samuel nimark
IS-IT--Management
We are in an age where organizations are completely dependent on their technological infrastructure to perform a majority of their business operations. Their IT assets form the backbone of their service delivery.
Lack of proper asset management can lead to compliance issues, limited asset visibility, erroneous inventory records, wasted resources, unnecessary service delays, and hefty costs. To alleviate such risks, organizations need to have clarity about how their assets are being used, where they are located, what is their configuration, what role do they play in various business processes, etc. This is possible only by implementing a proper IT asset management system in the organization. Before we dive into what benefits an IT asset management system can bring to your organization, let’s take a look at what IT asset management means.
IT Asset Management (ITAM) is the process of managing all hardware and software assets used to perform various business operations across the organization. Through, an ITAM system, you can construct asset life cycles, gain visibility into the asset utilization, identify trends, analyze data, understand procurement routines, and efficiently monitor and manage all assets from a single platform.
What are the Benefits of IT Asset Management?
1. Save Costs
When you employ an IT asset management system in your organization, you can save costs and reduce wastage of resources by effectively mapping new purchase requests with existing items in the inventory and avoid unnecessary procurements, identifying which assets are underutilized, and easily comprehend what role each asset plays in each business process.
ITAM can lower software spend by recognizing which users need basic licenses, which users need more expensive licenses, and flagging retiring contracts that are no longer used. It can also help you automate low-level, repetitive asset lifecycle processes so that technicians can focus on value-producing tasks.
ITAM comes with a CMDB that gives you a clear picture of the amount and type of assets already owned, making it easier to plan future purchases.
2. Achieve Compliance
Compliance with asset management is not a straightforward job. It requires your organization to enforce stringent policies and track their performance on a frequent basis.
Sometimes, it also requires significant systemic improvements in the business workflow. Your asset tracking software can help you easily track license consumption and automate notifications that immediately communicate a compliance breach so that you can remediate the situation to avoid legal actions and fines brought on by the violations.
By using an IT asset management system, you can reduce the number of compliance infractions in your organization and establish a policy-driven and automated process to achieve 100% compliance.
3. Control IT Environment
As mentioned earlier, to plan future asset purchases, you need to have a clear picture of the quantity and the type of assets that your organization owns. Your IT asset management has a CMDB-dashboard that can provide you a single pane view into all hardware and software assets like computers, servers, or any other IT infrastructure owned by your organization.
The increased visibility helps you make informed decisions about asset acquisitions and also offers better IT administrative control and accountability. Additionally, it can help IT asset managers efficiently resolve imminent IT incidents and improve their service delivery.
4. Increase Governance
When you use an IT asset management system that works in tandem with an IT service desk software, you can centralize all asset requests through a service catalog to manage and control your asset distribution.
Furthermore, you can also automate the process of attaining approvals for validation by creating workflows. This way when requests are submitted, you can implement policies and guarantee that all requirements are met.
5. Enable Faster Mean Time to Resolution (MTTR)
Your organization’s hardware and software assets are linked to end-users. Now if you have established a good IT asset management system, then when your users face an IT issue and raise an incident ticket, the relevant assets can be associated with the tickets for faster incident resolution. Having this context will not only help the tickets to be directed effectively and drive your service desk technician’s efficiency but also minimize the downtime caused by the outage and help the users continue their activities in no time.
To know more about MTTR and other incident metrics, read our blog What are MTTR, MTBF, MTTF, and MTTA? A guide to Incident Management metrics.
6. Mitigate Risks
As an organization grows, it becomes hard to keep track of all the contracts and licenses being used by various business departments making the organization susceptible to various risks.
Most ITAM solution comes with software license management feature that allows you to easily track software usage, blacklist or whitelist software throughout the organization and always be audit-ready. Moreover, you can also automate notifications of contract expirations and contract renewals to avoid gaps in coverage with your IT assets.
7. Eliminate Waste
The rise of remote working has made tracking assets dispersed at various locations a difficult task. With IT asset management, you can monitor how your assets are being consumed, at what capacity, and by how many users in your organization.
Based on this, you can optimize your licensing and procurement processes to prevent over-buying and over-licensing of assets by focusing on assets that best fit your organization’s requirements.
Conclusion
An IT asset management system can help you streamline your IT operations, achieve compliance, provide you with financial accountability, gain visibility into asset utilization, establish better control over your IT infrastructure, and save costs.
Now that you have realized the value of employing an IT asset management system, the next thing to do is to identify what ITAM software is right for your business. To understand how to pick the right ITAM software to meet your business requirements, read our blog IT Asset Management Software – How to Choose Right ITAM Software [Proven Way]