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1. Notify and assemble the audit board - Don’t ignore an audit request. Once the notification letter arrives, notify your ITAM team, gather your key stakeholders and communicate the audit process.  
2. Prepare your documentation and acknowledge the audit letter – Leverage Flexera solutions to gather and review all license entitlements, contracts and agreements associated with the audit. 
3. Propose a non-disclosure agreement (NDA) and meet with the auditor. 
4. Gather and submit the data. Only collect data that has been defined and in a form that is agreed to by all parties. 
5. Carefully review the results and settle/close the audit - Never agree to the findings in the first instance. 

An NDA often represents the only opportunity to put a fence around the scope of a software audit. Many software publishers and their hired auditors may refuse to consider comprehensive pre-audit agreements. However, most typically will agree to negotiate NDAs to control the handling of audit data.  It is a good idea to include appropriate, corresponding protective measures in the NDA to protect all parties involved. It’s advised not to proceed with the audit until this step is complete.

Many vendors pursue an audit strategy that at first looks like an informal request for information. These requests often arrive as a generic, impersonal request for the customer to collect and report data or as an offer for an assessment or review. They are often written in a way that makes it sound like the vendor is offering a free or helpful service. These are still audit requests.

Manual ELP (effective license position) reporting can take months without automated visibility. With automated reporting of application usage from Flexera, you can get near-real-time visibility into how licenses are used to ensure compliance. Our customers have been able to reduce the time to prepare for an audit by up to 90%.

With Flexera’s automated visibility, expert team and value realization services,  we help customers prepare for an audit in less than 90 days. Flexera is also Oracle Verified for Databases, Database Options, Middleware, Oracle Java, and Oracle EBS so you can produce reports for auditors with ease. 

Flexera software asset management solutions help organizations understand their ELP for thousands of vendors. Our Technology Intelligence recognizes over 900,000 applications. The most common vendors include IBM, SAP, Microsoft and Oracle, including installation details of Oracle Java.