Organizations that centralize their software purchases stand a much better chance of being software compliant than those that do not have a formal process in place. This is true for small and large organizations alike but certainly the risk of non-compliance increases as the size of the organization does.
The advantages of centralizing software acquisition cannot be overstated. For those organizations that do not centralize their purchases, they run the risk of being either underlicensed or overlicensed. After performing a software audit, many organizations have found that they are both underlicensed for some software titles and overlicensed for others.
Some organizations that are underlicensed have found themselves in the middle of an enforcement audit or lawsuit simply because the IT department did not have control over the software their employees were purchasing and using on a daily basis. Organizations that are the target of these types of investigations run the risk of monetary fines and negative publicity.
Organizations that are overlicensed have been acquiring software that they do not need or are not using. In this scenario, employees are free to purchase or download software that they think they need to perform their jobs. In theory this sounds great, but what often happens is that the employees do not understand the terms of the software licenses and the company ends up buying more software than it needs. For example, some software licenses permit multiple users to access the software as long as a lock out mechanism is in place. This insures that only a certain number of users can access the software at a given time. Centralized software purchasing would allow the company to avoid paying for extra licenses that it does not need.
In order to avoid being underlicensed or overlicensed, organizations need to be proactive and exercise control over their employees. The first step is to obtain an audit tool and perform a comprehensive audit of all workstations, servers and laptops. This provides an inventory of all the installed software. Some audit tools even make it possible to monitor daily software usage organization -wide. This allows the organization to determine which software programs their employees actually need to perform their jobs thereby making smarter purchasing decisions. Going forward, management should designate a person or specific department to handle all software purchases. They should require that all software purchases be approved by a specific person preferably someone in the IT department. Furthermore, this person or department should keep purchase documentation for the software for as long as it is installed. Additionally, they should run periodic audits to monitor changes in usage or any unauthorized installations.