The Purpose of Subscription Management

New government and industry regulations are setting new mandates for businesses to track how their infrastructure assets are used. These changes include legislation like Sarbanes-Oxley in the United States, standards like Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI-DSS), or accreditation like SAS-70. Software inventory maintenance is increasingly important to meet accounting and governmental standards.

That means that there is increasing pressure on IT administrators to have an accurate, current accounting of the software used on their systems. Generally, this is called software license management; with CentOS's subscription model, this is subscription management.

Figure 14.1. Managing Subscriptions for Software Inventory

Effective subscription management helps organizations achieve four primary goals:

• Maintain regulatory compliance. One of the key responsibilities of administrators is software compliance in conformance with legal or industry requirements. Subscription management helps track both subscription assignments and contract expirations, which helps administrators manage both systems and software inventories in accordance to their regulatory requirements.

• Simplify IT audits. Having a central and clear inventory of both current subscriptions and current systems, IT administrators can monitor and report on their infrastructure better.
• Get better performance by doing better at assigning subscriptions. The subscription service maintains dual inventories of available product subscriptions and registered server systems, with clear associations between subscriptions and systems. This makes it easier for IT administrators to assign relevant subscriptions to systems, because they have a view of what is in the inventory and what the system is currently subscribed to.
• Lower costs and streamline procurement. While under-subscribing systems can run afoul of regulations, over- subscribing systems can cause a significant impact on IT budgets. Subscription management helps subscriptions be assigned most efficiently, so costs could actually be lowered.

With CentOS's commitment to free and open software, subscription management is focused on delivering tools that help IT administrators monitor their software/systems inventory for their own benefit. Subscription management does not enforce or restrict access to products.

Most CentOS products are licensed under a GNU General Public License (GPL), which allows free use of the software or code; this a different license than the CentOS license agreement. A CentOS license provides access to CentOS services, like the Customer Portal and Content Delivery Network.

The CentOS subscription requires that, as long as there is any active subscription for a product, then every system which uses the CentOS product must have an active subscription assigned to it. Otherwise, the subscription is violated. See http://www.redhat.com/subscriptions/ and http://www.redhat.com/rhel/renew/faqs/#6 for more information on CentOS's subscription model and terms.