What is IT Asset Management?
IT asset management (ITAM) is a set of business practices
that join financial, contractual, and inventory functions to support life cycle
management and strategic decision making for the IT environment. Managing IT
assets allows you to get maximum value from the use of the assets, right-size
IT inventory, and optimize inventory purchase decisions and strategies.
Hardware asset management is the process of tracking and
managing the physical components of computers and computer networks, from
acquisition through disposal. The goals of hardware asset management are to
account for all hardware assets on the IT infrastructure to provide
comprehensive inventory visibility. Further, to help with vendor contract and
lease management, and to assist in making budgetary forecasts based on the
stock of assets and business requirement.
Software asset management is similar to hardware asset
management, but focuses on software assets, including licenses, versions, and
installed endpoints. ITIL states that the goals of software asset management
are to reduce IT costs and limit business, legal and security risks related to
the ownership and use of computer software, while maximizing IT responsiveness
and end-user productivity
The major goal of ITAM is to establish a centralized asset
repository that accounts for the presence and purchase of all your hardware and
software inventory.
To achieve this, ITAM methodology comprises the following
steps:
·
Asset
discovery, data capture and storage – Discovering all hardware and software
components of IT inventory on the IT infrastructure and capturing their
details, such as the type of asset, make, specification, etc., and storing it
in an asset repository
·
Asset
tracking – Being able to identify and track change in the location of
assets, increase or decrease the number of assets, track assignment status and
user information
·
Asset life cycle management – Being able to capture the asset life cycle data right
from requisitioning, purchase and assignment, to expiry and decommissioning
·
Asset
reporting and alerting – Being able to generate asset inventory reporting,
and receive alerts on asset warranty and lease expiration