Cloud solutions differ in some ITAM-relevant issues from on-premise software:
- By the nature of contracting cloud, you pay a regular fee for the accessibility of a solution
- The metrics are less complicated and can be verified without much ado
- Associated SLAs are often immature and need to be reviewed and managed carefully
- Hidden issues are interface efforts, data recovery and transfer format, as well as future cost
Because the solutions rarely have a footprint within your court of assets, you do not require local discovery. User access is granted by the service provider and controlled within their system management. Therefore, you don’t have audits to deal with, but you should be aware about automated fees increase in case users register unplanned, if the contract allows for the same. When systems are accessed using a unique log-on-URL, you may have to set up an administration to control the access authorization via the webmaster or firewall settings.
For automation of license management, you need to check how your cloud contracts are treated in the respective interface to the buying side. Cloud solutions regularly do not provide perpetual rights to the software usage and you need more control of deadlines for renewals and other allowances.
More general consideration that may help you discover realted issues are found in the following publication by Gartner: