EasySAM has grown rapidly over the last few years, which is a testament to the work ethic of our team to provide savings for our customers. Throughout recent years operating as a Software Asset Management consultancy, we have found competition not only from other SAM Consultancies but also from resellers with their own internal SAM Teams. The likes of Softcat, CDW and Computacenter to name a few.

Fortunately for us there are still many customers who still chose to use an external SAM partner for a reason we like to call, the ‘Hunter vs Gamekeeper’ analogy. This simply meaning, you do not want the same company providing you license advice to be selling you your licenses.

Which brings us onto our next point, where should you get your licensing advice from and who should you trust?

Do you know what’s on your office computers? Perhaps more to the point, how do you know?

Such questions might seem rather pointed, especially when they’re being asked by a nitpicking professional such as an insurer or an accountant. But they’re ones that you, as an IT manager, should be asking yourself – rather than waiting for circumstance to expose any gaps in your knowledge.

In an extreme case, the food company Mars (best known for Snickers and M&M’s candies) filed a lawsuit petitioning the court to order Oracle’s auditors to back off. Following the initial “license review” order from Oracle in September 2014, Mars spent more than a year negotiating the scope of the audit and license procedures – providing Oracle with more than 233,000 pages of documentation, at its own expense. Mars said the burden of the audit was far out of proportion with the requirements of the contract.

Mars dropped the lawsuit in December 2015—indicating that it ultimately reached a settlement. In another license dispute that bubbled over into court, SAP sought $600 million from beverage conglomerate AB InBev for “indirect access” to its systems via interfaces with other software. In a recently announced settlement, the parties appear to have agreed to a much lower number.

While business leaders would prefer to keep license disputes out of court, these cases are reminders that software audits, however routine, have the potential to turn ugly.

Today, more than two-thirds of businesses receive at least one audit request each year, according to Gartner, and some organizations report that they’ve been audited by as many as four different vendors in the same 12-month period.

“Software vendors don’t audit randomly,” says Craig Guarente, CEO of Palisade Compliance, an independent compliance advisory company. “These audits generate huge amounts of revenue for them. If you’re being audited, it’s because they think there’s money.”

And there usually is. Software companies want to ensure that businesses aren’t pirating software, exploiting single-user software, or infringing on copyrights, for example—all legitimate interests. Vague language in many contracts and “soft” interpretations of licensing, however, make it easy for vendors to nail customers for non-compliance.

In fact, 75 percent of enterprises are found to be out of compliance with their software contracts, and 20 percent of them end up paying a whopping $1 million or more in license true-ups, according to a report from software asset management company Flexera.

“[Software vendors] purposely make [audits] complicated to manage and expensive,” says Robert Scott, managing partner at law firm Scott & Scott. “They prey on ambiguity and make it so difficult to be a customer from a compliance burden perspective.”

When vendor software audits turn ugly and worst-case scenarios become a reality, CIOs need a game plan to minimize the damage. Here’s where to start.

The words “license audit” are guaranteed to strike fear into the heart of any Oracle customer today. At best, going through the audit process is a hassle. At worst, it can result in an unexpected hit to the IT budget – even if you’ve been trying in good faith to play by the vendor’s rules.

Across the globe, CIOs are working to optimize IT budgets and reduce the burden of costly annual vendor maintenance fees. They want to focus on driving innovation and growth into their businesses. But like death and taxes, vendor audits are inescapable – typically occurring at least once every three to four years for Oracle. If your organization is not prepared, an audit could divert thousands, if not millions of dollars away from critical projects. Proving that you are in compliance and clearing up any problems can just be expensive and a drain on resources.

In today’s market, where new licensing revenue can be harder and harder to find, software vendors are likely hungry to find their next meal. Don’t throw chum in the water by being unprepared or uninformed about your software license rights and obligations. It’s wise to understand your risks in a vendor license audit and guard against them.

Many industry analysts estimate that a software licensee can expect an Oracle or other major vendor audit every three to five years. These vendor audits are costly, not just with potential non-compliance findings, but with demands on internal resources to support audit inquiries or vendor scripting requirements.

According to a study conducted by the ITAM Review, the average software audit takes more than seven months and consumes nearly 200 hours of IT department time. That is time that could have been spent creating efficiencies or innovation.

But vendor audits are not going away. Audits are proven to drive license sales revenue for vendors and can provide the vendor with leverage when they want to push a client to adopt emerging revenue streams like cloud product lines. Therefore, software licensees need to prepare themselves for the inevitable audit and, through this diligence, mitigate the risk of a license compliance finding and excessive demands on internal resources.

