As everything seems to gravitate toward IT being delivered in the internet ‘universe’, Enterprises are more and more going to be posed with the difficulty of managing application licenses in the cloud.

Succinctly, cloud delivery models that bring with them the most software licensing challenges are Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS). These are the forerunners for applications in being driven by the ‘Internet of Things’. Software as a Service (SaaS) is less likely to cause your organization problems because the software is part of the cloud provider’s services.

For IaaS and PaaS, the Enterprise has shared control over what is being delivered in the cloud environment with any third-party software. The IaaS customer neither manages nor controls the underlying infrastructure, but could have control over operating systems and deployed applications. Whilst for PaaS customers, the opposite is true; the Enterprise typically will not have control over the operating system, but it may have control over the deployed applications.

SOURCE: licensedashboard.com