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What Is IT Asset Management?
An IT asset can be defined as hardware, software, and information held in value by an organization. IT Assets only last so long before they need replacing or retirement is needed, making lifecycle management of IT assets critical for organizations seeking maximum value from these investments.
While stages can differ between organizations, generally, planning, procurement and deployment, maintenance, retirement as well as the total cost of ownership should all play roles.
IT Asset management involves applying processes across each stage to optimize assets while understanding the total costs of ownership and retiring accordingly.
IT departments used to have control over actual assets within their domain. Unfortunately, asset management no longer remains solely focused on physical hardware branded with an IT stamp; modern teams require IT teams that are flexible enough and adaptive in adapting their asset-management process for business success.
Asset management becomes ever more essential as teams seek the latest tools for their work, providing current information that reduces costs and risks while serving as a single point of truth for budget optimization, supporting asset lifecycle management processes, and making important organizational decisions.
Asset management has become an increasing necessity across departments outside IT as organizations embrace service management practices.
Asset tracking software can now be found used by many organizations for everything from fleets and fish tanks to insurance policies and musical instruments.
IT asset management (ITAM) refers to the practice of tracking and overseeing IT assets from inception through retirement, with the aim of ensuring they are used appropriately, maintained efficiently, upgraded as necessary, and finally disposed of at their natural life cycle.
IT Asset Management, or ITAM, refers to the practice of tracking and making strategic decisions regarding IT assets with data collected from financial, contractual, and inventory sources.
ITAM seeks to optimize resource usage while simultaneously optimizing costs by reducing usage levels while lengthening the lifespan of used assets while deferring expensive upgrades. Understanding total-cost-of-ownership (TCO) as well as finding ways to maximize asset use are fundamental aspects of ITAM practice.
What Is An IT Asset?
IT assets refer to any software, hardware, or information used by an organization for conducting its business activities.
Hardware assets consist of physical computing equipment like desktops, computers, laptops, mobile devices, keyboards, and printers, while software assets include applications with licenses per machine/user for open-source database systems in addition to cloud-based assets like Software-as-a-Service (SaaS).
There Are 5 Types Of ITAM
IT Asset Management (ITAM) refers to five main forms, such as physical, digital, and mobile asset management, as well as cloud, software, and software assets.
Comprehensive IT management encompasses all elements involved with running an organization's IT operation - it's vital that organizations understand different management approaches employed when overseeing different asset types.
1. Physical Asset Management
Physical IT assets management entails managing physical IT hardware, products, and asset inventory related to computer systems, information, and networking.
Managing physical IT assets involves selecting devices needed by companies for powering their IT system; physical ITAM strategy involves assessing technical specifications of projects or organizations to select inventory that fits those criteria; asset management for physical equipment typically involves finding physical storage space for devices as well as checking if devices are compatible with software compatibility before ordering more assets to accommodate expansion plans.
2. Digital Asset Management
Digital asset management refers to the practice of overseeing all your data and information in an organized fashion.
Digital assets refer to data stored in databases; their strategies for management constitute digital management strategies. Databases are commonly utilized by IT departments for storage of data, additional analysis, and predictions, as well as supporting websites; digital asset management offers an effective means for IT pros to access it quickly for use and analysis.
3. Mobile Asset Management
Asset management is heavily determined by how IT staff use mobile devices such as phones and tablets connected to networks, like phones.
A successful mobile asset management strategy must include setting policies relating to how employees should utilize these devices so company data remains safe. A strategy may establish standards regarding what apps employees should install on their phones or how passwords should be shared between employees, or whether employers may access any device-specific asset details that arise during usage.
4. Software Asset Management
Software asset management (SAM) refers to how businesses oversee and administer software across an entire organization, with particular attention paid to licensing agreements of third-party purchased software as well as user permission settings that fit an organization as a whole.
IT administrators should review any licensing agreements carefully to make sure they will install on an appropriate number of devices - not simply install randomly as other apps might! SAAM should also monitor updates, drivers installations, and any data transfer between legacy systems and newer ones - plus transfer protocols between legacy ones.
5. Cloud Asset Management
Cloud asset management has become an indispensable element of many business processes today, using cloud storage to store information and services instead of internal databases.
Hosting components can be managed to ensure IT staff accesses these online data/services hosted online; cloud service supervision involves reviewing each feature/function that comes with hosting for your organization; finally, cloud asset management can integrate seamlessly with digital asset and software asset management as it hosts services like storage networking applications & more in one virtual asset place.
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ITAM Software Features
IT asset management (ITAM) software features can assist organizations in better controlling and tracking IT environments on-premises or via cloud solutions.
