Consider, you are the IT Manager for a global company with offices in different countries. Your company recently switched to a hybrid cloud strategy, a mix of on-premises servers and cloud services. First, it looked quite exciting. But then you realize it actually opened the door for a licensing nightmare, which includes:
- Unauthorized software: Employees in different locations are using different software, often without proper authorization
- Cloud confusion: Challenges in keeping track of cloud subscriptions and usage across various platforms (AWS, Azure, GCP)
- Audit anxiety: The constant fear of software vendor audits leading to hefty fines and potential disruptions
Notably, hybrid licensing is not something new. For long, software vendors offer different types of licenses to meet their customers’ specific requirements. Often, organizations would go for a few dedicated named user licenses, besides purchasing a pool of network licenses for their other users.
However, with the current software licensing trend going the cloud way, the subscribers often have no other option but to opt for a cloud subscription. However, there are certain software applications such as MATLAB that still offer perpetual and on-premise concurrent licenses.
This constantly evolving hybrid IT environment makes implementing comprehensive asset management tricky. In this blog, we will explore how to navigate licenses in these complex environments.
Challenges of managing licenses in multisite and hybrid IT environments
- Control and visibility: Difficulty tracking licenses across multiple sites and cloud environments
- Compliance: Trouble enforcing licensing policies for diverse applications with different compliance requirements
- Cost: Global organizations often end up purchasing additional licenses—leading to wastage—as they don’t have insights into how licenses are used by their users seated in multiple locations
- Vendor lock-in: Organizations experience this mostly with cloud licenses such Adobe, AWS, Microsoft, Apple, and more. In such cases, switching vendors becomes nearly impossible due to lack of options or resources.
Moreover, certain vendors have been accused of keeping hidden calcellation charges in their EULA, forcing organizations to keep paying for wasted subscriptions.
How to navigate?
To do away with the challenges of complex IT environments, a wise way is implementing a granular license management strategy by going for a smart asset management solution. With standard SAM solutions, you get the following:Â
- Centralized license repository: To track all of an organization’s licenses in one place, it is crucial to have a centralized hub from where you can check how many licenses are there in your ecosystem, how they are allocated, who are the assigned users, and more.
- License usage monitoring and optimization: Now you know your licenses and to who all have access to them. But how are they being used? Major SAM solutions come with functionalities to identify underutilized and overused licenses. These are derived from real-time and historical license usage data.
Once you have identified your underutilized and overused licenses, it is time to optimize. For network licenses, it is quite easy as solutions like OpenLM enable you to track licenses going idle and reclaim them with their functionality of license harvesting.
For optimizing named-user cloud licenses, you can leverage subscription optimizer by OpenLM, a functionality enabling to reallocate subscriptions based on user demands.
- Automation and policy enforcement: Top license and asset management solutions come with automation and compliance capabilities. Just define rules to streamline all license management tasks, and enjoy enhanced efficiency with reduced denials and minimized compliance violations.
- 360-degree reporting and analytics: Granular license usage reporting enables organizations to implement a cost-effective asset management plan in multisite and hybrid IT environments.
- Smart integrations: To enhance productivity through exchanging data, top license management solutions offer integrations with different procurement systems and ITSM platforms.
For managing software assets in the multisite and IT hybrid environments of 2025, no one-size-fits-all approach will lead you to the intended results. That’s why it’s prudent to choose an intelligent asset management solution like OpenLM that you can align with your unique business needs and enjoy enhanced productivity and significant rise in ROI.
Notably, with OpenLM SAM, you can monitor and optimize all major types of software licenses, including named-user cloud licenses, and also dongle and feature-based licenses—while receiving granular and real-time reporting. Not just that, simultaneously OpenLM enables you to track and optimize processes in your system.
The future of engineering software is largely about containerization and the cloud. Considering that, we at OpenLM are all set to keep upscaling our solution to provide you with the best asset management experience.
