For anyone working in IT or a licensing related role, ensuring compliance is a constant and difficult task. You may have hundreds of different licensing contracts and keeping track of all of them can sometimes seem impossible.
Today we’re going to explain how you can utilise a few Cisco tools to ensure you are always fully compliant with Cisco.
The image above isn’t a worst-case scenario. This is a normal state that large companies often find themselves in. It’s not the fault of the company. For many years, this was the norm due to common buying habits and the way in which options were presented to customers.
When you buy a Cisco switch, router, firewall, etc. you are actually purchasing the device, the support and the software license you needed for the appropriate functionality. Anytime you buy, upgrade or upgrade a device, the same process follows.
During the course of usage, other features on the device start getting utilised by the engineering team across the company. Over time, this creates a gap between what’s been purchased and what’s being used.
This then leads to another problem. How do you manage this sprawl across the entire organisation? How do you make sure that you’re using what you bought? How do you manage access to the licensing resources?
The key to compliance is to get everything gathered up in one place first. That’s where the Cisco Enterprise Agreements and Smart Accounts start adding clarity.
The Enterprise Agreements take each technology platform, de-couples the software from any hardware and puts it into a single agreement across the organisation. You can read more about Cisco Enterprise Agreements here.
What you also get with these contracts is access to the Enterprise Agreement Workspace. This single panel of glass lets you review your Enterprise Agreements, add products, review usage, end dates and so on. Now you can run inventory and utilisation reports in one place for the whole company. You can also use it for budgeting and forecasting rather than gathering up disparate excel spreadsheets spread across numerous employees.
Cisco Smart Accounts are a great way to control access to the licensing estate. While some of the features of the EA workspace carry over, you now get granular control of who can see the individual pools of licenses. Your company policy may only allow certain engineers to generate and apply licenses. This can be achieved with Smart Accounts. For conglomerates, we can compartmentalise the licenses across the different sub-companies while keeping the overall contract in a single place with the parent company.
The ultimate goal is to gain compliance and reduce the manual overhead of tracking, issuing, reclaiming and budgeting of the licensing. With Cisco Enterprise Agreements and Smart Accounts, Tesrex can help you get there.
As experts in Cisco licensing and Enterprise Agreements, we can guide you through the process of getting started.
Tesrex offers a comprehensive Cisco License Review that will pinpoint all the areas where you can save money and streamline management. Click here to learn more about this no-obligation engagement.