October 7, 2021 - Blog

Enterprise License Considerations When Adopting Cloud Technology

Jason Pepper, SAM Practice Head, Version 1

Cloud adoption is high on the agenda for most medium to large enterprises, particularly in the context of the 2020 pandemic.

Gartner published a press release in November 2020 that stated, “The COVID-19 pandemic forced organizations to quickly focus on three priorities: preserve cash and optimize IT costs, support and secure a remote workforce, and ensure resiliency.” By moving part, or all of your infrastructure to cloud, organisations are essentially accommodating all three priorities.

As experts in enterprise license optimisation, we encounter organisations that are moving to or have moved to the cloud and have overlooked or misunderstood the full impact of cloud adoption on their enterprise license estate.  As with many IT projects, and specifically technology transformation projects, things are never as simple as they seem on initial review.

The license complexity is unique to each client environment and generally centres around the details of your ‘as is’ and ‘to be’ estate and which cloud vendor you are migrating to.

Impacts of Cloud Adoption on Enterprise License Estates

The impact of adopting cloud on your enterprise license estate can be considerable if not given due consideration.  These generally focus on:

  • License non-compliance due to unforeseen contractual change or incompatibility leading to a misunderstanding of how legacy licenses might apply in your cloud environment.
  • Unbudgeted IT spend when resolving non-compliance and the potential vendor fines associated.
  • Potential impact on initial business case ROI resulting from unforeseen IT spend.

Considerations, Strategies for Right-sizing, Migrating and Managing your Enterprise Licenses for the Cloud.

It is with these in mind, that we created this whitepaper to highlight some of the lesser-known implications, considerations and opportunities in the context of enterprise licensing, particularly the array of complexities that are often unknown and can lay undiscovered until a vendor audit.  The whitepaper takes you through the following:

  • What to consider in your pre-planning phase.
  • How to accommodate a peak in license requirement for the migration and testing period.
  • How to manage your licenses and cloud consumption on an ongoing basis.

Download our cloud licensing whitepaper to learn more about the impacts of cloud adoption on enterprise licensing and our high-level view on the most effective mitigation methods to reduce risk and cost of license non-compliance. Alternatively, for further information, contact us with any questions.

About Version 1

Why choose Version 1? We will always put you, the customer first. We are vendor agnostic, providing independent licensing advice and guidance on a broad range of enterprise vendors with sophisticated levels of expertise on Oracle, Microsoft, and IBM to name a few. We can support you in making better, more informed decisions on your software estate; ensuring you understand the options to make the right decisions to deliver reduced cost and risk, and ongoing license compliance.

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