Even though vendor audits of software licensing are not making the headlines of today, with cyber security issues prevailing, it doesn't mean the audits don't happen anymore. On the contrary, vendors are still regularly auditing the businesses and such practices are very common. The financial and legal consequences remain significant.
“Computer asset inventory is a significant addition to a proper system management and, if carried out on a regular basis, can save time and money spent on unnecessary software purchases.”
Computer asset inventory is a significant addition to a proper system management and, if carried out on a regular basis, can save time and money spent on unnecessary software purchases. For optimal results a business needs a complete compliance procedure worked out ensured by an integrated process of asset data aggregation.
Using specialized software can help an organization track an asset lifecycle, cut down unneeded expenses, and make important strategic decisions about software and hardware inventory.
IT asset management (ITAM) collects inventory details that are very useful to a service desk. IT departments need information on the types of assets, their location, user info, network configuration data, the services they support. It also includes the data about a computer with assets installed and what software exactly is supposed to be installed on a machine.
Understanding your license agreements and tracking software covered by the license is an important step in keeping your system in compliance. To achieve that, regular audit and inventory are a must. They will help determine what software is used throughout the organization and eliminate unfortunate compliance surprises should an audit occur at any point of time.
An audit report should show:
Specialized automated solutions thoroughly scan computers and inventory the installed software. Thanks to the data you are getting from the inventory you can get a good baseline for understanding and comparing the purchased licenses to what you really need and what is in use.
You can also find out how often the software programs are used, which is rather handy for optimizing your company's budget, because why would you need to pay for 400 copies of Windows Office if you are only using 180?
Inventorying software and keeping track of license agreements is a solid starting point, and then it is important to establish, enforce, and update software installation and usage policies.
The usage policy explains how to use software properly and legally and what the consequences of software piracy are. A complete software license agreement covers everything from software purchase to its retirement, with such topics as installation, registration, types of usage described.
All this should not only help your business use software optimally, but also to not break any laws unknowingly. Not only can you avoid non-compliance and risks associated with fines and litigation from improper software utilization, but also save money by optimizing the number of licenses installed.
Scan your network and receive comprehensive reports on your entire computer inventory with an up-to-date software and hardware configuration data for each workstation, server or laptop.
Network Inventory Advisor is agentless and supports license aggregation, collection, and management for most major software products from more than 500 vendors, which includes such giants as Microsoft, Adobe. With no doubt, it is the best choice for computer inventory.
During the inventory process our asset management solution automatically identifies the type of computers on the network and lists them including all useful details. There is a possibility to tag each computer with its actual status and assign it to a specific user and technical owner.
Network Inventory Advisor is the best monitoring tool for a professional's toolbox - it is easy to use and install even for a regular user, yet works like clockwork and immediately after installation is up and running discovering all network devices. You can also track non-IT nodes manually.
Thanks to the efficiency of Network Management Software, you will quickly detect software titles used over the network and will be able to analyze the software license compliance. Any changes of your software and hardware environment are easily trackable.
It turns out with Network Inventory Advisor organizing your entire computer inventory is an easy task. It will organize nodes into proper workgroups and will let you create and manage multiple networks. You can create a separate group for each network.
You can print out the reports or export them into one of many supported formats for a convenient presentation for your supervisor or a client.
For the best presentation upon export and print you can use "Export this" and "Print this" options to have your computer inventory filtered for specific nodes and groups. This way you get to offer your client a more specific data overview.
Automatically collect all relevant data on all network devices and get detailed OS and devices statistics. Add custom data. Track important changes in your network.
You are getting 15-day, fully featured trial version.