Enterprise Cloud Licensing Rules Clarified

Use rights published in July 2011 clarify how customers can move licenses bought in volume licensing to cloud hosting providers. This “license mobility through Software Assurance” licensing option, a benefit of Microsoft’s Software Assurance (SA) program, provides one way for customers to move Microsoft server-based applications into off-premises data centers hosted by Microsoft service provider hosters, who in turn can reduce infrastructure and management costs. The new use rights reveal important differences between licensing products on-premises and licensing them off-premises with license mobility through SA. Customers and service provider hosters will need to study these differences, because the new use rights could mean that an on-premises software architecture would require additional licenses when moved to the cloud.

Moving Licenses to Cloud Service Provider Hosters

The new use rights were published in the July 2011 Product Use Rights (PUR) document, which repeats and supplements the software license terms of products with additional rights and restrictions affecting volume licensing customers. The use rights concern movement of licenses bought in Microsoft volume licensing programs from on-premises servers to servers at service provider hosters. Longstanding Microsoft policy allows volume licensing customers to move licenses for server applications from on-premises servers to servers located at a third-party service provider hoster, as long as the servers at the hoster are dedicated to (i.e., used exclusively by) the customer owning the license. In July 2011, Microsoft added license mobility through SA, which allows customers with active SA to move many types of server licenses to a service provider hoster’s multitenant servers, which are shared with other hosting customers.