9 Advantages of Asset Management

Park Place Hardware Maintenance


Parker July 12, 2017

Every enterprise IT department manages assets, such as data center hardware, networking equipment, software packages, spare parts, and so on. But not all IT shops have a true asset management strategy.

How to Set a True Asset Management Strategy

What’s the difference? Employing asset management means transitioning from an ad-hoc—and often “I don’t know what’s where”—existence to a more proactive stance in which the IT environment is fully documented and that information informs decision-making. IT asset management (ITAM) integrates inventory tracking with the financial, contractual, and functional aspects of each asset. Whether you’re considering a enterprise network management software for optimizing your current IT stack, or you’re taking inventory before an IT asset disposition project – understanding asset management can elevate your performance.

What Are the Benefits of Asset Management?

There are many advantages to taking such a global, holistic view of IT to ensure cost-efficient operations, achieve corporate objectives, and maximize ROI. In particular, asset management can help:

1. Tracking

The low-hanging fruit in asset management is a complete list what the business owns and leases, including where assets are located, how they are used, and when changes were last made (and what those changes were). Such a comprehensive survey of IT hardware, software, consumables, etc., provides the basis for the other benefits.

2. Operational Efficiency

Realizing efficiencies depends on aligning needs and requirements with existing capabilities. What can be leveraged before more spending is considered? What can be eliminated to save money? Asset management puts a full understanding of IT assets, their capabilities, lifecycle, upgrade expectations, maintenance requirements, etc., at the disposal of executive decision-makers to answer these and other questions.

3. Maintenance savings

Assets require different maintenance activity at different stages of the lifecycle, so asset management can help ensure spare parts and human resources cover corporate corporate needs, without over-spending. Asset management also enhances the ability to take advantage of lower cost support contracts when hardware hits the “sweet spot” for third party maintenance, usually in the third or fourth year.

4. Multi-site integration

Organizations that boast multiple locations or multiple data centers can more easily create inventory reports and provide other IT asset information that may be required by insurers, auditors, finance executives, or others.

5. Financial reporting

Accounting for hardware and software acquisitions, expenditures on related services and other needs, and amortization rates is key. Asset management can ensure that corporate financial statements fully disclose these details.

6. Asset recovery

Sadly, IT hardware doesn’t live forever. Some assets will eventually be redeployed, potentially moving from mission critical application to a remote office or other purpose. Others will be sold or scrapped. These changes, as well as use of consumables and spares, need to make it to the business books.

7. Risk management

Having an IT function inherently entails risk, and asset management helps identify where those risks lie and what types of proactive solutions can be employed to avoid them.

8. Forecasting

Having an accurate acquisition history and understanding what is deployed now empowers an organization to identify trends. This can provide a basis for predicting IT needs and budgets.

9. Accuracy

It’s tough to keep track of all the pieces that comprise enterprise IT. With strong asset management, it becomes easier to tell when items are lost or stolen and deal with the underlying causes—such as overly broad access to storage areas—and reduce vulnerabilities. Recovery efforts can also be initiated promptly.

There is no doubt that embarking on the asset management journey can be an immense undertaking. Most IT organizations find that they have much of the information required but that it exists in different places and cannot be easily accessed in a unified fashion. In that sense, asset management can be as much an organizational task as an investigation.

The Role of ITAM in Organizations

IT Asset Management has never been at the top of a CIO’s boast list of functions and even more so in today’s innovation-driven business landscape. ITAM sits awkwardly in the digital age where agility, speed, access and automation are pre-requisites for widescale transformational app rollouts.

As pressures on IT budgets have gradually increased, IT has proactively started to embrace ownership of ITAM, supported by a more effective model. This is despite ITAM’s problem-child reputation, allowing IT to achieve more from existing assets without embarking on unnecessary technology refreshes, while ensuring maintenance contracts are optimized. Given the IT infrastructure of today nearly always spans outside of a centralized model, IT is now faced with managing an incredibly fluid, frequently mixed, and deeply cloud-enabled, landscape – from desktop, to data center, to edge, to cloud. Unmanaged, the increasing complexity and the interlinked critical dependencies can create an eco-system of havoc. Managed properly, IT can proactively push critical applications onto the most appropriate resources, whether on prem or in the cloud, and can thereby reap many fold increases on both budget allocation and application performance across the infrastructure.

Regardless of digital enablement, one element of IT Asset Management hasn’t changed over the years. It all needs to begin with accurately establishing what is out there. Discovery is not however, as straightforward as it may sound as networks have dispersed.

ParkView Discovery™ – the first pillar of ParkView’s Managed Services™ – introduces automation and intelligence into the previously static world of Asset Management discovery. As a subscription hosted service, ParkView Discovery™ users get to identify all their assets across a global network and in the cloud through comprehensive discovery tools, holistically and in real-time. Agentless discovery automatically occurs right across the estate:- from the O/S; to networking tools; to virtual machines, to storage and into the data center itself – in short, if it exists on your network, ParkView Discovery™ will find, capture and track it.

Leverage a Partner for Reliable IT Asset Management

Whether you’re in need of IT asset discovery tools, data center relocation services, or IT asset disposition, Park Place can serve as your trusted partner.

The many upsides of devising an asset management solution make it well worth the time investment. To help get started, you may want to consider Park Place Technologies’ portal to track hardware, product ID, contract information, and more. It’s available for free whether or not you’re a current customer or not. Simply contact us to set up a login ID and password.

 

About the Author

Parker, Park Place Assistant