Many organizations think they are compliant with vendor license agreements and yet most of these organizations don’t fully understand the many licensing pitfalls that can ensnare even the most diligent of asset management teams.

So how does an organization implement a license compliance strategy that will successfully mitigate the risk of compliance findings in future vendor audits? Unfortunately, there is no silver bullet to eliminate all license compliance risk, but here are some best practices to reduce risk:

Perhaps your company hasn’t really done anything to get ready for the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which goes into effect about two months from now.

In that case, it may be time for GDPR triage.

Tim Jesser, director of product marketing for Stockholm-based software asset management firm Snow Software, has a few suggestions. His background includes data security and software management.

First, he told me, “ignore the alarmists.”

“The enforcement won’t be that bad [at first],” he said, “because [the maximum fine] equal to 4 percent of annual global revenue or 20 million euros is for repeat offenders.” Of course, there won’t be many repeat offenders at the beginning.

Next, get a realistic sense of your exposure.

At one end of the spectrum, the most liable companies are those with presences in the European Union (EU) that process personal data from EU citizens.

At the other end are companies elsewhere, with no EU presence, who may inadvertently process personal data of EU citizens without knowing it.

The countdown toward GDPR is on. Friday 25th May marks the enforcement of the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation, and it’s not just IT and Technology sectors that are looking at a complete shift in culture – this will impact every industry, cloud-based or otherwise, that collects, retains, or processes personal data on EU individuals, regardless of physical business location.

In what is being dubbed as the biggest shake-up to the privacy and security landscape, data management will never be the same, with stringent rules on handling personal data, and the subsequent streamlining of its flow inside the European Union

With the threat of fines of up to 4% of a company’s annual revenue, or €20m (whichever is greater) for non-compliance, the mere mention of GDPR has had some companies quaking in their boots. Indeed, the demand for “accountability” and “transparency” has meant that the often neglected responsibilities that many would assume come as standard in data management are under internal scrutiny. That is, companies are scrambling to reach compliance in time.

It is pretty hard to get anywhere in life without knowing where you are first. Knowing how far ‘down the road’ you are is essential to knowing how far you still need to go and what milestones are next. Many people will preach about proactive SAM (Software Asset Management), myself included, where processes and procedures are put in place to prevent licensing breaches, overspend etc. But a good place to start is identifying what is going wrong and reviewing the related policies accordingly.

Managing a complex IT environment very challenging, even before becoming involved in an external software audit from a software publisher or a third-party auditing entity. Businesses facing VMWare audits in particular should be prepared to take a number of steps to ensure compliance and avoid exacerbating any potential copyright infringement claims.

It all begins with the receipt of a simple letter from the Business Software Alliance. The BSA is a trade group representing software giants like Apple, Adobe, Cisco Systems, Hewlett Packard, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle and Salesforce.

In the letter, the BSA accuses the company of illegal duplication and use of unlicensed software, demands that the company perform a “software self-audit,” threatens legal action, and warns the recipient of potentially owing millions of dollars in statutory damages.

You may think this is an unlikely scenario for your business, but it happens daily to businesses of all sizes.

Using software without a proper license constitutes copyright infringement and can result in costly penalties. Under U.S. law, if the BSA proves that your company has willfully infringed software copyrights, damages can rise to $150,000 for each copyrighted product infringed, plus the BSA’s attorney fees.

How does the BSA find out that a company is using unlicensed software? Sometimes the BSA targets companies within a particular metropolitan area or industry sector. Most often, the BSA is “tipped off” about a company’s use of unlicensed software by one of the company’s disgruntled or former employees. The BSA sponsors both a toll-free hotline and a website — convenient ways to receive reports of a company’s use of unlicensed software.

There are a few important protective steps that a company can take both prior to coming under investigation by the BSA and once a BSA investigation is underway.

Greetings from the exciting world of licensing.  For those of you that may have noticed that my articles are becoming more sporadic as the demand on my time increases, hopefully this blog will make up for my recent silence.  I’d like to tell you all today about some entitlement to Microsoft’s Azure I bet you didn’t know you have.  To start you off, a reminder on what Azure is; Microsoft Azure is a growing collection of integrated cloud services that developers and IT professionals use to build, deploy and manage applications through Microsoft’s global network of data centres.

And although there are many benefits to SA (software assurance) and many, many more exciting things to report about migrating to Azure…below are two key areas worth getting really excited about: