Article written by Leo Reiter
With so much to think about regarding providers, platforms, and delivery models, it’s often easy to overlook the most critical part of any cloud computing strategy: the applications. After all, without applications, there’s simply no use for any computing, whether it’s cloud-based or not. Once we start to focus on applications, the complexities and intricacies of software licensing immediately become “front and center”.
In an ideal world, all cloud applications would be open source and providers would get paid on usage, which they would apply to system and software support. But in the real world, we often depend on vendors and thus have to pay careful attention to their proprietary software licenses. Not only is this understanding critical for compliance, but it can also steer cloud adoption strategy itself. Let’s consider the 3 primary ways vendors license software and how this plays in cloud computing…