Estimating FCS Costs

When calculating the costs of Forefront Client Security (FCS), customers must estimate the cost of additional infrastructure licenses that may be needed.

These estimates are for licensing a total of 100 devices or users under FCS. They are based on Microsoft’s Open Value volume licensing program. (Large organizations can get discounts of 20% to 30% off these prices, depending on volume.)

The first estimate assumes that an organization has an existing SQL Server with the capacity to handle the additional load of FCS. It also assumes that this SQL Server is licensed per processor, so there is no need to add the cost of a SQL Server Client Access License (CAL) to each scanned computer. Therefore, the customer can use an edition of FCS that does not include SQL Server. The model also assumes that there is an existing Windows Server with sufficient capacity to host the FCS management console. Therefore, the estimated annual cost per scanned computer (99 user subscription licenses, plus one device subscription license for the server on which the FCS Management Console is running) would be US$13.57.