- Automated Detection: Most IT asset management programs automatically identify all of the computer networks' hardware and software.
- Software For IT Asset Management: ITAM stores licenses. The licenses are then compared to the inventory data in order to inform the organization whether it is under-licensed, at risk of violating a licensing agreement, or over-licensed with software that it does not use or has never used. This functionality allows the organization to track expiration dates for license agreements.
- Version Management And Patch Management: Asset Management software tracks new software patches and version releases to keep a company's computers up-to-date and secure.
- Request Management: Some ITAM Software can track all requests and asset request workflows. They manage the acquisition process and evaluate license requirements.
- Inventory Management: ITAM Tools keep track of all assets that an organization uses. The inventory contains asset information such as name, license agreement type and version.
- Configuration Management Database (CMDB): A CMDB is a centralized database that stores information on an organization's assets, including the relationships among them.
- Fixed Asset Management: The majority of ITAM tools come with a repository dedicated to managing data on fixed assets. Hardware is the main component of fixed assets.
- Digital Asset Management: This ITAM feature involves the management and rights of rich media, such as videos, photos, and music.
Asset Management Tools
ITAM professionals often identify two sets of tools as being vitally important to successful asset management.
- Discovery Tools: Discovery tools are intended to give you visibility over the assets in your IT complex environment and are built for that purpose. Crawling around through it and discovering various assets is their purpose - some tools even specialize in cloud native assets, while others offer dependency mapping for hardware, software, and multi-cloud assets.
- ITAM Database: Your ITAM data may reside separately, or it could overlap with that from Configuration Management databases and CMS tools; in either instance, ensure a process exists to share this information between databases. If it remains separate, create policies and procedures for sharing.
Automation and orchestration should become part of ITAM toolkits. IT asset managers can utilize tools with powerful automation to get all the data necessary about what hardware and software assets they are managing at any given point in time.
Your discovery tools might already be automated, and your database likely contains automation features, but are there additional automation opportunities beyond these two components? Patching, Application Deployment, and Reporting.
But please bear in mind that no single tool can address all your ITAM challenges at once; your strategy needs to be phased accordingly, as there's no single answer that works well across every ITAM issue.
What Is An IT Asset Management Process (ITAM)?
An IT Asset Management (ITAM) process typically comprises these steps:
- Asset Identification: Asset identification is key in IT asset management. Doing this allows for easier identification and redundant assets can be reduced or removed completely for greater efficiency.
- Tracking IT Assets: Continuously Tracking IT assets uses an ITAM system or tool for continuous tracking of assets that include financial costs (assets), contractual data (warranties/licenses/SLAs/etc.), inventory (location/condition), etc.
- Maintenance: IT Assets should be maintained according to their lifecycle stage; repairs, upgrades, and replacement are all part of asset maintenance costs and activities that should be tracked as part of IT Asset Management (ITAM). As part of ITAM, all maintenance activities on an IT asset must be recorded so data can be used in assessing performance analysis of that IT asset.
Why Is IT Asset Management Necessary?
One Source Of Truth
Asset tracking often occurs across many locations by many different people without one centralized source of truth for all assets in an organization, leading to chaos and inaccurate data that makes informed decisions difficult.
Some companies employ people specifically to track IT assets; instead of spending their brainpower tracking artifacts and usage monitoring usage patterns - asset management provides order and provides one source of truth that brings order across management teams as a whole as well.
Improve Utilization And Eliminate Waste
Asset management updates information in order to enable teams to eliminate waste and increase utilization, leading to significant savings by eliminating unnecessary purchases, decreasing licensing fees, and providing improved support services.
Enhanced control also ensures compliance with legal and security policies while mitigating risks that affect productivity as well as costs throughout an organization. The results benefit productivity as well as costs across its entirety.
Productivity Without Compromising Reliability
Modern asset management goes far beyond simply tracking laptops and mice; digital transformation has dramatically transformed business operations, necessitating asset management tools and processes to quickly deploy new functionality without impacting asset reliability - teams often adopt DevOps principles and SRE processes in order to effectively deploy new functionality
Supporting ITSM And Enabling Teams In Organizations
In order to enable ITIL procedures like change, incident, and problem management, IT asset management is essential.
The IT team helps the organization become more innovative and provide value faster. The right data is at the fingertips of teams, allowing them to move quickly and predict changes' impact before they occur.
The organization can gain a competitive advantage by democratizing actionable insights and delivering more value faster. To keep up with modern innovation, any organization must be strategic in controlling, tracking and mastering IT information.
Read More: Utilize Asset Management Solutions To Track IT Assets
What Kinds Of IT Assets Will You Manage?
