Secure Your Licensing In Virtual Environments

During the early 2000's, there was much skepticism about the value and viability of virtualization. Today, however, there is no doubt that companies have embraced the efficiencies and expansion capabilities afforded by multiplying resources of a single machine across several different virtual machines. The cost effectiveness and increase in availability, performance and utilization of IT resources are all contributing factors to the success of virtualization, whether applied to desktops, data centers or applications.

While end users are reaping the economic benefits of virtualization, it has been challenging for ISVs to create flexible licensing schemes that are better suited for the virtual environment, are easy to manage on the end user side, and are protected against misuse of the license. Just think about the many ways software licenses can be misused when operating simultaneously on virtual machines and terminal servers. Take for example licensing threats within a virtual machine environment:

For dongle users:

• Illicit use of a single license by using one dongle for several guest systems.

For software based licenses:

• Resetting time-limited or pay-per-use licenses by using a copy or snapshot.
• Duplicating machine-bound licenses by cloning the allocated machine in its entirety.

And, consider these potential licensing threats on terminal servers:

• Illicit use of a single license in multiple simultaneous sessions on the terminal server.
• Use of a single-user license as a floating network license.

To help you identify and address these licensing complexities and security threats, we’ve developed a new white paper entitled CodeMeter in Virtual Environments: Make Your Software License Management More Agile.

This white paper illustrates the potential threats in various licensing scenarios and reviews how the CodeMeter secure licensing platform protects against each one of them. With CodeMeter, you can protect your software against any license abuse. No matter if your customers are using real or virtual systems, or a combination of both, you will have an accurate count of your licenses, and the interruption of the execution of the software if an attack is detected. CodeMeter provides the versatile licensing platform and mitigates the evolving security threats in a straightforward fashion.