it for you.

Oracle Cloud versus AWS and Azure

Your Oracle licenses can only move to approved Oracle virtual machine infrastructure, like Micosoft Azure, Amazon Web Services (AWS), and, of course, Oracle Cloud.

Oracle Cloud is the most affordable of the bunch, because of its low 0.5 core factor. This makes sense for Oracle, since it naturally wants to retain existing customers by driving them to its own cloud solution.

But if you’re like many Oracle customers, you’re already using Azure or AWS. In this case and only for those both major cloud players Oracle will consider 1 or 2 vCPUs per Proc license equivalent depending on whether hyper-threading is enabled or not (no Core Factor).

For example, for an on-premise Oracle DB installation, a 24-core server with an Intel Processor would require 12 Oracle DB Proc licenses (core factor is 0.5). For AWS and Azure, no core factor is applied, and since you don’t know the number of server CPU or processor types, you just have the number of vCPUs that you pay to use. So, if you have 12 Oracle DB Proc licenses, you can install an Oracle DB on Cloud (AWS or Azure) with 12 vCPUs allocated (hyper-threading enabled) or 24 vCPUs allocated (hyper-threading not enabled).

In a software license audit, Oracle might ask for all the information on your AWS and Azure cloud products, so you will have to track the compliance of licenses deployed on these environments. A tricky proposition without an Oracle license management tool.