3 Best Practices for Managing Software Licenses

Understanding how to manage software licenses can help you run your business efficiently. Effective software license management can help you reduce operation costs, avoid compliance issues, optimize your software investments, and more. In this blog, we’ll explore some software license management best practices to help you get started on this critical process.

What Is Software License Management?

Software license management (SLM) is a critical process for you to stay compliant with your current software usage. Your business can effectively reduce costs and non-compliance risk by optimizing, controlling, and documenting your software licenses. By keeping your software house in order, you can avoid surprises down the road.

The software license management process provides insights into what software is owned, where it’s installed, and how it’s utilized, helping streamline operations and optimize resources. You will have a better understanding of:

• Types of licenses
• Quantities of licenses
• Number of installations
• Software usage

Managing software licenses allows a business to stay in line with the terms of the software licenses it owns.

• This process helps you avoid under-licensing, where there are more users or installations than available licenses.
• It also helps you to prevent over-licensing, where you’ve bought more licenses than necessary. The latter can be a drain on your resources and should be avoided.

The process of managing software licenses can be a real eye-opener for your budget. It uncovers chances to cut down on software expenses through smart strategies like reassigning unused licenses, buying in bulk, bargaining for better deals, or finding alternative software solutions that give you more value for your money.

Software license management often involves thoroughly analyzing how your business uses software. This helps identify the most economical licensing setups, whether per-user, per-device, concurrent user, or enterprise agreements. It all depends on what your actual requirements and usage habits are.

Software license management doesn’t stop there—it also includes overseeing the entire lifespan of these licenses. This means keeping track of renewals, purchases, and terminations to make sure everything is current and in line with what your organization needs.

Software License Management Best Practices

With a better understanding of software license management, you can now follow these best practices for software license management.

Track Software Usage

Small businesses would be surprised to see how much money and resources are wasted on under-utilized software licenses. According to TechRepublic, $34 billion is wasted annually in the US and UK on unused software licenses. By tracking your software usage, you can significantly reduce your expenses.

To manage your software licenses effectively, use Ciracom’s two-part strategy. First, we track staff and application usage, allowing you to identify the tools that are being actively used and those that are not. With real-time insights, your business can obtain the maximum benefit from the data.

Second, maintain continuous tracking to see how this software usage evolves over time. Monthly reports allow you to know how you utilize your current resources and extract the most value from them.

Consolidate Licenses

One significant issue with some businesses is that they don’t leverage the features they pay for. This leaves them with multiple SaaS subscriptions with redundant features. Your business should make the most of your software investments by staying on top of feature releases and optimizing your usage when you manage software licenses.

For instance, Ciracom Cloud customers with Microsoft 365 Premium can benefit from Microsoft Teams Phone, a seamless native calling solution integrated with Microsoft Teams. Our customers have saved money using this feature within their existing licensing instead of choosing a separate SaaS product.

Create a Software License Management Strategy

To be effect, you need a plan behind your actions—the same applies to managing your software licenses. Ciracom Cloud actively works with clients to create a coherent strategy for managing licenses and SaaS applications throughout their business.

We’re here to assist you in defining roles and establishing processes for procurement, analyzing your organizational needs, software deployment, and overall management. This ensures your budget aligns with your needs and can scale as necessary.

Keep in mind that efficient software license management is not just a cost-saving measure. It also helps avoid legal complications and guarantees seamless operations for your company.

Make the Most Out of Your Software Licenses

With regular reviews from Ciracom Cloud, you can update your software license management best practices to match your organization’s evolving needs and goals. We make cloud business solutions simple, affordable, and secure.