Not only does the ITAM mean counting and tracking IT assets in an excel sheet, but it also means keeping your company’s IT assets compliant and monitored against any vulnerable threat. Additionally, it helps the company to improve IT Asset, Infrastructure operations and support.
Before hopping to the mainstream, let us explain what exactly is an IT asset! The hardware, software systems, licenses, intellectual properties, and confidential informational data are what the company call its IT assets. In order to obtain maximal results from the IT Assets, the company requires to proactively manage them. Hence, to ensure sound productivity, most companies prefer employing ITAM globally rather than maintaining on excel sheets.
What is ITAM?
“A set of business practices that incorporates discover, manage & maintain IT assets across the business units within the organization. It joins the financial, contractual, inventory & risk management responsibilities” International Association of Information Technology Asset Managers (IAITAM)
IT Asset Management is a form of business management, entirely linked up to the company’s IT asset framework. It helps the company to make a comprehensive insight into its hardware and software assets. To be precise, IT Asset Management is employed to make certain about the planning, authorization, installation, up-gradation, maintenance, and discarding of the IT assets/digital valuables of the company.
The prime motive to employ IT Asset Management is to track that the IT assets are operated in a controlled and coordinated manner. Furthermore, it keeps track of the changes and the modifications of the IT assets too. Perhaps, employing ITAM may help your company analyzing if your software is over licensed or paying for unused software. So far, it is apparent that employing ITAM is proven to be profitable due to its cost-effectiveness and budget-friendliness. Furthermore, it acts as leverage among the various departments and prevents vulnerability. Count of IT assets is just the beginning of the ITAM program but continuous reconciliation is needed to keep the compliance on track.
The consequences of not employing IT Asset Management for your company won’t be a favorable one, uncertainties like, limited accountability, delayed service or output, inaccurate inventories, and wasted capital that might intrigue your productivity and profit. Increased cycle time for issue resolution and business outages are a common phenomenon of ill managed IT Assets.
Merits of ITAM
IT Asset Management isn’t any random insignificant management framework. Likewise, it helps a company in achieving profitability through productivity and reduced business disruption. It encompasses long-listed IT Infrastructure operations in order to ensure the well-being of IT Assets (Hardware and Software). The collaboration of Software Asset Management, Digital Asset Management, Hardware Asset Management, Cloud Asset Management, and Mobile Asset Management makes certain the coherent functioning of the company. Its not just the count but compliance of all these activities has to be maintained.
The five most significant merits of ITAM are as stated below:
Cost-effective: Employing an IT Asset Management system can help your company to cut off excess expenses and execute the operations in a cost-optimized manner by analyzing if your software is over licensed or if you are paying for unused software. Besides, it keeps track of every digital data to prevent fraudulent, vulnerable threats, and irrelevant expenses. Furthermore, it allows you to evaluate and categorize every single detail of the digital assets you own, making it easier for future prospects.
Better-tracking: As discussed in the previous section, ITAM through CMDB allows you to centralize every single detail (manufacturing details, privacy policies, device’s details, storage details, internal data, etc) of the digital assets you own, helping you to manage and control your asset distribution. Furthermore, it helps you to manage the asset throughout its lifecycle, starting from procurement to disposal. Likewise, it is something more than impossible for an IT support team to keep track of the IT assets through the excel sheet.
Diminishing risk: Every company in its tenure, is likely to get exposed to some uncertain risk besides, the contracts and licenses and the contracts keep heaping up leaving the company vulnerable to threats. Some ITAM solutions offer software license management features that allow users to track the software usage and also the blacklist or whitelist software. Also, it allows enabling the notification of contract expiration and renewals in order to bridge the gaps in coverage with the digital valuables.
Achieve Compliance: Compliance with asset management demands enforcement of rigid policies, regular monitoring and punctual evaluation. As discussed in the above, the IT Asset Management solution offers a software license management feature that allows tracking software usage, blacklist or whitelist software, and notification automation or renewals, preventing you from litigated affairs and violation acts so compliance can be maintained.
Terminate excess waste: ITAM helps your company to centralize and evaluate the past purchasing and installation details as a reference for the future purchase, helping to tally best stakeholders, business units, etc. This respective benefit prevents the user from making any sort of errors regarding the transactions of capital. Additionally, it helps in managing the Total Cost of Ownership to prevent duplication or neglection of assets. Moreover, the application of ITAM helps you as the company owner to navigate and evaluate the consumption of the IT assets regardless of the location (remote-mode working).
How ITAM Works?
IT Assets hold immense essentiality in a company likewise, the productivity of the organization relies upon them. Regular maintenance and punctual inspection of IT Assets are hence necessary to ensure efficiency and productivity. Employing ITAM tools assist the company to cope up with timely data, reduce risk and optimize cost by monitoring, discovering and mending glitches. Through the ITAM the locations of the assets, the number of users, frequency of using the asset, configuration, output, and overall expenses pave a way for smoother operations and enhanced compliance.
IT Asset Management operates its enforcements in the below-stated five areas:
Software Asset Management: Here, ITAM deals with the management of the company’s software application starting from request for installation to expiration, i.e., throughout its lifecycle. Besides, it involves software license management, software metering, file scanning, software and hardware inventory, prohibits software and block executables, software reconciliation, software vulnerability, etc.
