Accounting for Licenses in the Local Network

What is license accounting? Why is it so important? The answers to these questions are quite simple. Software is, first of all, a product that for one reason or another is necessary for the company. He is an intellectual property and protected by the relevant laws, and his unlicensed use, in fact, is theft. For any firm, big or not, this is unacceptable, as it leads to fairly palpable fines and penalties. Therefore, the registration of licenses is an activity necessary to ensure the normal functioning of the company. Do not forget that the responsibility for the software installed on the employee's workplace is not on him, but on the manual.

Naturally, like everything that is somehow connected with information technology, the task of accounting for licenses falls on the head of the system administrator and is added to the long list of his daily duties. If you think about it, it can even be called a war - between ordinary employees and network administrators. And the accounting of licenses is the main weapon of the system engineer in these battles without rules. Regardless of all requests and orders, employees will still bring third-party programs of dubious origin to their computers. Therefore, licenses should be registered in real time, and specialized programs should record all the facts of installing programs.

Of course, you can go in a very simple way - to save time and money on the accounting of licenses, prohibiting users from doing anything at all, by reducing the account right by one click. But this may seem like an output only for small networks, for large ones, this is in principle unrealistic, since the system administrator simply can not do it anywhere. You can also perform inventory and accounting licenses manually. Although, again, if there are a lot of computers on the network, it can take many days. And it is possible that by the time the last machine was checked and third-party software was removed from it, the newly installed unlicensed programs did not appear on the first one already tested. Accounting licenses helps to identify other cases - when an employee puts himself additional software, which greatly facilitates his work or increases productivity. In this case, it is necessary to assess the degree of utility and, possibly, acquire it.

So, completely prohibit users from installing programs - it is impossible, manual accounting of licenses is not an option. In this case, there is only one way - special automated license accounting software. They will allow to systematize all available software, to track its timely updating, to provide at any time a report to the supervisory authorities. In addition, the deadline for the end of the paid period will be clearly visible, which will allow you to plan the expenses.

However, accounting licenses is not just a list of installed programs. Each item on this list must be confirmed by any available payment documents confirming the right to use it. When accounting for licenses, the administrator must systematize the existing documents (well, if the accountants help in this) and be ready to provide them on demand. Naturally, this information should be kept in an updated state in order to avoid misunderstandings and errors.

Thus, the automated accounting of licenses not only facilitates the performance of the duties of the system administrator, but also protects the firm from possible troubles connected with infringement of copyrights.