Leveraging Use of Software-license-protected Applications in Clouds

Running software license-protected commercial applications in IaaS or PaaS Cloud environments is still an issue that is not resolved in a satisfying way that benefit both the independent software vendor (ISV) and its customers. Due to the mandatory centralised control of license usage at application run-time, e.g. heartbeat control by the license server running at the home site of a user, traditional software licensing practices are not suitable especially when the distributed environment stretches across administrative domains. Although there have been a few bilateral agreements between ISVs and Cloud providers in the past to allow customers of these ISVs to run some of the ISVs license-protected applications in Clouds of certain providers a general solution is still lacking. In this paper we present an approach for software licensing that allows location independent use of software licenses both in form of delegation of already purchased on-site licenses to the Cloud and with authorisations for individual application executions in the Cloud.