What Is an IT Asset?

• IT Asset Definition

  IT Asset Definition

  IT assets are the integral components of the organization's IT environment used for storage, management, control, display, data transmission, and more.
• What is IT asset management?

  What is IT asset management?

  IT asset management (ITAM) refers to the process or set of business practices used to track, manage, and organize the IT assets of the organization. The process involves financial, inventory, and risk management responsibilities to manage the overall life cycle of these assets. It also includes tactical and strategic decision-making to drive success.

  Assets include infrastructure hardware, software, networking, cloud devices, and even non-IT assets such as buildings. It also includes detailed information on hardware and software inventories, so it’s easier to make informed decisions about purchases and assets.

  IT asset management heightens visibility to the organization’s assets, helping document and manage the lifecycle of each asset. It aligns all the information related to IT assets such as your hardware and software inventory, location information, owner and access rights, and more, helping with other service management practices.
• Benefits of IT asset management

  Benefits of IT asset management

  • Informed purchasing and deployment decisions: The major benefit of IT asset management is the in-depth details it provides about individual assets, their lifecycle, and in which processes they are involved. Consistently maintaining this data can help organizations better evaluate purchase order history and make informed deployment decisions. It can also guide you to take future actions by letting informing you about factors such as the reliability and durability of software and hardware.
  • Business continuity: IT asset management is crucial for business continuity. It helps you identify the impact of business-critical events and gives you the knowledge to restore services for end users. The data gathered through IT asset management can also help develop IT architectures redundant and resilient to many situations.
  • License and subscription compliance: One of the biggest concerns of IT organizations is to track cloud subscriptions and software licenses. It’s also important to meet compliance and regulations to avoid legal and financial risks.
  • The total cost of ownership: Total cost of ownership (TCO) refers to the overall cost of owning and operating an IT asset. It includes the cost of the IT asset and the value it adds to your organization, operational conditions, support, and maintenance throughout its lifecycle. Effective management of TCO also eliminates the added cost from duplication of assets.
  • Standardization: Standardization of IT assets ensures all the pieces, including data conventions, business processes, software, or hardware of the asset management operations, work in collaboration and are consistent across the company to achieve common goals. It can save IT teams both cost and time and helps teams be more productive and efficient in their daily operations.

  Using professional IT software for asset management can provide numerous benefits for a large company. The key advantages are streamlining operations, improving compliance and security, and optimizing IT spending. It also empowers large companies to make informed decisions, efficiently manage their IT assets, and focus on strategic initiatives to drive business growth.
• What is the IT asset management lifecycle?

  What is the IT asset management lifecycle?

  IT asset lifecycle management is crucial to ensure the performance and reliability of IT assets. The lifecycle of each asset helps in making informed business decisions. Outlined below are the few steps that determine the lifecycle of an asset:

  • Planning: What assets are needed in an organization to support various business-critical operations? Planning strategy and making informed decisions often include cost and benefit analysis, procurement procedures, and asset usage or dependency.
  • Acquire: The second step involves the procurement of the assets through licensing, leasing, buying, or building.
  • Commission: This step involves the integration of IT assets into the IT ecosystem. It includes installation, integration with other components, and giving access rights and permission controls.
  • Maintain: Maintenance is one of the most crucial steps in the lifecycle of an asset. As the asset is used and operated, it goes through various upgrades and repairs to deliver value to end users. Asset maintenance extends the life of the asset, mitigates risks, enhances the workflow process, and reduces support costs.
  • Retire: Assets must be replaced or decommissioned when their current conditions are against normal thresholds. Retirement of assets includes transitioning users to other resources, terminating licenses, updating asset records, and more.
• Why is IT asset management important?

  Why is IT asset management important?

  IT teams manage a large proportion of an organization's assets that are expensive and difficult to maintain. They focus more on the usability of asset data to drive business value rather than on extracting huge volumes of data.

  Asset management is one of the best ways to help your IT teams ensure the efficient use of the resources to support business functions and end-user requirements. It captures data to manage asset inventories and to drive decisions. Moreover, it provides accurate information about asset lifecycle, costs, and risks associated with it. This helps to make sourcing decisions and strategize funding plans.

  Asset management is important to businesses as it helps:

  • Enforce compliance and improve regulatory performance with security policies
  • Reduce support costs by reallocating or eliminating the underutilized resources
  • Enhance productivity by deploying advanced technology to support business requirements
  • Limit the overhead costs of managing an IT environment

  It’s important for businesses to choose an asset management system that encourages accountability, supports asset tracking in real-time, and ensures equipment maintenance is on track. Tracking and managing assets digitally eliminates the issues often faced while using traditional tracking systems reliant on inaccurate and outdated data. With a centralized database, asset management software helps your IT teams track assets easily and coordinate across different time zones.
• What is the objective of IT asset management (ITAM) per ITIL?

  What is the objective of IT asset management (ITAM) per ITIL?

  With the help of ITIL best practices, be it a service request or an incident raised by an end user, you can easily manage your IT assets in real time with a complete understanding of how problems, changes, and incidents impact your assets.

  Practicing IT asset management can be successful in other service management practices as well. With broader visibility into assets and their value, there’s an opportunity to reduces business risks by alerting you about potential risks and problems ahead. ITIL asset management can improve resolution rates, reduce resolution times, and resolve incidents and issues more effectively by connecting service-related information or ticket to a specific asset record.