3 Costly Software Audit Mistakes

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Sending unvetted data to auditors

Auditors love when you send raw or unvetted data. It gives them the opportunity to expand their inquiry, look for outliers, and enhance scope.

Properly vetted data means having the ability to defend your results. Anomalies you cannot explain or defend only lend credence to the inquiry and give auditors confidence to increase their demands.

Vetting tips:

  • Use your own scan tools, not auditor-provided tools and scripts
  • Restrict data to requested fields
  • Filter results to publishers and products in scope
  • Note multiple versions of the same product
  • Identify false positives like trial versions
  • Remove duplicates

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Using your last renewal as your entitlement report

Your most recent renewal is not an exhaustive list of your entitlements. Vendors are a great resource, but they cannot and often do not show you everything you own. Finding every entitlement is your responsibility and requires forensic analysis of data from multiple sources.

Entitlements commonly overlooked:

  • OEM licenses included in products from other vendors
  • Developer and test environment licenses
  • Licenses acquired through M&A
  • Old perpetual licenses

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Not optimizing virtualized environments

Virtualization generally increases exposure due to complexity of licensing variables in play. Optimizing your environment requires a deep understanding of product use rights by VMs, Hosts, Processor Units, User Counts, and virtualization rules.

Optimizing virtualized environments to reflect your entitlement portfolio can significantly reduce or eliminate audit penalties.

Examples of optimizations include:

  • Consolidate products onto dedicated hosts
  • Reduce resource allocation to key clusters
  • Redeploy to user-restricted servers

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