IT teams need flexible cybersecurity solutions to address near-constant evolution in enterprise networking needs and licensing models for those solutions should be just as flexible says John Maddison at Fortinet.
When it comes to technology, the one thing you can count on is change. Requirements evolve over time as organisations adapt their environments and deployments to meet new demands and challenges. But in the past few years, this rate of change has skyrocketed. What an organisation needs one quarter may be drastically different than what it needs the next.
IT teams need flexible cybersecurity solutions to address this near-constant evolution in enterprise networking needs. And the licensing models for those solutions should be just as flexible.
Flexible licensing programmes that allow organisations to pay by usage have emerged as a solution to this challenge. Although there will always be a need for traditional product licensing models, usage-based pricing offers an additional way to leverage solutions and adapt to dynamic business needs.
With usage-based pricing, you can provision services and solutions when you need them and only pay for what you use. As your business needs evolve, you can dynamically scale your solutions up or down and in or out to fully secure your technology initiatives, no matter how they may evolve or shift over time.
For maximum flexibility, you should seek out licensing options that can be applied in all the environments where you need to deploy your solutions, including on-premises, physical and virtual datacentres, clouds, hybrid clouds, and hybrid mesh firewall environments. Additionally, look for flexible licensing programmes that offer a wide portfolio of solutions and services rather than one or two.
With usage-based licensing, you can eliminate excessive procurement cycles and lead time because teams do not have to preplan and presize their deployment purchases and risk underestimating or overestimating their needs. They can deploy exactly what they need rather than go through a procurement process whenever additional solutions and services are called for.
Additionally, select usage-based licensing programmes can help organisations meet their minimum-use commitments with cloud providers. IT teams can use solutions offered through a flexible licensing programme within their cloud environment and the spend counts toward their minimum commit. This means organisations can get the most out of their budget, their cloud provider, and their usage-based pricing programme.
Usage-based cybersecurity licensing provides the flexibility you need to right-size services to your multi-cloud, hybrid cloud, and hybrid mesh firewall environments.
Look for solutions that let you:
- Increase and decrease capacity and services as you go without any procurement hassles
- Centralise administration and visibility of all license entitlements with reports
- Deploy and run supported solutions in any cloud, virtualised datacentre, or on-premises deployment
- Purchase through a marketplace to help reduce minimum use commits with cloud providers
- Automate the whole license life-cycle management with rich API support
It is also important to look for a programme that includes validated solutions. Between marketing hype and pay-for-play efficacy reports, it can be challenging to understand which solutions and services will offer the best protection for your environment.
Third-party testing is the best way to get objective data to inform your purchasing decisions because these organisations have little incentive to modify their results in favour of a vendor. Look for a flexible licensing programme with solutions and services that have been vetted by these sources.
The mission at Fortinet is to make it as easy as possible for our customers to procure and deploy the cybersecurity solutions they need. FortiFlex usage-based security licensing programme offers a simple, transparent, points-based approach, so customers can freely deploy and scale only the cybersecurity solutions they need.
The FortiFlex programme covers a wide range of Fortinet solutions and services for virtual solutions and services for physical hardware. All can be managed from a single console, and users are billed in 24-hour increments so organisations can right-size daily.
Fortinet is committed to expanding our flexible licensing and purchasing options across more Fortinet solutions and services in the future.
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