IT Asset Management

IT asset management (ITAM) is the set of business practices that join financial, contractual and inventory functions to support life cycle management and strategic decision making for the IT environment. Assets include all elements of software and hardware that are found in the business environment.IT asset management (also called IT inventory management) is an important part of an organization's strategy. It usually involves gathering detailed hardware and software inventory information which is then used to make decisions about hardware and software purchases and redistribution. 

IT inventory management helps organizations manage their systems more effectively and saves time and money by avoiding unnecessary asset purchases and promoting the harvesting of existing resources. Organizations that develop and maintain an effective IT asset management program further minimize the incremental risks and related costs of advancing IT portfolio infrastructure projects based on old, incomplete and/or less accurate information.

Knowing which IT assets you have and how they are used has become a challenge in today's complex and ever evolving IT infrastructure, yet managing IT Assets is an important task for any business. A typical IT infrastructure has many different assets of various types, and new IT projects are deploying additional assets to support the business objectives. These challenges includes tracking IT assets across multiple offices and IT platforms, detecting software installed and used, and discovering new devices that are on the network.

Challenges

• Knowing which assets you have, where they are, and their current configuration.
• Tracking changes to your assets, such as new computers or software installations.
• Planning IT migrations and new IT projects.
• Correlating IT assets against business financial records such as contracts and licenses to better control risks and liabilities.
• IT Audit - where is the business benefit?

An updated IT inventory of workstations and software assets can help reduce the cost of administrating your IT assets, improve security and ensure you are always ready for your next IT audit.

Benefits

• Reduce IT costs by better managing and administrating your IT assets.
• Ensure software compliance by knowing what you have and what you use.
• Align IT with business goals to support business decisions such as license purchasing or renewals.
• Improve productivity by empowering the IT administration team to easily track and manage assets and their changes.
• Detect unauthorized and illegal software by adopting a software usage policy and easily detecting any policy deviations.
• Audit Automation - every organization is facing an IT audit, whether its taking place every year or every month and regardless of the audit trigger (internal or external audit request). An updated IT inventory can save you from manually tracking your assets and managing spreadsheets.

What IT Asset Management Covers

• Control Costs & Value of Assets – See where your IT investment have been made within your organisation. Reduce the hidden cost from using your own, higher paid, IT team to perform audits. Asses the total value of your hardware assets.
• Control Ownership – See instantly who owns an asset in your organisation.
• Change Management & Asset Life-Cycle – Need to upgrade equipment or reallocate resource? Identity current and potential hotspots for upgrade/decommissioning.
• Management Service Level Agreements – If equipment is leased you can monitor supplier performance against service level agreements for failures in contractual delivery.
• Tax – Accountability needs to be taken for every asset within an organisation. Tax is paid on all company assets, having an up-to-date database may allow you to save money by not paying for items that don’t exist. Items also depreciate over time, which also needs to be accounted for.
• IT Help Desk – IT help desk need to be able to identify software/hardware problems by locating items. An up-to-date database allows them to pin-point and solve issues quicker.
• Time & Money – Hardware auditing is time and cost effective, especially within large organisations when time equates to valuable profit. A professional service can ultimately save money in the long term.

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