IT assets have a limited lifetime and must be used in the best possible way. To ensure this starting with planning all the way to disposal, efficient IT asset management is necessary. Find out what asset management is, what benefits it has, and what you need to consider when choosing the right software.
IT Asset Management (ITAM), also referred to as “IT Asset Lifecycle Management” or “Asset Lifecycle Management,” is a framework for proactively and strategically managing the entire lifecycle of IT assets, including acquisition, use, maintenance, and disposal.
ITAM focuses on the implementation and automation of asset-related processes. Using other words, asset management in IT can also be defined by the following questions:
Nowadays companies use tools for asset management, because without a certain degree of automation, this would hardly be possible and would require enormous amounts of human resources.
The main role of a comprehensive asset management tool is to provide centralized control over IT assets, optimize their usage, reduce costs, ensure compliance, and efficiently manage the entire asset lifecycle.
The goal of IT asset management goes beyond the simple use of technology and covers various areas of the company. When using ITAM software, the following goals should be considered:
IT asset management helps to obtain a complete overview of all relevant assets, to classify them and to use them optimally over their entire lifecycle. But how exactly do you define an asset and what does a CMDB have to do with it – we will explain these and other important terms in the following.
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IT Asset Management is an important part of a successful business. It includes effective management and use of IT resources such as hardware, software, licenses and network devices. The IT asset lifecycle describes the complete lifecycle of IT resources within an organization, including their procurement, provision, use and ultimate disposal or recycling.
When companies remove IT assets, they must ensure that they responsibly recycle their equipment. Furthermore, companies should also consider refurbishing and selling functional assets that are no longer needed. This can help businesses not only make a profit financially, but also achieve important sustainability goals.
Asset Management according to ITIL offers your company a variety of benefits – e.g. in terms of advantage over your competitors, as it increases your efficiency.
IT Asset Management is critical to ITIL processes, such as …
A good ITAM process takes a holistic approach and captures all IT assets in the enterprise, whether they are physical devices, virtual systems or cloud-based applications.
ITAM creates a central source of information (single source of truth). This is essential if you want to optimize budgets, support lifecycle management, and make decisions that can affect the entire organization.
The total cost of an IT asset is always higher than the purchase price alone. Therefore, asset operation, support and maintenance must be as efficient as possible so that all assets can actually add value to the business. By managing the TCO using ITAM software, unnecessary costs are thus avoided.
Automated ITAM tools are able to collect information about all IT resources and their usage in real time. This allows potential problems to be identified and eliminated at an early stage.
Effective IT asset management can help reduce IT infrastructure costs, improve IT system performance, and increase IT staff efficiency. Continuous monitoring and improvement of IT assets can maximize ROI and thus increase the value that IT infrastructure delivers to the business.
In addition to a good ROI, benefits for the business result and reduction of TCO, the company can use ITAM to quickly identify needed upgrades and bring IT up to the latest technological standard. As a consequence, ITAM can open the door to greater advantages over the competition.
A challenge organizations face is keeping track of software licenses and cloud subscriptions. Asset management handles this task, ensuring that companies don’t use resources they haven’t paid for or pay for resources they don’t need.
This also has legal advantages, because violating licenses can have financial and also legal consequences.
When selecting a software for IT asset management, you should consider following criteria:
There is a wide variety of ITAM software – from inexpensive and flexible to expensive, complex solutions that automatically detect IP-based hardware on the network, for example. It is important to select the most appropriate solution for the individual use case – whether it is a simple tracking software or one with enterprise functionality.
Our SmartITSM solution not only offers an efficient asset management tool, as a user you also benefit from our expertise and experience in the field of ITSM. But feel free to try it out for yourself, contact us and book our free demo!
IT asset management is an essential part of a company’s IT infrastructure. Effective IT asset management can help reduce costs, improve efficiency, and ensure compliance with security policies and regulatory requirements. The selection of the appropriate ITAM software is essential to achieve the desired ROI – so be sure to get good advice on this step!
IT Asset Management (ITAM) provides accurate visibility into the lifecycle costs and risks of technology assets to maximize the business value of technology strategy, architecture, financing, contracting, and procurement decisions.
ITAM includes the following 5 phases:
