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How to Avoid a Costly Oracle Audit

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How to Avoid a Costly Oracle Audit

December 08, 2014
By Laura Stotler, TMCnet Contributing Editor

Tax season is looming large in the new year, but for some companies, an IRS audit should be the least of their worries. Oracle (News - Alert), while notably the top database management system in the world, has some very confusing licensing policies. When combined with a large number of add-ons, options and management packs, companies can very easily find themselves out of compliance and faced with steep audit fees.


A recent TechTarget article outlines the seven popular Oracle audit triggers as well as ways that companies can avoid them. According to a recent report from Flexera Software and IDC (News - Alert), a whopping 85 percent of organizations queried were out of compliance with their software licensing agreements, while 63 percent of them had been audited in the past 18 to 24 months. Since Oracle is one of the top software auditors, companies should be on the lookout for the most common violations to protect their investments.

A lack of licensing inventory can lead to trouble, yet many companies don’t bother to track their software licensing documentation. But those using Oracle should have access to their full order histories, renewal dates, discount offers and more in addition to their Oracle License and Service Agreements (OLSAs). Another major problem is not knowing which products are installed where, along with the specific editions or versions implemented. This is a problem, since options and management packs may be easily used without being licensed for a particular location. Again, meticulous tracking and recordkeeping is essential to staying in compliance with licensing agreements.

Metrics can further complicate matters when installing software. An example would be if different administrators are doing the installation, and one uses the Processor (News - Alert) and Named User metrics for installation while another might use a legacy metric like Concurrent Users for the same type of installation. This can ultimately lead to underestimating the number of named users, which can easily knock a company out of compliance. Virtualization is also a huge problem, since Oracle only supports hardware partitioning and not software partitioning. Consequently, companies must license all processors and cores accessible to the Oracle installation, although they usually end up licensing the logical partitions only. This can lead to steep fines costing more than the original license if Oracle decides to audit.

Additional missteps that can lead to trouble include failure to license failover cluster nodes or servers used for disaster recovery and high availability scenarios. License misuse is another big issue, with software being used in ways not permitted by the license. And the Unlimited License Agreement (ULA) further confuses matters, since it still limits which products may be used, where and for how long.

Finally, installing products without paying for any licensing at all is a big no-no. This can happen in non-production environments like development, testing and preproduction, where all users, processors, editions, versions, management packs and built-in options must still be accounted and paid for.

Very simply, the best way to avoid a costly audit is to be vigilant about continuously monitoring the entire Oracle suite of products across all platforms.

 

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