The Internet is definitely not terra incognita for businesses, but even a well-equipped IT team might flinch at the prospect of having to run its own servers and web services. And even when the right people with the right training and the right resources are available (and willing), it might simply make more sense to leave the entire job to a service provider.

After all, there is a reason for the meteoric rise of cloud services in the last decade. Imagine that you are running a great restaurant and want to offer your menu for delivery. You could, of course, organize your own delivery drivers, which keeps you in control, but also costs you lots of time and money, and you need to pay your drivers even if there are no orders for them to deliver. Alternatively, you get a different company to do the delivering service for you. They serve multiple restaurants, so you are benefitting from their economies of scale, and you might still get the deliveries with your branding on, so the happy customer does not even notice that the drivers are not employed by you.

Now, CodeMeter License Central is a database-driven licensing solution that automates the process of creating, delivering, and managing licenses for software and digital content. Like the restaurant owner, you can handle all of this yourself, and CodeMeter is designed to make that as easy as possible for you. But you also have the option of outsourcing the process to Wibu-Systems as Software-as-a-Service (SaaS). This means that you do not have to deal with hardening your systems yourself, organizing access control mechanisms via client certificates or IP filtering, or investing resources to keep your systems and services up to date. You can imagine it like the packaging for the food deliveries in our example: Wibu-Systems makes sure that the product is packaged safely and has the right address and price tag on it.

Wibu-Systems offers all of this from a single source with Wibu Operating Services. Hosting by Wibu Operating Services also gives you a level of availability and professionalism that many customers cannot achieve themselves. And hosting at Wibu-Systems naturally includes operations in accordance with ISO/IEC 27001, ISO/IEC 27018, ISO 9001:2015, as well as monthly vulnerability scans and project management for complex setups.

Wibu-Systems provides standard addresses at which the services and Internet-based extensions can be accessed by users, e.g. lc.codemeter.com. However, some customers prefer to display their own branding to their users. To make this possible, we offer two combinable options:

• Branding of the web pages visible to users: the CodeMeter License Central WebDepot can be adapted to your corporate design; this can be done by you or by our Professional Services (recommended)
• Customer-owned domains or subdomains can be redirected to the systems of Wibu-Systems; urls accessed by the user, such as the WebDepot or the gateways, can then be reached at "https://license.mycompany.com", for example. To do this, customers set up these domains themselves and provide a corresponding SSL certificate to our team; in turn, Wibu-Systems creates a matching virtual host, accepts requests under this address, and delivers the results accordingly.

For the user, the location and the operator of the services are not directly recognizable when using a customer-owned subdomain. The IP address refers to the data center of Claranet GmbH in Frankfurt, Germany, where the services of Wibu Operating Services are located.

To return to our restaurant: You cook the food, Wibu-Systems wraps it up for you with your restaurant’s branding and makes sure that only the people who paid for it will get to enjoy it. The customer does not have to worry about who does what – it is your product, delivered with your name and brand on it, and it is theirs to enjoy. All that you have to do now is: Enjoy the support and keep doing what you do best!

Many of our clients already rely on Wibu Operating Services, and we would love to welcome you among them