Six reasons why the software life cycle management matters

Good management of your organisation’s software life cycle has always been important. After all, your software must meet the needs of your enterprise users and function as intended. Once you’ve chosen the right software, keeping up to date with the latest technologies, best practices, features and functionalities can greatly improve efficiency and productivity across your organisation.

Managing the software life cycle can help you mitigate financial and compliance risk and save costs, as you can identify and eliminate unnecessary or underused features or licences.

You may find you don’t really understand the software licences you have, that you’ve struck the wrong deal or that you are paying something you don’t need. Overspending on software and running into expensive vendor audits are just two of the possible consequences.

Efficient software life cycle management can be a headache for any organisation. Software products lack common standards and keeping an accurate software inventory can be time-consuming and still not provide the visibility your organisation needs to manage licences or negotiate software contracts. But it’s worth investing in – and here’s why.

Six reasons to pay attention to software life cycle management

It can reduce complexity

Software licensing is complex, but it’s important to get to grips with it if your organisation – like so many others – has a complicated estate.

You may have swathes of licences expiring in one location, different versions of software used in another location, unused licences, overuse and many other scenarios. There may be multiple vendors involved, with a range of licence types.

What’s more, your software products may be different life cycles with varying expiry dates. Licences for your gateway hardware, like switches or routers, might even apply to other hardware too.

A software life cycle management strategy for both the short and the long term will take all of the above into account. It will help you reduce licensing complexity and increase visibility and control so you can manage your licensing efficiently.

It can protect you against compliance-related risks

Compliance isn’t just about meeting vendor requirements or paying your licence renewals on time. This is important, but so is internal compliance.

If you don’t have proper version control or don’t know your expiry dates, you may be relying on software that’s nearing end of life or is no longer supported.

Let’s say you believe all your switches are working on version four, but it turns out some are still on version three. This means the next upgrade might not work properly. This oversight can have serious consequence for the performance of your software – and your organisation.

This scenario can leave you exposed to two kinds of risk. The first is operational: when you have something that’s not supported or is end of life, your business continuity could be affected by a lack of network availability, for example. The second risk relates to the potential for security vulnerabilities that could leave your network compromised.

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