Software audit-readiness

As part of the ongoing need to manage license entitlements, an audit must be periodically performed to validate that the list of deployed software is accurate. Any software used above the authorized quantity is in violation of the license entitlement, and the violation must be addressed to bring the usage into compliance. Maximo IT provides license use reports that you can run to help ensure that you are audit-ready.

One way to measure audit-readiness is to make an enterprise-wide count comparison of the number of authorized software instances being managed to the number of corresponding deployed software instances discovered in the IT environment. Counts of discovered software instances can be compared to the software license records in the Licenses application. Guidelines for acceptable deviations can be established based on license terms and the goals and resources of your business.

Much of the work to perform a software audit-readiness count is in the setup and maintenance of related data, especially the creation of variants that convert any anomalous names identifying the same software so that all names for the same software match the description of the software's corresponding license and item master record. This is done in the Software Catalog application.