Come on, why aren’t you excited about the benefits of awesome IT asset management? We think it’s always special because, done well, ITAM saves you time, money, and reputation. Some of the benefits of IT asset management are that it supports high levels of business productivity, keeps costs under control, and probably improves your skin, too.
Now, Let’s Calm Down and Clarify What IT Asset Management Is…
ITAM is a collection of business practices and processes that blend financial and inventory tools to manage the lifecycle of information assets. The purpose of ITAM is to optimize what you buy and how you use your IT assets to enable them to support your business as effectively as possible. ITAM helps you minimize risk, maximize benefits, and increase the oomph for your IT dollar.
So, What Is an IT Asset?
In the old days, an asset was something you could physically lift and throw out of a window. Nowadays, it’s more than that. Your IT assets include pretty much everything in your IT environment that helps you store, use, transmit, control, manipulate, and display data. We’re talking about:
- The hardware: Endpoint devices, printers, servers, workstations, and routers.
- The software: Apps you use, any proprietary software, or cloud asset services from companies like Google or Airtable.
- The data: Digital assets (such as your own image library), customer and corporate data, and intellectual property.
- Other bits, such as software licenses.
Your IT team is not an IT asset unless they’re happy for you to stamp a number on them and stick them in a dusty cupboard.
IT Asset Management: Where to Start
Before we get unnaturally incoherent about the benefits of IT asset management, it might be sensible to show you how to get started. If you’re a purist, check out the ITAM standards, because, yes, the International Standards Organization (the team that does ISO 27001) created ISO 19770 purely to show why ITAM is important and how to do it properly. If you’re not a purist, the key to ITAM is to:
- Get visibility of all your IT assets. If you have mobile device management, your dashboard will do a lot of this for you, as it’s a ready-made, always-live IT asset register.
- Once you have visibility, you’re able to monitor your assets to establish how (or if) they’re used, which stage of the lifecycle they’re at, and to plan to protect and maintain them.
The Benefits of IT Asset Management
“Actually, I prefer not to manage my IT assets because I enjoy chaos, risk, and an early grave,” said no one ever. Hold onto your hollyhocks because we’re now gonna bust out just a few of the benefits of IT asset management:
It’s Your Single Source of Truth
If you don’t know what you have, how can you manage it properly? Knowledge is power. ITAM gives you visibility of all your assets, meaning you can throw out the guesswork and make a whole truckload of relevant decisions that’ll impact your business productivity, security, and financial wellbeing.
It Saves You Money
When you have visibility of your IT assets, it’s much easier to monitor them, and this means you’ll know how used or useful your assets are or aren’t. It’s an opportunity to optimize software licenses, to stop paying for them if you’re not using them, or to make sure you have the right ones (because no one wants surprise license fines from the software vendor).
ITAM gives you the opportunity to create a cloud account policy (because you’re paying for cloud accounts even when they’re unused). It’s a chance to create a robust maintenance schedule to keep those assets, like endpoints, working better for longer. You’ll have an up-to-date inventory of your spare devices so that you can re-use them, rather than buy new devices when you hire new people. Strategically, ITAM informs, and is informed by, your IT procurement strategy. Don’t you just love joined-up business?
When you have oversight of your IT assets, you’ll be able to eliminate unnecessary spending and stop maverick spending or dark IT purchasing (which isn’t a new Netflix series, but should be). If Dana, Head of Sales, wants that all-singing, all-dancing MacBook, she’s gonna need a damn good business case for it, rather than buy it out of her cigars’n’bars budget.
It Reduces Your Risk of a Data Breach
An out-of-control IT asset ecosystem is at risk for a dozen flavors of data breach. ITAM helps you control your IT assets in ways that can prevent a data breach and respond to risks or events faster and more effectively. ITAM gets you to identify your IT assets and the cybersecurity threats they face, which means you’re more informed about the levels of protection you’ll need for particular assets. For example, a database storing the names, addresses, and medical conditions of healthcare clients will need higher levels of cyber protection than, say, employee timesheets.
In addition, if you’re using MDM as your asset register, you’ll be able to:
- Discover which devices in your fleet are running out-of-date OS or software. It’s then a simple task to enforce updates to close down that risk.
- Enforce security patches.
- Remote lock or wipe the data from missing, lost, or stolen devices.
- Lock remote devices out of insecure public wifi.
It Helps You Achieve Compliance
It’s a truth universally acknowledged that if you want to play in the big league - for instance, by contracting with big corporations or government bodies - you’ll have to demonstrate data security compliance. If you can show that you’re protecting the confidentiality, availability, and integrity of the data you’re responsible for, you’ll get through that next round of procurement.
Rather than take your word for it, your potential client will demand proof in the form of certification with a compliance framework, such as HIPAA or Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification (CMMC).
ITAM is a foundational aspect of most compliance standards. It’s your methodology for identifying, corralling, and controlling IT assets as part of those standards as well as giving you the basis for applying further cybersecurity standards and protocols.
Enjoy Those Sweet, Sweet Benefits of IT Asset Management
Maybe you’ve just hired a gazillion new people and your IT assets are all over the place. Maybe you’ve tamed your IT assets, kind of, but need a way forward. Maybe everything is just a great big mess and you wanna stick your head under the duvet until it all goes away. We feel you. We’ll also help you because the only thing we love more than a perfect IT asset management environment is a big mess. Because we get to sort it out.
Learn to optimize the benefits of IT asset management with us. Ignition is Silicon Valley’s best (and friendliest) IT security, compliance, and support team. We love chatting all things IT support and cybersecurity–call us now.