Government organization mitigates $60K Oracle Java Licensing & Security Risk across Multiple OS
A regional Government organization had no visibility of their Java environments, and recognized the need to manage this potential financial and security risk within their governance of Oracle technology investments.
They also understood that although Oracle have introduced a new Java Management Service, this is provisioned via Oracle Cloud Infrastructure on Linux hosts, which encourages existing Java customers into an Oracle owned cloud-based environment in order to track their Java estates. This is not something which they wanted to do.
Company Profile
Industry: Government Authority
Product: Certero Java Position Report Service
Devices: 7,000
Scope: Windows, Linux/Unix & Mac
The government organization therefore required a solutions and service that could be deployed on premise, did not require a specific hosting environment and that could analyze all operating systems such as Linux/Unix as well as Windows and Mac. All of which they could achieve through an Oracle SAM Services engagement with Certero, allowing them to gain complete control of all their Oracle products, including Java, which had been a growing concern.
The Certero Solution
Using Certero for Oracle alongside a Java Position Report Service, the customer was able to discover all java instances throughout their estate allowing them to identify and reduce associated subscription risk in their Java deployments across the multiple operating systems required.
Where this included identification of older, legacy versions of the Oracle Java software, Certero’s report not only confirmed the location and version of these legacy items, but enabled the organization to focus on them in priority order.
Data insight from Certero allowed the customer to reduce potential associated security risks where environments had gone unpatched and unmaintained for long periods of time, cherry picking the most important environments to focus on first.
As a technology led service the organization was able to track and see their progress in real time through the Certero platform, ensuring they were always working from the most up to date information and making the best decisions for their IT estate.
Qualifying Potential Java Subscription Licenses
In addition, the Certero Service was able to identify environments where Java updates would qualify for a subscription license and those which did not. As part of this engagement, the customer had clear sight of the cost of licensing the existing subscription environment, the areas to focus on to reduce security related risk and the monetary cost for updating the remainder of the legacy estate should they choose to do so.
Using Certero’s service and custom built dashboards in the Certero for Oracle product, the customer was also able to track in real-time the Java deployments happening in the estate and take action to prevent desktop builds from automatically using the latest – and therefore subscription based – Java releases.
Identifying 3rd Party Java deployments
Finally, because the Certero Java Service analyzes any detectable Java deployment, Certero’s Oracle experts could also confirm where Open Source or 3rd party Java had been deployed. Certero could then help the customer to assess which Open Source Java they would standardize upon and which 3rd party Java they could safely ring-fence away from Oracle subscription licensing.
Summary of Benefits
- Java licensing risk mitigation of $60,000
- Full-scope service identifying Java across multiple OS
- Mitigated Security Risk from the identification of unpatched and unmanaged devices
