What is IT Asset Management?
Making sure that an organization’s assets are tracked, installed, maintained, improved, and disposed of as needed is known as IT asset management (ITAM). It involves ensuring that your organization’s essential assets—both material and immaterial—are monitored and utilized.
What is an IT asset, then? A company’s valuable IT assets may comprise hardware, software systems, or information. Physical computing devices, including desktop computers, laptops, mobile devices, desktop servers in data centers, keyboards, and printers, are examples of hardware assets. On the other hand, software assets include databases and software systems created utilizing open-source resources and applications for which licenses are generally provided per user or machine. Cloud-based assets like Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications are also considered software assets.
IT equipment has a finite shelf life. To maximize the value a business may get from IT assets, the asset lifespan can be actively managed. Depending on the firm, the stages of the lifespan may differ, although they frequently include planning, procurement, deployment, maintenance, and retirement. Therefore, a significant part of IT asset management is using procedures throughout all lifespan stages to understand the total cost of ownership and maximize asset use.
How Does an IT Asset Management Process Work?
The steps below typically make up the IT asset management (ITAM) process:
- Asset identification: Making a comprehensive IT inventory of all assets is the first step in IT asset management. As a result, redundant assets may be quickly identified and optimized for maximum effectiveness.
- Tracking: This requires employing an ITAM tool or system to routinely monitor IT assets. For each asset, information is gathered regarding the financial (costs of the asset), contractual (warranties, licenses, and service-level agreements (SLAs), and inventory (location and condition of physical assets).
- Maintenance: According to the stage of their lifecycle, IT assets are maintained. Asset replacement, upgrade, and maintenance is all part of maintenance. As part of the ITAM process, every maintenance procedure on an IT asset is documented such that the data can be used to assess how well the asset is performing.
Why is IT Asset Management Important?
Provides a Single Credible Source
Too frequently, a significant number of different persons and places track the same assets. A single person owns nothing; information is not gathered and centralized by a single instrument. Chaos and accuracy inevitably follow. It’s challenging to make wise selections. There are also businesses where employees are hired solely to manage IT assets. Systems ought to do this task. IT staff may devote more time and mental energy to what is most important to the organization by not having to track artifacts, monitor usage, and understand dependencies. Asset management provides IT teams, management, and ultimately entire companies with order and a single source of truth.
Enhancing Efficiency and Eliminating Waste
Teams may reduce waste and increase utilization because asset management keeps information current. By assisting in preventing pointless purchases and lowering licensing and support expenses, it helps to save money. In addition to reducing risks, increased control ensures adherence to security and legal regulations—the entire organization benefits from the favorable effects on expenses and production.
Increasing Productivity While Maintaining Reliability
Considering how the digital transition is altering how businesses operate, modern asset management goes far beyond tracking computers and mice. Embracing DevOps and SRE concepts will enable teams to quickly launch new features and services without compromising reliability. They need asset management techniques and equipment to accomplish this. Due to the increasing dependency on platform and infrastructure services, Gartner claims that effective asset management can help firms limit their consumption of “on-demand services.” The research “Prepare Your IT Asset Management for 2020” makes this claim. By enhancing control, visibility, and assigned responsibility, teams can save costs and reduce wasteful consumption, including overprovisioning and idle instances.
Building Teams Across Enterprises and Supporting ITSM Practises
The support of ITIL processes like incident, change, and problem management relies on IT asset management. The IT department enables the entire business to be more innovative and to deliver value more quickly. Teams can respond quickly and anticipate the effects of changes when they have access to the correct data. The organization obtains a competitive edge and may offer value more rapidly by democratizing access to insights. Every firm that wants to stay up with the pace of contemporary innovation must become more strategic about managing, tracking, and regulating IT data.
Post courtesy: Kinetix Technology Services – California-based IT Support and Security Services Provider.
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