How an Expired Software License Can Spell Trouble for Your Business

Your business relies on several software solutions that are designed to help your team be as productive as possible throughout the workday. In order to use these pieces of software, users often need to have a software license or an agreement with the developers. Without these software licenses, the legitimacy of the software is questioned and your team loses valuable time to be productive.

Risks Involved with Renewing Software Licenses
It’s important that all businesses have a solid plan to approach software licensing issues. This means taking an accurate assessment of the risks that are involved with managing software license problems. Here are three of the biggest culprits:

• Downtime: One of the most immediate issues associated with software licenses is that they can run out at any given moment, especially if you don’t take the initiative to renew them before they expire. Imagine this scenario: your team is working full-throttle to finish a project, but then the software is made unavailable because it’s no longer licensed. If this happens, your team could lose precious momentum while waiting for IT to resolve the issue. This wasted time translates to downtime, which has a negative effect on any strict budget.
• Shadow IT: In the above scenario, let’s say that your team doesn’t want to wait for IT to resolve the issue. This may cause them to look into alternative solutions that may not be approved by management. This is what’s known as shadow IT; solutions that are implemented without the proper oversight. When this happens, infrastructures could be put at risk of being compromised, while ignoring software licensing requirements.
• Legal issues: Employees may get the idea that they can find a illegal copy of the needed software online at a cheaper price (or free). While your employees may only be trying to help, their intentions are irrelevant, primarily because if they download a “discounted” or “free” version of a particular software on the Internet, it may not come from a legitimate source. In other words, you run the risk of your employees resolving the issue in a potentially illegal way. If your business is found to have a pirated copy of a software solutions, you could be subject to nasty fines that are easily avoidable. All it takes is an unexpected audit to completely drown your chances of success.

If your organization finds it difficult to handle software licenses, we’re here to tell you that there’s an easier way to manage your business’s mission-critical software solutions. With our remote management and maintenance solution, we can manually update your business’s crucial systems, making sure that they remain secure from potential threats. We can also arrange your software licenses in a way which lets you update them at around the same time. This way, you’ll never miss a critical update or software license renewal ever again.

For more information, give us a call at (703) 359-9211.