Co-Term Data Retention Licenses

When you co-term licenses, you consolidate or merge your licenses to synchronize renewal dates. This makes it easier to manage and renew your licenses. When you activate a new Data Retention license, you can combine it with an existing license. The activation process merges the new license with the selected license and the two licenses are co-termed.

Each Data Retention license has these properties:

  • Model Compatibility — the Firebox models you can assign the license to
  • Days — the number of days of data to store in WatchGuard Cloud
  • Expiration date — the date the license subscription expires

To extend a Data Retention license, both licenses must be compatible with the same Firebox models.

For more information about Data Retention licenses, see About Data Retention Licenses.

Data Retention Expiration Date Calculation

When you activate a new Data Retention license and choose to extend an existing Data Retention license, you can extend the expiration date of the original license or increase the number of days of data retention.

The number of days of data retention and the expiration date of the co-termed license depends on these factors:

  • Your choice to extend the expiration date or increase the data retention days
  • The remaining data retention days and term of the original license
  • The data retention days and term of the new license you activated

The co-term calculation is the same whether you add data retention days or extend your license, with one important difference. The final data retention days associated with the co-termed licenses depends on whether you choose to add data retention days to an existing license or extend the expiration date.

This is the calculation used to determine the expiration date for co-termed licenses:

New Expiration Date = Today's Date + (current data retention days x days until license expires) + (purchased data retention days x term days)
final data retention days

If you add data retention days:

final data retention days = current data retention days + purchased data retention days

If you extend the expiration date:

final data retention days = purchased data retention days

If you renew an existing license, and the new license has fewer data retention days than the original license, the final data retention days of the combined license is reduced. If you previously assigned the license to a Firebox, some previously stored data could be removed from WatchGuard Cloud.

When you activate a Data Retention license that has the same number of data retention days as the selected active license, and choose the option to extend the expiration date, the expiration date of the original license increases by the number of days in the term of the license you purchased.

These examples describe the co-term calculation for different license renewal and extension scenarios.

When you renew a Data Retention license, and the new license has fewer data retention days than the existing license, we recommend you activate it near the expiration date of the existing license. If you activate the license key before the expiration date, the number of data retention days for the renewed license immediately changes to match the data retention days for the new license.

Related Topics

About Data Retention Licenses

Activate a Data Retention License

Manage Data Retention Licenses