Partner Article

The increasing risk of software audits

In the past few years, software vendor audits have grown more common as the industry leans on businesses to become compliant with software regulations. With audits becoming more frequent, larger organisations are not the only ones in the firing line. A recent example of this was the Business Software Alliance planting a £10,000 penalty on a Lancashire-based building services engineering company for using unlicensed software.

For the more experienced and perhaps larger businesses, software audits are not a new phenomenon. Smaller businesses however might not be as clued up on the financial implications of noncompliance and as software vendors look to toughen up on piracy to claw back revenue in tough economic times, businesses medium and small should be scrambling for a better understanding of software asset management before it is too late.

Within the last month the BSA have released findings suggesting that almost one in three small UK-based businesses have infringed the law through software mismanagement. A shocking finding considering research from the IT research & advisory company Gartner’s highlighted that software vendor audits are up from 61% to 65% in the last year. With the increasing threat of a software audit, you would assume that processes would be put in place by IT managers on all levels to recognise potential failings and protect organisations from the consequences of noncompliance.

With the BSA recording that 78% of SME’s feel they need to be better educated on the risks of becoming under-licensed, the BSA, software vendors and software asset management providers need to do more to offer education, recommended SAM tools and recourses to ‘interested parties’.

SME’S can protect themselves and reduce the risk of audits by adopting software asset management processes and software. Investing in SAM can help firms of all sizes control costs and optimise software licences across an organisation’s network, making it easier to identify what software a business has, where it is running and whether licences are expiring or expired. Any good software management system should help improve software compliance and highlight areas of risk and overspend. Just like finding cheap car insurance, business or health insurance, managing your software licenses can deliver significant savings for business without the hard work, time and effort.

SAM software can often be looked upon as an expense, but when organisations consider the potential savings from over-licensing and the potential financial penalties they could face from BSA, investing in a licensing management system can often be more of a cost saver than a compliance tool or expense.

As businesses invest more in virtual and cloud-based technologies the risk of vendor non-compliance is greatly increased as creating new virtual machines, running copies of operating systems and software applications, can be done with a mouse click. With record levels of devices requiring licenses, the need to establish a comprehensive license management program is more important than ever – because you know it won’t be long before you get a knock on the door from a software vendor or trade organisation. Knowing that a business is fully compliant can enable them to focus on the day-to-day running of their business even if they have one or two software audits a year.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Karl Young .