INFORMATION
Highly Available Licenses
When software on a regular consumer computer stops working, it is a nuisance. If it stops working in a commercial environment, it can threaten the mission( mission critical incident) or the entire business( business critical incident). As a software developer, it is essential for you to understand your users’ availability requirements and to respond to them with the right strategies and capabilities. You should never forget to include the question of licensing in your availability concepts.
One obvious and simple solution is to forego any licenses at all. In such cases, the software could simply be copied to a replacement computer, and the user can keep on working. However, this option has one often ignored condition and one potentially disastrous effect on your business. For the software to be installed on a replacement computer, that computer would have to be available or be bought on the spur of the moment if something happens. It would have to be fully compatible as well. Buying or organizing a replacement license would be just as easy as buying or organizing such a replacement computer. The great disadvantage of foregoing licensing in general is obvious: Unscrupulous or unwitting users could simply copy and use your software without paying for it at all. In any case, the lost revenue, especially in the form of unintended overuse, can be life-threatening for small and medium-sized enterprises.
The cotton sorter One of our clients produces specialized sorting machines for cotton processing. The unique intellectual property of that client lies in the software that controls the sorting process – the rest of the machine is simply nuts and bolts and a few cameras, which any skilled engineer could copy without too much effort. As the machine sorts cotton during active production, any outage or disruption means an immediate loss, because production comes to a standstill. High availability is key. The sorting usually happens literally in the field, i. e. on the cotton plantation, so that an Internet connection is not always available when problems occur.
A solution would be to install two devices for controlling the machine. One of them has a dongle with an unlimited license for the control software. The second one has as a similar license, but it is limited to 30 days of use after first activation. If anything goes wrong, the first controller can be replaced or repaired without production having to be interrupted, whatever the problem might be. Service technicians would have 30 days to repair the system on site and set up a new emergency license.
This is called a cold standby solution. An additional license is available and ready for use as needed. Because it is for temporary use only, the user would not be able to trick the system and use it as a second full-scale license. Technically, this can be achieved by defining a usage period or integrating a unit counter. In the former case, you define for how many days the license should work after it is first activated. In the latter case, the unit counter tracks the number of individual actions or the actual time in use, down to the last minute.
Main Server
Machine
Cold Standby
The architect Another scenario would be an architectural
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