Login Management: It involves the monitoring and management of the asset’s logins and services tracking. It helps reconcile the login with the assignment to check if we don’t have logins that are mismatched and cannot be tracked.
Hardware Asset Management: It encompasses tangible IT devices management. It monitors and tracks the desktops, laptops, keyboards, printers, scanners, copiers, mouses, and any other device used for IT and data management purposes. Besides, it allows the company to categorize the devices on the basis of the manufacturer, storage, age, device type, durability, End of Life, End of Support, etc.
Cloud Asset Management: Whether it is a private cloud, public cloud, or hybrid cloud, ITAM offers cutting-edge security and privacy and cost-effectiveness. With the simultaneous up-gradation of the cloud, ITAM will optimize itself accordingly. Application of ITAM for the cloud ensures the elimination of foreign servers and licensing issues, keeping data accessible, compliant and safe.
Software Asset Management: Here, ITAM deals with the management of the company’s software application starting from request for installation to expiration, i.e., throughout its lifecycle. Besides, it involves software license management, software metering, file scanning, software and hardware inventory, prohibits software and block executables, software reconciliation, software vulnerability, etc.
Login Management: It involves the monitoring and management of the asset’s logins and services tracking. It helps reconcile the login with the assignment to check if we don’t have logins that are mismatched and cannot be tracked.
Hardware Asset Management: It encompasses tangible IT devices management. It monitors and tracks the desktops, laptops, keyboards, printers, scanners, copiers, mouses, and any other device used for IT and data management purposes. Besides, it allows the company to categorize the devices on the basis of the manufacturer, storage, age, device type, durability, End of Life, End of Support, etc.
Cloud Asset Management: Whether it is a private cloud, public cloud, or hybrid cloud, ITAM offers cutting-edge security and privacy and cost-effectiveness. With the simultaneous up-gradation of the cloud, ITAM will optimize itself accordingly. Application of ITAM for the cloud ensures the elimination of foreign servers and licensing issues, keeping data accessible, compliant and safe.
Mobile Asset Management: Mobiles also come under the ITAM remit, demanding the requirement for punctual monitoring and management throughout their lifecycle. Besides, it requires efficient applicability and security measures on a serious note because mobile devices are more likely to get vulnerable to threats. Despite the significance of the application that has been downloaded on the mobile, a security check by the ITAM team is mandatory in order to prevent any piracy and compliance checks.
ITAM Process
The deployment of IT Asset Management intends primarily to cut excess costs through monitoring, categorizing, and tracking the IT assets of the company. As discussed in the above sections, the deployment of ITAM brings structure, standardization, efficiency, productivity, and profitability to the company. ITAM should be at the epicenter of your IT Infra Ops and should be implemented with all the rigor for better returns. The important ingredients of the ITAM Process Framework are mentioned below:
Asset discovery: Cataloguing all the company’s assets to the inventory is a very arduous task to do. The manual task of cataloguing assets demands time, expense, and accuracy that is a lot to ask for! Here come the ITAM systems, which can discover new IT assets and add them to the inventory automatically and helps to track down any unlicensed or duplicate IT asset. Besides ITAM tools like Eracent are also capable of navigating and monitoring an ongoing program to support the contemporary IT activities in the company to provide multiple benefits.
Policies & acquisition management: In order to eliminate the vagueness of rules and regulations, all the policies must be elaborated and enforced, before the deployment of IT Asset Management. These policies and business rules can very well be implemented through Eracent a tool which is elaborate and easy to deploy.
Licenses and legislation management: Proper software license management ensures your compliance and prevents you from the burly fines during auditing. Besides, it reduces the risk of non-compliance and maintenance costs. Hence, it is good enough to be cautious and follow compliance regulations and be prepared for non-compliance issues, in advance. Eracent provides regular compliance reports to maintain and improve the health of overall organization compliance. All this can be monitored through 1 screen.
Project management: ITAM follows a few keys to track the asset’s lifecycle that starts from requesting for a new asset, and continues with the approval and procurement of the asset. To, the maintenance, up-gradation, mending, and retirement of the respective asset. Consequently, with the ITAM system, the project can be managed business-like methodically and business benefits can be communicated in a methodical manner to the top management. Eracent is fully geared to provide the track and trace metrics.
Track usage and disposal of assets: The ITAM system help the user to evaluate the usage trends and interprets whether an asset is overused or underused and whether the software license should be terminated or extended. Besides, ITAM also take measures after the disposal of the assets. It allows the user to backup, relocating software, managing data, and information security to prevent disposal-related vulnerability.
Compliance over Count
Managing ITAM manually using excel is really a tedious task that also is time-consuming, expensive, and prone to errors. ITAM is not just about counting the assets its also about serving compliance needs of the organization and support IT Security initiatives. ITAM shouldn’t be looked as a independent process but should be a foundational platform for a strong IT Infrastructure initiative. In order to keep all the troubles at bay, you should surely try out ITAM tools to manage the company’s IT assets. The ITAM tools allow you to store Financial Data, Inventory Data, Compliance, Vulnerability and Contractual Data. Furthermore, it allows you to get an overview of your IT assets, establish control over the assets’ usage, ensure the absence of vulnerability, prepare for auditing, and categorize overused and underused IT assets. Eracent provides extensive functionality for your ITAM Processes.
ITAM should be looked as an enterprise-wide integrated foundational platform and not be left to only to a small team. Compliance takes precedence over Count.