Are there specific IT assets you will be overseeing as part of IT Asset Management (ITAM)? ITAM covers an enormous scope.
Assets are defined as useful or valuable components of a product or service; their worth can be determined by considering costs versus savings potential:
- Hardware.
- Network infrastructure components.
- Software on demand.
- Subscribe to services and solutions (SaaS/IaaS/PaaS etc.).
- Intangibles: Patents, knowledge, etc.
Tracking hardware is simple enough, but what about knowledge held within teams or individuals? Cloud applications make keeping track of everything even harder.
Your assets should be organized based on several different considerations:
- Static Vs. Rapid Speed: Asset Lifespan Low-speed assets, such as physical server racks, will remain in a data center for several years, while faster assets, like cloud instances of servers, only last hours or minutes before becoming inoperable.?
- Consumption: Individual or Shared? A laptop or cell phone is usually only utilized by one or two individuals at the same time, yet it still supports multiple services and functions. On the other hand, servers tend to be shared among many indirectly while only supporting a specific service or function.
The Lifecycle Of IT Assets Is Divided Into Stages
Each IT asset has an end date; IT asset management (ITAM) involves overseeing their lifecycle to optimize productivity.
While every organization may follow different stages in its asset life cycles, generally, IT asset management includes:
- Planning: Planning is the practice of identifying assets required by an organization and how best to acquire them. Organizations also evaluate competitive alternatives while planning asset purchases as part of this process and perform cost/benefit analyses and TCO (total costs of ownership) analyses on all options considered for purchase.
- Procurement/Acquisition: Assets may be acquired in various ways, such as by purchasing (such as SaaS), building, licensing, or leasing them.
- Deployment: Deployment may include installation, integration with tools, and user access management, as well as technical support services.
- Maintenance: After assets are deployed, it's vital that proper planning be undertaken for preventative maintenance, upgrades, and repairs in order to optimize their use and maximize value while simultaneously extending lifespan, cutting costs, and decreasing risks.
- Retirement Of Assets: An asset should be retired when depreciation sets in and maintenance becomes infeasible, such as IT assets that require excessive upkeep costs to remain operational or have been outshone by newer alternatives in the marketplace. Retirement involves disposing of older assets, updating information regarding them, terminating license and support agreements, and planning to move on to different ones as part of ITAM (Information Technology Asset Management), among other terms and phrases used for ITAM services.
What To Consider When Selecting IT Asset Management Software?
Before exploring different vendors of asset management software, it's essential to evaluate why an improved approach to asset management is necessary.
Here are a few signs you might need asset management software:
Do You Want To Save Money?
Optimizing spending on services such as software, infrastructure, and platform services can be one way of cutting costs.
Research indicates that many organizations could reduce spending up to 30 percent by applying best practices for optimizing software licenses manually versus employing SAM (Software Asset Management), an enterprise tool that automates, accelerates, and improves manual processes; it often costs less than manual alternatives & pays for itself!
You Rely On Spreadsheets
Spreadsheets remain one of the primary methods by which companies track their assets, but you need to think long and hard before trusting that they remain accurate for an extended period.
Your company may be changing quickly, and it can be challenging for you to keep pace.
You May Find It Difficult To Keep Pace With The Rapid Pace Of Change At Your Company
Shadow IT has quickly become an issue of growing concern in recent years. More IT assets - applications, licenses, and additional resources - are purchased, managed, and utilized without informing central IT teams or their knowledge.
Collaboration software provides an effective means for keeping central IT informed while improving team productivity while mitigating unnecessary costs or risks.
Once it becomes evident that it's time for your organization to adopt a new asset management approach, it is critical that they strategize how best they should go about doing it.
Doing an inventory of assets is often the easiest and cheapest way to determine their cost and arrange mapping assets' lifecycles together with finance departments for cost assessments.
IT Asset management goes further, automating asset management tasks.
Through an employee self-service portal, they may request access controls to popular software titles through subscription requests that will then be reviewed according to pre existing policies before receiving access. IT teams can focus more on high-level work by spending less effort supporting tasks.
Collaboration is central to asset management. A collaborative tool allows employees to submit requests while other teams, like procurement, can approve or comment on purchases.
For maximum effectiveness, integrate your asset-management tool with services already used by employees, such as Slack, so an employee can submit requests with just a few keystrokes while IT teams gain visibility by improving asset request intake processes.
An important cornerstone for effective IT teams lies with service desks: employees can easily ask IT for additional assistance while IT staff manage and report on them.
Service desks linked to asset-management software enable more reliable service delivery when users request repairs on laptops; when someone inquires for repair service on one such laptop, their purchase date and previous issues become readily available automatically while access is granted to any associated tickets as soon as a request comes through - providing seamless support services delivery that surpasses their competitors.
