As businesses and organisations grow, so do their IT infrastructures, becoming more complex and harder to control. Business growth means new laptops, new network appliances, new printers…essentially a lot more new technology, so making sure that your business stays on top of its technology landscape is essential for optimising performance, reducing costs and avoiding unnecessary risks.
What is an IT asset?
An IT asset is any technology-related resource that a business owns and uses to support its business activities. This includes physical assets like computers, servers and networking equipment, as well as digital assets such as software, licences and data. In short, if it’s essential to your day to day operations and technology based it’s considered an IT asset.
IT assets have a limited lifespan and managing their lifecycle is crucial. Effective IT asset management ensures that businesses can optimise asset use, reduce costs and maximise the value these assets provide throughout their lifecycle.
What is IT asset management?
IT asset management (also known as ITAM) is a set of practices and processes that helps businesses and organisations to manage the entire lifecycle of their IT assets, from acquisition to disposal. It involves tracking and maintaining both physical and digital assets to ensure they are being used efficiently, upgraded when needed and eventually disposing of the assets when necessary.
Managing your IT assets well will optimise spending and support lifecycle management. Ultimately, IT asset management helps reduce costs, ensures compliance with licensing rules and minimises risks related to your IT assets.
Why is ITAM important?
The IT asset management process is essential for modern businesses because it brings order to the management of assets, offering many business benefits. One key reason is that ITAM consolidates all asset information in one place, giving IT teams and the entire organisation a clear and up to date view of assets. This reduces the time and effort spent tracking multiple systems by different people which can lead to confusion and inaccuracies. Ultimately this frees up IT employees to focus on tasks that matter most to the business.
IT asset management goes beyond tracking assets. By maintaining accurate data on things like laptops and their warranties or expiration dates, it helps with budgeting, planning replacements and managing support. More importantly, IT asset management maximises asset value, reduces unnecessary spending and improves efficiency by ensuring that all resources are fully utilised.
As well as this it also strengthens company wide understanding of IT’s business value, improves collaboration between IT and other departments, ensures compliance with cybersecurity standards and reduces the cost of managing the IT environment.
What are the types of ITAM?
IT asset management can be categorised into different types based on the specific focus and functions involved in managing IT assets.
Hardware asset management
Hardware asset management focuses on managing the physical IT assets such as computers, servers, workstations etc. It involves tracking the inventory, maintenance, usage and life cycle of hardware assets to ensure optimal use and compliance with warranties.
Software asset management
Software asset management involves managing software applications, licences and associated agreements. This includes tracking software inventory, monitoring usage to ensure compliance and managing renewals and upgrades.
Cloud asset management
Cloud asset management focuses on managing cloud-based resources and services such as Amazon, Microsoft and Google. This includes tracking cloud expenditure usage and compliance with service agreements ensuring effective management of both public and private cloud assets.
Data asset management
Data asset management focuses on managing the business’ data assets which includes databases, files and unstructured data. It involves ensuring data quality, security and compliance with regulations such as GDPR, and effective data lifecycle management.
What is IT asset lifecycle management?
The IT asset management process is a continual process that teams execute on a regular basis. The process involves five stages that help businesses manage their IT assets throughout their lifecycle.
1. Planning
The planning stage is where the business identifies their IT asset needs and budget for new assets. Vendors are selected, contracts are negotiated and the business ensures that the right licence and agreements are established.
2. Procurement
This is where the asset is evaluated, as well as the most effective way of financing them. For example, building, purchasing, or leasing, comparing Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) cloud options to inhouse systems and tracking service level agreements and warranties.
3. Deployment
This includes aspects such as installation, integration into existing systems, providing users with appropriate access, and technical support and training. Redeployment is also included in the stage. This is where an asset is either assigned to a new user or repurposed, for example, a server running a new application.
4. Maintenance
Proactive maintenance helps extend the effective life of an IT asset to improve ROI. This can be done through functional updates and security updates, and upgrading and repairing systems as required.
5. Retirement
Asset retirement involved disposing of old assets within WEEE guidelines. Support and software agreements may need to be updated, transferred or terminated. The retirement process feeds back into planning where new IT assets may be considered.
The benefits of ITAM
A good IT asset management process helps businesses make better decisions and carries many benefits. It helps avoid unnecessary spending, security risks and compliance headaches. Some important benefits include.
Comprehensive asset tracking
With ITAM you can track how your business uses assets over time. This gives you helpful data to make strategic decisions based on operational needs. ITAM also helps businesses know what IT equipment they have, where it is, who’s using what and when it needs replacing. This ensures users have the tools they need in an efficient and cost-effective manner.
Reduces costs
ITAM helps a business uncover those hidden costs. By knowing exactly what assets you have, unnecessary purchases are avoided. As well as this, it also helps businesses to understand how and where your software is being used and what technology is no longer needed.
Removing assets that are no longer used and stockpiling surpluses also helps prevent unnecessary purchases. This not only reduces costs on maintenance, support and energy use but also reduces the business’ carbon footprint.
Improved security
As ITAM tracks every asset’s lifecycle from procurement to retirement, the process allows you to know which devices or software are approaching end of life. This means that you can patch vulnerabilities before they can be exploited.
IT asset management software also allows you to understand who uses what and who has access to sensitive data. This allows you to restrict user permissions in a more logical way. Ultimately, ITAM allows an urgent security patch to be rolled out when needed and helps to ensure that users have the correct access authorities.
Software licence compliance management
IT asset management software helps keep track of legal, contractual and regulatory obligations which is especially important for businesses who face regular audits. When an organisation licences software for multiple users, the third-party supplier will have the right to check you are compliant with the terms of your service-level agreements.
If an audit reveals there are excessive users for an application or service, there are often financial penalties in addition to the cost of purchasing additional licences. Ultimately, IT asset management software helps avoid fines.
