Renew your Security Center subscription before it expires to maintain protection for your servers. An expired subscription increases the risk of malicious intrusions and data breaches. This topic explains how to renew your subscription.
Expiration details
Expiration reminders
Seven days before your Security Center subscription instance expires, the system notifies you by email or in-console message to renew the subscription. If you do not renew within seven days after expiration, you will lose access to the paid services of Security Center on the eighth day.
Data and configuration retention
For seven days after the instance expires, the system retains all your feature configurations and data in Security Center, such as asset groups, tags, file quarantine, vulnerability whitelists, and baseline check policies. If you renew within this seven-day period, you can continue to use your current configurations and historical data.
If you fail to renew within the seven-day grace period, your Security Center subscription will be terminated. Your configuration and historical data will become inaccessible. Your Security Center edition will be downgraded to the Basic, and all value-added services will be disabled. You must then purchase a new Security Center subscription and reconfigure its features to protect your assets. For more information, see Purchase Security Center.
Renewal methods and scenarios
You can renew your Security Center instance at any time after purchase until seven days after it expires.
Renewal method | Renewal type | Description | Applicable scenario |
Manual renewal | Renew with original configuration | Manually renew your instance with its current configuration. | You do not want to change the current configuration or enable auto-renewal. |
Renew with configuration change | You can change the configuration during renewal. The current configuration is not affected. The new configuration takes effect when the renewal order becomes active. To change the configuration immediately, you can upgrade or downgrade it. For more information, see Upgrade and downgrade. Important You cannot submit another configuration change until the pending one takes effect. | You want to keep the configuration for the current billing cycle and adjust it for the next one. | |
Auto-renewal | Auto-renewal | If you enable auto-renewal, the service is automatically renewed upon expiration. Note
| Enable auto-renewal if you plan to use Security Center for a long time to avoid frequent manual renewals. |
Manual renewal
Prerequisites
If you are using the Full protection mode, ensure that the Number of servers and Number of vCPU cores purchased for your Alibaba Cloud account are greater than or equal to the number of servers under your account.
If you have insufficient quotas, you must first upgrade your subscription or reduce the number of protected assets by unbinding servers (or releasing Alibaba Cloud ECS instances). This ensures your asset count aligns with your purchased quotas (Number of servers and Number of vCPU cores). For more information, see Upgrade and downgrade. If you only need to protect some of your servers, you can switch from Full protection mode to On-demand protection mode. For more information, see How do I manually switch from Full protection mode to On-demand protection mode?.
Renew with original configuration
Log in to the Security Center console.
On the Overview page, click .
On the Renew with Original Configuration tab, select a renewal duration, read and select Security Center Terms of Service, and then click Order Now.
Renew with configuration change
In Full protection mode, the renewed Number of servers and Number of vCPU cores cannot be less than the number of quotas you have bound to servers. To reduce the Number of servers or Number of vCPU cores, make sure that you have unbound the corresponding quotas from the servers. For more information, see Manage protection versions for servers.
To reduce the Number of servers or Number of vCPU cores, make sure that you have released the Alibaba Cloud servers or unbound the non-Alibaba Cloud servers that you no longer need to protect in the next billing cycle before you renew with a configuration change.
For more information about how to unbind non-Alibaba Cloud servers, see Unbind a non-Alibaba Cloud server.
For more information about how to release an Alibaba Cloud server, see Release an instance.
You cannot submit another configuration change until the pending one takes effect.
Log in to the Security Center console.
On the Overview page, click .
On the Upgrade/Downgrade Renewal tab, select an edition, set the Number of servers or Number of vCPU cores, purchase value-added services and specify their quantity, read and select Security Center Terms of Service, and then click Order Now.
When you renew with a configuration change, if there are changes to the Protected Assets, Purchased Quota, Remaining Anti-ransomware Capacity, or other metrics on the Overview page, these metrics will not update immediately. They will refresh at the beginning of the new billing cycle.
In the upper-right corner of the Security Center console, you can choose . On the My Orders page, on the Orders for Services tab, find the order for renewal with a configuration change and click View Details in the Actions column. You are redirected to the Order Details page, where you can view the start and end time of the order and the new configuration.
Auto-renewal
When you purchase Security Center, you can enable auto-renewal by selecting Monthly, Quarterly, or Yearly in the Subscription Duration area. If you did not enable auto-renewal at the time of purchase, you can enable it by following these steps.
Log in to the Security Center console.
In the top navigation bar, choose .
On the Renewal Management page, on the Manual Renewal tab, find the Security Center instance for which you want to enable auto-renewal, and click Enable Auto-renewal in the Actions column.
In the Enable Auto-renewal dialog box, set the auto-renewal period and click Enable Auto-renewal.
ImportantPayment processing for auto-renewals begins nine days before the expiration date. Ensure your account has a sufficient balance to guarantee a successful transaction.