Asset management must evolve along with IT. As critical services increasingly outsource to SaaS providers, keeping track of dynamic cloud environments becomes ever more essential.
You should select additional tools that complement and enable service management practices.
Every organization is different; depending on its structure and dependencies, you might need to map these intricate relationships within.
To mitigate risk and identify key intangible assets such as licenses and compliance documentation. Or perhaps your needs are straightforward enough that all you need is tracking an inventory list for a computer inventory.
Asset management software comes in various flavors - from easy and affordable solutions for personal needs all the way up to complex enterprise solutions that can discover, locate and inventory all IP-based equipment across your network or even wash dishes in the office kitchen sink - offering plenty of choices when selecting an asset manager solution for you and your office.
When making this important choice, it is crucial that a lightweight system be chosen, or one with additional complexities, such as RFID tracking capabilities that meets enterprise-grade solutions, is chosen.
What Capabilities And Gaps Exist Within ITAM?
Essentially two core functions comprise ITAM:
- Keep a complete inventory of software and hardware your business unit owns and monitor their condition and usage without failing to know whether they help achieve business service goals or not.
- Involve everyone involved when conducting this review process; get input from employees.
Without information regarding how you use IT assets, it can be impossible to assess their success as investments.
ITAM extends beyond hardware; its implementation should encompass software licenses and technical services offered to your company. Maintaining asset records on IT asset performance, conditions, and usage data can assist your team with making more informed decisions on what works and doesn't.
Taking prompt action if there are software licenses being paid for but are never being utilized is vitally important to making informed business decisions.
Not every decision should be obvious: for example, if many employees in a company use certain hardware or software applications, there could be other more cost-effective or useful options on the market that might offer greater functionality or savings potential.
Utility and cost should not be the sole drivers behind a decision; the implementation of new software or hardware has its own costs and complications that must be carefully considered when making this type of investment decision.
Now that you understand the condition of your assets, it's time to decide when the appropriate time for action may be.
When Should We Reconsider Our Ways?
Technology evolves quickly, hardware becomes outdated over time while software support diminishes. Furthermore, new advances render outdated technology obsolete a decade or two later.
Anticipating and preparing ahead for needs can often be the key to success. Technology companies are known for keeping customers abreast of the latest updates; IT asset management events tend to follow an expected schedule.
ITAM requires organizations to review what hardware and software their organization currently utilizes to ascertain which upgrades may yield more gains for upgrading purposes.
Consider, for example, this scenario.
An expensive hardware upgrade before the release of new technology may waste your company's money on machines that will soon become outdated and underserve your business needs. When other methods exist which still work just as effectively for you and can serve your needs just as effectively compared to newer models, upgrading may not always justify its increased price.
Sometimes technology takes unexpected leaps forward that require you to reevaluate when planning upgrades. Planning ahead allows for better flexibility to deal with unanticipated circumstances; any good asset manager would keep an eye out on IT Hardware and Software markets to do just this.
What Should We Do Now That We've Determined Changes Need To Be Implemented, And When?
Buying products as soon as they hit shelves could provide one solution, but this won't ensure the long-term sustainability of new investments.
Provide a competitive edge, or your company will incur costs associated with beta testing platforms with bugs. This example illustrates just how vitally important "the how" really is.
Wait until a new model becomes available so that you can purchase older yet functional and capable units at reduced costs.
Or upgrade existing hardware by adding some components, refurbishing old pieces in storage, or simply making use of what hardware exists now. Determining the appropriate course of action when dealing with IT asset issues is critical in optimizing the return on IT investment.
Considerations When Selecting ITAM Software And An Asset Management Solution
- Purpose: A company should know why they need ITAM software, and what goals it wants to achieve by implementing digital asset management. Management should arrange meetings with all IT departments in order to gather their opinion.
- Cost: After identifying software packages that are suitable for an organization's needs, it is important to compare the prices with its budget. Understanding what each software package has to offer and doesn't have at the price can be very helpful. Take advantage of the free trial before you decide to purchase.
- Technical Support: Organizations should select a software vendor that provides technical support when needed. Support can be provided by a self service platform, a community of online users, a web or in-app chat with a robot, phone support, or a chat with an assistant in social media.
- Reviews: The reviews and ratings of past and current user experience of software packages on third-party websites (e.g. app stores, software rating agencies) may help an organization to make the right choice.
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Conclusion
IT Asset Management is essential to any organization.
In order to make informed and intelligent decisions on behalf of your company, analyzing all types of assets owned and their performance according to your own organization's individual needs requires collecting detailed data analysis on every one.
