CTO TAlks

Resource and license management

Imagine that you can add, move or remove licenses as you like, in real time

Something that has always been a big hassle for me as an experienced IT user and administrator is the management of user licenses. Questions like, "How many licenses do I have?" "Who has them?", and "Can I move the licenses to different users?" are very common in today’s IT environment. When we designed the Simple Encryption Platform, I didn’t want the users and administrators of Cryptzone’s solutions to have to worry about these things. My team of engineers has put in great effort to create a license management system within the Simple Encryption Platform. How it works is that a customer buys a pot of licenses. The Simple Encryption Platform is connected to Active Directory®, which uses the same structure and group names as in AD. It is possible to delegate licenses to a user or a group during runtime. This in turn will have the overall number of licenses automatically reduced. The quota can be used and reused in both directions, i.e. removing a license from a user will move it back to the pot of licenses.

The licensing implementations also adapts to changes being made in the AD, and the system will automatically add licenses to users as new ones get added, and remove licenses from terminated users. This indirectly means that licenses can easily be moved around and transferred between users with the use of simple click action. Our license interface makes it possible to see how many licenses that are left in the pot, and with a few clicks a report can be created showing which licenses a user has, of which products, and what date the user used the application the last time. Also worth mentioning is that the licensing concepts are designed with ease of use in mind for desktop home users, flexibility in mind of SAAS- and ASP- providers and scalability and manageability in mind for enterprises. Licensing should be a tool to control product accessibility within a company. Not a pain.