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Cloud license management

Cloud license management helps you track your organization's license usage and identify opportunities to optimize your spending with Bring Your Own License (BYOL) offerings.

Microsoft’s BYOL program, Azure Hybrid Benefit, is a licensing model that allows you to transfer your eligible software and operating system (OS) licenses to a cloud environment, where you can apply them to resources like virtual machines and containers at no additional licensing cost. This provides substantial savings compared to pay-as-you-go licensing models, which charge a premium for software and OS licensing based on the configuration of the underlying resource.

License usage and optimization​

Cloud license management supports Microsoft Customer Agreement (MCA) and Enterprise Agreement (EA) accounts, and provides discoverability on Microsoft’s Azure Hybrid Benefit program for:

  • Windows Server licenses

  • SQL Server licenses

For more information, see Azure Hybrid Benefit .

Cloud license management use cases​

  • Monitor your organization's license coverage for BYOL virtual machines. You can detect a shortfall in the number of core licenses required for your BYOL virtual machines and use that information to maintain compliance with Microsoft's licensing terms.

  • Identify opportunities to save costs on unused licenses. You can detect when your Windows Server and SQL Server licenses exceed the number required for the virtual machines in your inventory and use that information to reduce the number of licenses your organization pays for.

  • Identify opportunities to optimize your spending by migrating eligible virtual machines to BYOL. You can view which individual virtual machines are eligible for BYOL, as well as a total count of all your eligible virtual machines, and use that information to purchase the additional Windows Server and SQL Server licenses required to migrate the virtual machines to Azure Hybrid Benefit.

Get started with Cloud license management​

To start using Snow Atlas Cloud license management capabilities, you must first set up Cloud license management connectors to enable Snow Atlas to collect data on your virtual machines and licenses. See Set up Cloud license management connectors.

Cloud license management connectors are the Cloud connectors that collect inventory data from Azure and transfer it to Snow Atlas, where the data is displayed in consolidated views on the Cloud license management pages. For more information, see Cloud license management.