What is EmpowerID Azure License Manager?

Azure License Manager (ALM) is an licensable module in the EmpowerID Suite that is designed to help organizations inventory their Azure licenses and expenses across multiple Azure tenants for cost reporting and allocation of license expenses within their organization. To understand how Azure Licensing Manager can help your organization with the costs associated with Azure licenses, it is helpful to review how Azure provides licensing.

For each Azure tenant, there exists one Azure Active Directory and in that Active Directory an organization can enable various Microsoft products to license them. Each product includes one or more Service Plans, which are the components or the services that are offered in that product like Office 365 Enterprise E3, Visio and Project. If your organization chooses to subscribe to Office Enterprise E3, that product becomes a subscription with a specified number of licensed users with a per user per month cost.

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Azure Licensing Challenges

There are multiple challenges with managing license distribution and license reporting for organizations using Microsoft Office 365 and Azure. One key challenge is that when a company subscribes to licenses with Azure and Office 365, it can only subscribe once. For large organizations with multiple departments or business units using these licenses, there’s no real way to determine how many licenses are being consumed by which units or to grant responsibility to groups within the organization manage who gets licenses, who can approve license assignments and to report how much of the organization’s license budget is being consumed by the various business units.

The below example provides a simple illustration of the challenges associated with determining how much of the total licensing costs spent by an organization can be allocated to individual business units from the information available in Azure. As can be seen, there exists a company consisting of a headquarters department with two business units, one located in Germany and another located in the United States. The company has one Azure subscription for Office 365 Enterprise E3 and one subscription for Visio Online Plan 1. In the case of Office 365 Enterprise E3, there are 10,000 users at a list price of $20 per month, which is an annual expense of $2,400,000. Some of these licenses are consumed by users in Germany, some are consumed by users in the United States, and some are consumed by users in the headquarters location. The question becomes, How many licenses are being consumed by each unit and how are those licenses being managed? With native Office 365 features, there’s no real way to gather data that is intelligent enough to portion off those licenses to each business unit to allow those units to see how much they are spending or to allow them to manage their own license assignments. Azure Licensing Manager allows organizations to gather the intelligence they view not just the total of their licensing costs, but to see who is driving costs and grant those entities the responsibility for managing license assignments.

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How Does Azure Licensing Manager Help?

EmpowerID provides a very flexible cost and responsibility allocation mechanism within Azure License Manager called "license pools and bundles." License pools and bundles allow an organization to break up their subscriptions to match their logical organization structure.

License Pools and Bundles

Keeping with our previous example of a fictitious company consisting of a headquarters department and business units in both Germany and the United States, the above illustration demonstrates how license pools and bundles give organizations visibility and control over licensing. In the example, the company has a total of 10,000 Office 365 Enterprise E3 licenses, one license pool and license pool owner for each business unit, as well as several license bundles with an allocated license count per bundle. So for example, the business unit in Germany has been allocated 6,000 Office 365 Enterprise E3 licenses distributed to two license bundles, the “DE Standard Employees” and the “DE Interns” license bundles. The bundles themselves can have owners who can manage user and group assignments to the license bundles. All bundle owners determine who can have a license in the bundle and become the default approvers for license access requests to a license in their respective license bundles. By using license pools and bundles, the organization can set license cost controls, and bundle up the cost for a total expenditure allowed per license pool.

The below image provides an end-to-end flow of how Azure License Manager helps organizations visualize and control licensing costs. Azure (shown on the left), has a number of subscriptions the organization purchased, which in this case includes 10,000 Office 365 Enterprise E3 licenses and 800 Visio Plan 1 licenses. In the middle of the image, these licenses are logically divided into two license pools for cost allocations and expenditure—one pool for the business unit in Germany and another for the unit in the United States. Each license pool has assignable bundles, each with a specified number of user licenses mapped to a single Office or Azure product or a single subscription. 

On the right side of the image, in the Azure tenant, each license bundle is mapped to a single Azure Active Directory group for fulfillment. That group has been configured for group-based licensing and is mapped to that same subscription with service plans enabled or disabled. So, in the Germany example, users in the DE Standard Employees license bundle are fulfilled by a licensed Office 365 Enterprise E-3 full group, which grants all service plans as enabled, whereas the license bundle for the DE Interns is mapped to a licensed Office 365 E-3 Limited group, which has two of those service plans disabled. The bundles deliver the same subscription, but have been configured and mapped to provide different features to their assignees.

License Bundles - Key Points

License Bundle Assignees

At the most basic level, license bundle assignees are the people who have been assigned to a license bundle and who should receive the license granted by the bundle. As mentioned in the key points above, license bundles can be assigned to any EmpowerID actor type. This gives you the power to make assignments to license bundles using any criteria that makes sense for your organization. License bundle assignees can be diverse as any or all of the following:

• You can assign user accounts directly to a license bundle

• You can assign a group in another system, such as those in an on-premise Active Directory, those in Amazon AWS, Salesforce, or ServiceNow, among others

• You can assign Business Role and Locations to a license bundle, giving all people with that Business Role and Location a license

• You can assign Management Roles to a license bundle, giving all people with that role a license

• You can assign Query-based Collections (QBC) that return all users with a specific attribute value to a license bundle so that every user in each QBC gets a license

Beyond defining who should get the license bundle, you can apply exclusion rules to the bundle to define who should not receive a license. As with assignments, you can use the same actor types in your exclusion rules. Once a license bundle is defined with assignees and exclusion rules, ALM calculates the resultant set of license bundle assignees, which is everyone who should have the license, minus everyone who shouldn't have it. The end result is that everyone who is eligible for a license bundle will receive it. Azure License Manager adds each of these assignees to the License Fulfillment Queue and pushes them into the mapped license bundle group in Azure AD, which, in turn, gives them the actual license.

License Bundle Eligibility

Beyond defining who should receive a license bundle, ALM makes it possible for you to define who should be eligible to receive a license bundle. Returning to the example of the fictitious company mentioned earlier, consider how the structure of the company can benefit by defining license bundle eligibility. As you may remember, the organization has:

• A headquarters department and two business units, one located in Germany and another located in the United States,

• One Azure subscription for Office 365 Enterprise E3 with 10,000 users

• One Azure subscription for Visio Online Plan 1

Additionally, using ALM the organization has created license pools and license bundles to match their organizational structure and Azure subscriptions. So, they have:

• One license pool for Germany

• One license pool for the United States

• Four license bundles for Office 365 Enterprise E3:

  • A license bundle for standard employees in Germany

  • A license bundle for interns in Germany

  • A license bundle for standard employees in the United States

  • A license bundle for interns in the United States

• Four license bundles for Visio Online Plan I:

  • A license bundle for standard employees in Germany

  • A license bundle for interns in Germany

  • A license bundle for standard employees in the United States

  • A license bundle for interns in the United States

It looks like the organization has their licensing situation in a much better position — and they do. However, currently users can see all bundles when shopping for licenses in the IT Shop. And if they are not careful enough, users in one business unit could request licenses meant for users in another business unit, or interns could request licenses meant for standard employees. Further, the organization could inadvertently grant these requests, which would present an inaccurate picture of business unit license usage. To help prevent this type of oversight, Azure License Manager uses what is known as Eligible Assignees to control which license bundles users can see when shopping for licenses. This keeps the organization from advertising license bundles to users who should not see those licenses. In this way, standard employees in Germany only see licenses that they can request, standard employees in the United States only see licenses they can request, interns in Germany only see licenses they can request and interns in the United States can only see licenses they can request. Each group only sees the licenses delegated to them by the respective license bundles.