About Smart Licensing

Smart Licensing is a cloud-based, inventory management solution for your software licenses. Unlike earlier, licenses are not installed on individual Cisco products. Instead, a pool of floating software licenses are assigned to a Cisco Smart Account. Your inventory of licenses is then managed through the the Cisco Smart Software Manager (SSM) interface on Cisco Software Central.

Any new licenses that you purchase are added to your Smart Account. Smart licenses are no longer device-specific, but organization-specific. You can create separate Virtual Accounts for different departments in your organization and assign licenses to them from the centralized pool, thereby improving license portability and efficient consumption. Different Virtual Accounts can be assigned licenses that can be used to register product instances using a registration token. When a device is no longer in use by a department, the license can be provisioned to another department or pooled back to the Smart Account.

It allows you to manage and track the status of your license, hardware and software usage trends. It enables you to automate time-consuming, manual licensing tasks by simplifying the three core functions of purchasing, managing and reporting of licenses.

You can choose the deployment option, based on your security profile, as follows:

• Direct: The Cisco product provides usage information directly over the internet or through a HTTP proxy server. More.Most common deployment for its ease of use and it requires no additional configuration.
• On-premises: The Cisco product provides usage information to a Cisco SSM On-Prem (previously known as Cisco SSM satellite) appliance installed on your local network. This information is exchanged periodically to synchronize local database with Cisco SSM. More.Ideal for organizations with strict security requirements such as financial institutions, utilities, government agencies, and so on.
• Offline: The Cisco product is activated manually using license reservation, but with Smart License tracking. More.Ideal for organizations that cannot connect their devices to Cisco over the internet such as defense, security, and sensitive government agencies.

 

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