Over the last several years, audits have been on the increase.  As licensing becomes more complex between hybrid and public cloud scenarios,  common mistakes come up in almost every audit.  Our goal is to help you be prepared and be more PROACTIVE instead of REACTIVE so we thought we would put together these common audit pitfalls and ways to avoid them.  If you have questions, email info@octopus.cloud

• Not keeping track of end customer licenses.  Your sellers need to remind your customers of license mobility or flexible virtualization benefit requirements.  Yes, your customer may have active software assurance when they first bring licenses into your datacenter, they have to maintain software assurance.  It does expire.
• Not having rules in place that prohibits and engineer from installing whatever they want to install.  Your engineer installs SQL Enterprise out of convenience but you thought it was SQL Standard.  Guess what?  You owe for SQL Enterprise.
• Reporting usage just to report usage.  Reporting needs to used as business intelligence.  In the above example, if you report incorrectly, you are not charging your customers correctly.
• Not having a tool in place to help support and track your licenses.  Check out www.octopus.cloud
• RDS and other user based products.  Remember, each user that HAS access to the software will need a license, not who does access.  If a user leaves, be sure to deactivate them or else you will be on the hook for those licenses!

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