When it comes to budgets, accountants can follow every cent and maximise every spending decision. In the same manner, IT leaders can employ the same discipline to tracking and managing IT assets.
In fact, experts have indicated that effective and comprehensive IT Asset Tracking has become essential, particularly in a world where many employees are still working remotely.
IT Asset Tracking is the use of software to track IT assets and make strategic decisions that result in their effective and efficient use. Performance, location, financial and contract data are extracted to optimise costs as well as the maintenance history and usage of each asset.
IT Asset Tracking is not only the management of hardware assets but includes software assets as well. Laptops, PCs, printers, and even servers qualify as hardware, while software includes any software that has been purchased or leased from apps or programs that require licencing, which is typically issued on a machine-to-machine basis.
There are principally six major benefits of proper IT Asset Tracking.
Inventory Management
IT Asset Tracking is an essential process that helps businesses achieve the highest return on their IT investments. It enables them to make better, more informed decisions about managing their IT resources. It involves gathering detailed hardware and software inventory information. Accurate IT asset inventory data collection helps companies use their assets more effectively and avoid unnecessary purchases. Information regarding the status of each asset such as location, users, and software updates helps the IT department to ensure the efficient use of resources in supporting the needs of users and business functions.
Outdated assets can hamper employee productivity.
Employees stuck with ageing and outdated machinery can struggle to do their jobs. While companies will always want to ensure their assets are used for as long and effectively as possible, the flip side of the coin is that employees need to have a trouble-free work experience to deliver to the best of their ability. Being able to adequately track performance and usage is therefore critical to ensuring maximum productivity. IT Asset Tracking ensures that asset lifecycle practices are implemented to rotate out old hardware and integrate new equipment.
Cost savings
Getting the most from each IT asset requires companies to be able to track each item and ensure that the right employee has the correct piece of hardware and all the software they need to do their jobs. When IT asset reports are inaccurate, they expose the organisation to unnecessary IT purchases. If there isn’t a precise record of who was given what, you will find out that without a system being used, assets go missing, duplicates are purchased, and some equipment never gets used. By avoiding unnecessary asset purchases for both software and hardware, IT asset managers can cut licensing and hardware costs, eliminating waste.
Security
In an age where security threats evolve rapidly, failing to properly track and update the status of your software and hardware can quickly lead to weak points in your network. JP Morgan learnt this the hard way when their servers were breached, and the data of 83 million customers was stolen simply because one network server out of dozens had not been upgraded to a dual password scheme. Had the hardware been tracked and the software updated, the breach could have been avoided. These days with numerous employees working off-site it is even harder to ensure that one person's laptop does not become the breaching point for your servers. As they are not in the office and therefore not necessarily joining the network, updates are difficult to follow up on and enforce with typical, old-fashioned systems.
Regulatory compliance
Each new Data law passed requires greater and stricter adherence to protection protocols. Proving that you are doing everything necessary to protect your client's information is basically impossible without adequate IT asset management. New laws may require you to completely remove requested information from your servers and failure to do so may result in fines. If assets are not adequately tracked, audited, managed throughout their lifecycle, and disposed of securely, a company could find itself in hot water very quickly.
Disposal
This leads directly to the next part which is disposal. Adequate, ethical, and legal disposal of hardware will require proper cleansing of the drives to avoid leaked information. Assets that go missing on the network due to inadequate tracking can pop up later as problems. IT Asset Tracking will account for every machine and show you how long your assets have been in your environment. With this information, you can determine whether it’s time to plan for an upgrade, migration, or dispose of your equipment adequately through a documented process.
Greater business continuity
By maintaining a complete list of hardware and software it becomes significantly easier to track errors and correct them, ensuring that if anything does go wrong the impact is minimised and company systems are back up and running as quickly as possible.
Implementing IT asset tracking solutions is therefore fundamental to any business operating in the modern era. Employees working offsite must be adequately tracked and their systems updated just as securely as those in the office, and any problems which do arise need to be isolated and resolved from the rest of the network quickly and efficiently. It is, in short, a full-time job and one that is only getting increasingly important.
Ready to start tracking your IT estate? Try V-Track™ today.