The software licensing gotchas in the cloud


Become An Insider







In either case, it's increasingly important for CIOs and IT pros alike to be aware of what license limitations might exist for the software they use or are considering using. Failure to do so could hamstring your plans for moving to the cloud or, worse, find you on the wrong end of a financially crippling software audit.

One of the very first things to watch for involves hardware licensing keys. Although you can often work around them by introducing an Ethernet-attached USB hub, many times the licensing software is too smart to fall for that. For software vendors that sell software licensed by a hardware key, the key effectively is the software. Chances are your attempts to virtualize it or move it into the cloud won't be successful. However, if you ask the software vendor, you may find it will support a software-based licensing scheme, so it's always worth checking.

The second red flag is software platforms that are licensed by the processor socket or core. These hardware-related metrics almost always cause trouble when you try to virtualize or go to the cloud because the concept of a socket or core changes substantially in both cases. A good example is IBM WebSphere. On a physical server, you pay a certain amount for each processor core you use to run WebSphere. However, in a virtualized environment, you pay a different amount for each processor core that WebSphere could run on. In an on-premises virtualization environment, that could mean any processor core within an entire cluster of virtualization hosts -- not just the ones that the WebSphere VMs are using. Unless you have a whole cluster's worth of WebSphere workloads, this can be prohibitively expensive. The bottom line is that any piece of software that is licensed by a hardware-based metric (processor, core, or server) could be a problem and warrants close inspection.

But many of the software vendors that have restrictions for on-premises deployments have also done quite a bit of work to make it possible to run their software in the cloud. Continuing to use IBM WebSphere as an example, has a deal with IBM to offer IBM software products on Amazon EC2 instances using Amazon's familiar per-hour-per-instance pricing model. That's great because it shows a willingness on the part of IBM to allow its software to run on a third-party cloud. However, what if you start to use IBM software on EC2 and then decide to move away from Can you get the same pay-as-you-go licensing somewhere else, or are you locked into using

An organization that makes the effort to understand software licensing terms will find itself better positioned to take advantage of the flexibility that the cloud offers. Organizations that don't do this licensing homework may find themselves tied to expensive on-premises software or forced into proprietary vendor-owned cloud offerings. 

This article, "The software licensing gotchas in the cloud," originally appeared at Read more of Matt Prigge's Information Overload blog and follow the latest developments in storage at For the latest business technology news, follow on Twitter.

From CIO: 8 Free Online Courses to Grow Your Tech Skills
Join the discussion
Be the first to comment on this article. Our Commenting Policies