Why Your IT Asset Inventory Management System Is a Must-Have Resource for Your Business Toolbox
If the phrase “IT asset inventory management system” doesn’t thrill you, you’re not alone. However, once you learn more about its utility, you’ll realize that (when optimized like a boss) it’s of such massive utility for your business that you just can’t even continue without it.
Your IT asset inventory management system goes by many names. Call it a device inventory, or IT asset registry. But whatever you call it, it’s more than just a list. It’s a valuable tool for your business toolbox, and it punches way above its weight. When integrated into your Mobile Device Management (MDM) service, it can support business operations as varied as:
- Business planning and forecasting
- People management
- Financial management and planning
- Regulatory and legal compliance
- Quality assurance
- Data security and safety
Remind Me Again—What’s an IT Asset Inventory Management System?
Happy to help. Very simply, an IT asset inventory management system is a record of your IT devices. Its most mature form contains a wealth of information about each device. A respectable asset inventory tells you:
- Who has which device, when it was last accessed, and where it is now.
- Detailed device information: e.g., make, model, serial number, OS version, RAM, and disk size.
- Device age and warranty information.
- Which software and apps are installed, plus information about licenses.
- Security details such as encryption and the encryption recovery key (or lack thereof).
- How many spare devices do you have in the closet, and who last used them.
How to Automate Your IT Asset Inventory Management System
An IT asset inventory is a living document that changes with the winds at its highest level. This is how Ignition automates the ones we provide our clients, which we call Fleet Sheets: if you delve under the hood of a Fleet Sheet, you’ll find scripts that run hourly. These scripts contact all the management systems installed on your device fleet—for example, MDM agents, anti-virus agents, health monitoring, and backup software—and pull the data back into the registry. We’ve built ours to automatically flag for action anything that could compromise security, such as an outdated OS or lack of encryption.
But it’s not just what your IT asset registry helps you do; it’s how it enables you to do it.
An optimized asset registry will never be more than one hour out of date and will always be auditor-ready. It’s your at-a-glance dashboard that gives you accurate and real-time visibility of your whole mobile fleet. This means that you’ll never need to waste time and manpower manually chasing down data or creating management information from scratch, and it’ll improve your speed of response to support, security, and compliance requests.
Your IT Asset Inventory Management System and Business Operations
Introduce your IT asset inventory to your HR team, your Head of Strategy, your numbers people, heck, even Naomi in Legal, because it’s something they can all use. Here are just a few areas of business operations that can benefit:
- Legal and Compliance
If you’re going for ISO 27001, SOC 2, or any other major cyber compliance framework, then putting an IT asset inventory management system together is a no-brainer since, purely by existing, it’ll check many of the compliance boxes. It fits beautifully with ISO Annex 8, which requires you to demonstrate, among other things, ownership of assets, acceptable use of assets, and how you decommission devices.
The security functionality embedded within your asset inventory will also help you comply with other regulatory requirements, such as those demanded by everything in the acronym salad bowl: HIPAA, PCI, SOC 2, CMMC, HITRUST, and FINRA.
And if that wasn’t enough, your asset inventory is a source of information you can use to comply with health and safety legislation. It’s especially useful in the world of remote working. Knowing exactly which devices your people are using and where they are using them means that you’ll have an overview of the type and scope of risk facing your workforce.
- Finance and Planning
Sometime during the year, your CFO needs to know what IT assets the business has on hand, how old they are, how much they’ve depreciated, and other balance-sheet stuff. Your IT asset inventory has the answers.
It’ll also make you look good at budget-setting time. Your asset inventory will highlight devices out of warranty or getting old and creaky. From this, you can efficiently and accurately forecast the cost and timing of replacements. The same goes for software licenses, subscriptions, and maintenance contracts—you won’t be hit with surprise renewal costs because you’ll know what needs to be renewed when.
- IT security
This is a biggie related to ISO 27001, SOC 2, and the rest. Your IT asset inventory is the key to maintaining high levels of cyber security, and it’s your early warning system that:
- Highlights devices in your fleet that are unencrypted or where there’s a missing recovery key.
- Identifies devices running a prehistoric version of their operating system. (Bonus — your inventory will tell you if there’s an update available).
- Identifies weird stuff that you need to investigate. Perhaps Nick hasn’t logged on for weeks. Why is his device in Tampa when he lives in Ellensburg, Washington?
- Identifies unlicensed or against-corporate-policy software.
- People Management
When you need to get a bunch of new hires up and running fast, your IT asset inventory will tell you precisely what spare devices you have, where they are, and what software they’re running—with this knowledge you can allocate and provision old devices to new people. Your IT asset inventory will also inform you about what’s going on with each device.
You’ll gain the information you need to manage user accounts effectively, provide or limit access to applications, force upgrades and effectively enforce your corporate acceptable use policy. Your IT asset inventory is a comprehensive knowledge base from which you can quickly build helpful management information for every part of your business.
What to learn more about IT asset inventory management system? Talk to us, we are here to help!