Remote access licensing can have an outsized impact on IT budgets, administration, and the organization’s readiness to respond when change occurs. When running a small technical team, we can sometimes run out of manageable work. This is especially true after hiring (new staff come with their own workloads), restructuring, adding new endpoints or modifying your remote support responsibilities.
This makes licensing flexibility as important for IT leaders to consider in evaluating LogMeIn as performance and usability. The correct solution should allow companies to cater for fluctuating numbers of technicians, users and computers without additional management effort. The pricing should also be simple enough for teams to estimate their costs as their environment grows.
The Importance of Flexible Licensing for IT Teams
It gives organizations evaluating a LogMeIn alternative with flexible licensing a way to consider remote access in line with their operational requirements, rather than treating licensing as an afterthought.
So why is flexibility important to organizations? IT environments rarely stay the same for long. A company might have a physical increase in headcount by hiring additional employees or opening a new office, or may logistically need to ramp up the remote talent working capacity of an entire team (or teams) as part of adoption or migration efforts. On the other hand, the number of people who are not interested in accessing it can be reduced by restructuring or completing a project.
The usual license makes these normal adaptations costly or tedious. This might mean IT administrators end up paying for unused capacity or spending extra time figuring out which licenses need to be assigned to whom.
Instead, flexible licensing connects technology procurement with the actual need a little more closely. It is not enough to just look for the cheapest first quote. Licensing structure is also a concern, especially when scenarios arise in which IT teams’ requirements evolve over time.
Consider not just the price advertised for a subscription
You should assess a remote access platform based on total cost of ownership, not just its advertised subscription price. Two plans that might have nearly identical advertised prices can present a very different total cost of ownership when an organization factors in users, endpoints, administrative needs, support requirements and future growth.
Prior to comparing plans, teams should define their current needs. They have to establish how many people need to work from home, how many computers are needed, and whether technicians will support equipment owned by employees or customers. One should also take into account the overall expected growth.
This approach is consistent with broader IT asset management planning practices, which emphasize visibility into hardware and software assets, license management, life cycle management, and cost control.
It prevents guesswork from informing purchasing decisions. When IT understands how remote access is actually being used, it can make much more accurate capacity licensing selections and identify when needs change.
Match Licensing to Real Access Patterns
Different organizations utilize remote access differently. Some employees connect on a regular basis to office, dedicated computers. Some of them will only use it from time to time while traveling. Support technicians may have only a short time to connect to multiple machines and troubleshoot them.
But those patterns should inform decisions about licensing.
An effective assessment begins by splitting audiences into two categories: those that require ongoing remote entry and a few that require periodic helpdesk capabilities. IT should also see if access needs are dependent, meaning whether they need to be consistent through the year or vary due to things like seasonal work, temporary workers, acquisitions or one-off projects.
This difference can have a serious budgetary impact. Moreover, paying for unused access involves needless monthly expenses and over- or under-provisioning may lead to hurried purchasing for resources in response to demand spikes.
IT teams should also consider the manageability of licenses. A cost-effective cloud-based service can quickly become inefficient if operational changes are manual in nature.
Consider Administrative Flexibility
Licensing is in part a procurement problem but also an operational problem. Each license managed by IT also adds a shadow of admin liability. Those can be large tasks at scale.
Administrators could either add or revoke access, react to employee departures, refresh groupings and ensure that capacity purchased corresponds with usage. The answer to all of this is that the right system should take the hard work out of routine activities.
This principle extends across enterprise software. Current guidance for managing user licenses illustrates how organizational licensing can involve adding and removing seats as membership requirements change.
The same thinking should apply to remote access evaluation, looking at the full license life cycle. Ask: What happens when employees switch roles or leave the company? IT organizations should also plan for technicians, contractors and departments that reorganize. The simpler the licensing can be adjusted to those events, the less administrative overhead IT needs to absorb.
Assess Scalability Before You Actually Require It
Your licensing decisions for today’s org should not cause problems for tomorrow’s org. And even businesses not aggressively pursuing growth plans can find themselves facing instant widespread need for remote access.
Adding hundreds of endpoints via an acquisition. The access requirements can scale rapidly with a new remote work policy. You may need more technicians for enough months of your non-permanent mission. Even business continuity event scans can lead this to unexpectedly increased usage of remote access.
Your IT teams should simulate various realistic scenarios before committing on a platform. They can determine the degree of administrative cost and operational impact associated with moderate growth, significant growth, or peak demand.
This exercise shows you if a licensing model continues to make sense over a period, such as 1 month after the initial deployment. It creates data that lets procurement teams compare apples to oranges more meaningfully, since the analysis reflects how things will work going forward rather than a single moment in time.
Comparison: What is the Difference?
For organizations seeking a logical evolution away from requirements that directly impact the IT environment. Requirements can include licensing, remote access, administration and deployment, expected scale, security expectations, and cost predictability.
Teams need to resist the temptation to think that every feature is equally important for a comparison to be useful. IT leaders should also think through the implications of switching. Other than a subscription fling, migration is a little more involved. Teams have to: deploy software, configure permissions, communicate changes to users, document processes, and train support staff.
The best business case, therefore, takes into account both ongoing license benefits and transition effort. It should be favorably evaluated if the licensing model and delivery mechanism aligns better to how an organization expects to use it, while the ultimate decision must reflect documented technical and business requirements.
Establishing a Replicable Licensing Review Process
Remote access licensing should not be a set-it-and-forget-it decision for IT. Patterns of use, staffing, budgets, and organizational priorities evolve.
A periodic review can evaluate purchased capacity against effective demand. IT can help determine which licenses are unnecessary today, proactively plan for upcoming growth and ascertain if the current setup is still aligned with business goals.
Reviews serve as a strong foundation for accuracy before renewals, reorganizations, and larger hiring seasons. They allow procurement and IT to make thoughtful changes instead of responding with adjustments after capacity has become an issue.
For teams looking to compare it side by side with LogMeIn, though, this process also provides greater clarity. The value of flexible licensing reaches its peak only with a well-managed inventory, doable predictions, and continuous license management.
FAQs
What to Look for in a LogMeIn Alternative?
IT teams should bring together the differing factors of licensing flexibility, scalability, administrative effort, remote access requirements, security constraints and deployment needs versus total operating cost.
Why is flexible licensing important for remoting?
Having a flexible license enables organizations to scale their access and capacity based on employees, technicians, endpoints, environment or business requirements without the need for additional administrative complexity.
How IT should go about evaluating the costs of remote access licenses
IT will need to consider its current usage and provide realistic growth scenarios, while also taking into account unused capacity, admin effort, migration cost and future scalability.