Many organisations are currently assessing the possibilities to move to our cloud solutions.
When considering moving specific locally installed applications, to our cloud hosted solution, clients who already have MS Office licenced locally wonder whether they can simply apply this licence in the Cloud.
This is a reasonable question to ask however the answer is not quite so simple as there are licencing complexities associated with Microsoft applications when used within a Cloud hosted environment.
As such Microsoft provide a specific Cloud licence which has to be applied to applications such as Office 2016 Standard (Outlook, Excel and Word) or Office 2016 Pro (Power Point).
Why is it you cannot use your Microsoft Volume Licencing?
The advantage of using the Cloudsis platform is that it provides an Enterprise level solution for all.
To achieve this at an economic cost , it’s an environment where hardware and virtual machines (VMs) are shared and we create a dedicated securely sectioned environment for each client on our platform.
As we can optimise the usage of the platform, the resulting economics of scale reduces the cost per user which makes this is the preferred solution for most small and medium sized companies.
With reference to Microsoft licencing, it is not possible to apply individual licences as Cloudsis are required by Microsoft to apply one volume Mocrosoft licence to the whole platform.
We then switch on selectively the Office features required by each client and we report back to Microsoft monthly the number of licences we have applied.
Private Exclusive Cloud
For much larger clients with many users, we can provide a dedicated Cloud platform.
The platform is configured exclusively for your company with dedicated hardware and Virtual Machines.
As the platform is essentially a private dedicated cloud and totally separate, then existing licensing agreements provided by the client can potentially be applied to this platform.
If existing licences are not available, Cloudsis can provide a Service Provider License Agreement (SPLA) for applications such as MS Office 2016 applications.
The entry cost for the private Cloud is significantly higher however which limits this option to businesses with many users whereby the cost per user can be reduced to an acceptable level.
Why not just use the MS Office Licences Provided by Cloudsis?
Cloudsis can replicate your local IT environment in the Cloud and if this becomes your chosen solution it negates the need to have MS Office licences locally.
The benefits of the Cloud is that you can access your system anywhere and don’t have to be reliant on having licences installed and maintained on a local PC – essentially this removes the need to duplicate licences.
Office 365
An exception applies to the Office 365 online apps.
These apps may be used in a shared environment as long as they are provided by a Shared Computer Activation (SCA) partner.
Cloudsis can also provide Office 365 Essentials and Office 365 Premium licences. Please note that some applications such as Pegasus Opera 3 are not supported on Office 365 and require an MS Office 2016 (desktop) licence, even in the cloud.