Executive Summary
Snow License Manager and SAM Core on Snow Atlas are advanced license management solution, which allows organizations to reduce licensing expenses and avoid any negative effects of potential software audits. Calculation Service is the core of this solution and regularly provides an updated compliance statement.
This document provides an understanding of how Snow License Manager and SAM Core on Snow Atlas calculates compliance and help organizations make better decisions on how to optimize their software spend.
Compliance
To be authorized to use a software application, the supplier of the application normally requires that you have a license. If all the applications in your IT environment are adequately licensed, your organization is compliant.
In case of an excess of licenses, there is a misuse of financial resources but the organization is still compliant. Should there be applications that are not covered by any license, you are not compliant and need to take measures to avoid legal and financial risks.
Your challenge
In order to establish a compliance statement, you need to keep track of all the installed applications within the company and match that with your stock of purchased licenses.
A company easily ends up with thousands of program files, making it a demanding exercise to keep the information up to date. Another complication is the large variety of potential licensing scenarios and their different effects on compliance.
Automated intelligence
Manual calculation of compliance for an entire organization is time-consuming, tiresome, and prone to the risk of human error. With Snow License Manager or SAM Core on Snow Atlas, you can address these challenges by automatically collecting and reconciling the data needed to understand your compliance.
The engine responsible for the automated compliance calculation in Snow License Manager and SAM Core on Snow Atlas is the Calculation Service.
The Calculation Service calculates the compliance statement without any user intervention. Required information about the applications is provided by the Data Intelligence Service, which automatically identifies all commercial applications present in the organization. Information about the license details is retrieved from the database in Snow License Manager or SAM Core on Snow Atlas.
Accurate statement
For an accurate compliance result, it is essential that the organization's license purchases are entered into the system accurately and with the correct entitlements. Consequently, the license administrator needs to have knowledge of central concepts related to Software Asset Management, software licensing rules, and license compliance before they can understand how these are implemented in the compliance calculation.