lisenshåndtering

Lisenshåndtering, or license management, is the practice of planning, acquiring, deploying, tracking, and optimizing software licenses to ensure legal compliance and cost efficiency within an organization. It covers on-premises, cloud, and hybrid licensing across multiple vendors and product families.

Core activities include software asset inventory, entitlement management, license reconciliation, contract management, usage metering, and renewal planning. It is closely aligned with Software Asset Management (SAM) and IT Asset Management (ITAM) disciplines, and relies on data from discovery tools, procurement systems, and vendor license terms.

A license position is maintained by comparing discovered installations and usage against entitlements, identifying gaps, over-licensing, or non-compliant deployments. Organizations then take actions such as re-harvesting licenses, negotiating renewals, reallocating seats, or stopping unused deployments to reduce cost and risk.

Governance involves defined roles (for example SAM administrator, license analyst), policy development, and regular audits or reviews to ensure adherence to licenses and procurement controls. Effective lisenshåndtering supports compliance, procurement optimization, budget forecasting, and faster software approvals.

Challenges include complex licensing models (per-user, per-device, named user, concurrent user, processor licensing), frequent changes from vendors, virtualization and cloud subscription dynamics, and shadow IT. Data quality, accurate normalization, and timely data integration are critical.

Standards and practices such as ISO/IEC 19770-1 for SAM and ITIL guidance provide structure for governance and process improvement. Many organizations implement dedicated tools or platforms to automate discovery, metering, reconciliation, and reporting.

See also: Software asset management, IT asset management.