Software Asset Management: Critical for Mitigating Non- Compliance Risks

The digitisation of business and the economy is in full swing. The success of digitisation relies on software solutions being systematically present to coordinate and automate corporate processes. Consequently, software portfolios, which are already crowded, are continuing to grow, despite the consolidation initiatives put in place by companies.

This is making the management of software assets a major challenge for businesses, even outside IT departments: The risk of managing only part of the assets or worse, not managing them at all is already high and getting higher given the complexity, heterogeneity and variety of software architectures (virtualisation, containerisation, Cloud) and complex contractual models.

This issue is even important given the rise in the number of compliance audits requested by software publishers. In this context, this observatory evaluates the difficulties businesses face when improving the management of the software assets and identifying the best practices to mitigate the risks of inefficient software portfolio management.

Faced with these pressures, IDC anticipates significant progress in the maturity of businesses over the next 2 years.