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Mitigating Homeland Cybersecurity with Software Licensing Optimization

By Michelle Amodio, TMCnet Contributor

The Department of Homeland Security's Continuous Diagnostics and Mitigation (CDM) program is important if you are in charge of any sort of IT for a government agency, no matter how big or small.  The regulation requires all governmental agencies to keep track of the devices on their networks that they may not own or have expected to be present, as well as the ones that should be present but have been noticeably absent for a while.

Flexera Software highlighted this in a recent article, discussing how the CDM works. In addition to “taking attendance,” another concern is the possibility of any of this hardware having unlicensed software or software installed on it that has not been officially permitted by the agency. 

The major concern here is security of information, as any of these scenarios are potential threats because they can be exploited and sensitive information can be compromised.

It might be obvious how having rogue hardware accessing your network would be a security problem, so networks not only have passwords, they check to see if any new hardware has shown up that might have somehow acquired the password but is not official equipment.  This is the first part of Software Licensing Optimization.

The second part occurs as networked machines are regularly scanned, their contents compared to databases of software licenses to make sure that pirated software is not being used.  Pirated software does not get security updates as quickly, sometimes not at all, which can also leave a machine on the network or even the whole network at risk of being hacked into.

The third part of Software Licensing Optimization is when the network looks for unsanctioned software installed on network machines and uninstalls it. This might be something obvious like an application whose title is an unintelligible string of characters or something more insidious, masking as a new printer driver. 

The bottom line is that the government needs visibility in order to maintain control and security. With License Optimization, the organization can view, generate and interpret compliance and management reports through an intuitive multi-user, roles-based interface.