We know IT asset management (ITAM) shouldn’t be treated as an afterthought. But often teams still scramble to maintain a comprehensive, accurate, and up-to-date view of their assets - both physical and virtual. The COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated this further with enterprise assets dispersed ever more widely.
Poor IT asset management creates risks. In the 2020 report ’10 IT Cost Optimization Techniques for Private and Public Sector Organizations’, Gartner states that by overlooking asset management capabilities, IT costs will increase and by evaluating ITAM practices, companies can achieve cost savings of 10-20%.
The inability to get an accurate view of your inventory, including knowledge about physical location and who is using it, can impact your business in a number of ways:
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Out-of-date equipment such as zombie servers continue to be supported, consuming resources including power, without providing any useful business purpose.
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Purchasing errors associated with user hardware requirements or over- or under-purchasing software licenses can lead to increased costs and non-compliance.
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Equipment is shipped to the wrong locations delaying projects.
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Performance issues are created when new software isn’t compatible with old equipment.
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Poorly managed asset disposal can mean non-compliance with security and legal requirements.
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Inability to protect proprietary data – if you don’t know where it’s stored, or you haven’t cleared old equipment.
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Haphazard data center growth due to the delivery of quick fixes to support ad-hoc business needs.
Given that poor ITAM can inflate CapEx and OpEx costs, adopting a best-practice approach to ITAM will make life easier. The reason ITAM is often mismanaged is because much of the work is completed manually.
Tracking IT Assets Manually = Major Headaches
With data stored in multiple systems and conducting IT asset management activities manually, you are never going to have access to an accurate inventory of all your assets:
- Cross-checking data and collating into a single static spreadsheet takes multiple team members many hours of work and out of date quickly.
- Where is all the data stored? ITSM platforms don’t usually track spare parts or rack equipment. Do you know what assets have been purchased outside your domain?
- Business changes, such as department moves, reorganization, new starters and leavers mean that by the time you’ve completed the inventory, it’s already out of date.
- Human error further creates opportunities for bad data to impact your projects.
Band-aid fixes can work in the short-term, but they will leave you with ongoing structural, performance and cost issues. So, how should you approach ITAM to remove the risks?
Automate to Deliver New ITAM Efficiencies
ReadyWorks advocates adopting automation to take the pain and effort out of IT asset management. By automating repetitive tasks across the lifecycle of all your assets in an intelligent way – from ordering, through deployment, license utilization, upgrade, decommission and destruction – you’ll reap the benefits of:
- An accurate, consolidated view of all company physical and virtual assets at all times.
- CapEX and OpEx reductions associated with removing support for old or unused equipment, manually tracking and managing assets, and reclaiming unused software licenses.
- Reduced time spent preparing for audits. Real-time audit trails enable security compliance with reduced effort.
Who doesn’t want to optimize support for their business and show their VPs how they are positively impacting the bottom line?
Find out how one of world’s top investment banks uses ReadyWorks to manage changing needs and provide their innovators with seamless, on-demand access to the latest equipment and services.
ReadyWorks connects to and orchestrates all your databases, tools and systems, to automate more than 50% of manual tasks. Capabilities allow you to adopt an effortless, risk-free approach to IT asset management:
- Automated data collation, aggregation and analysis give you a real-time view of all IT assets in days rather than months.
- A structured approach to IMAC allows you to easily track the order, deployment and movement of assets.
- The E-waste process is simplified – taking the effort out of disposing equipment correctly and removing the risk of data-leaks.
- A self-service portal allows users to input unique requirements and schedule updates and equipment deliveries, drastically reducing deployment errors and the time your team devotes to scheduling activities.
- Vendor orchestration ensures OEMs receive accurate equipment orders to improve purchasing.
- Support for QR code scanning provides greater asset inventory accuracy.
- Comprehensive dashboards take the hassle out of reporting and allow you to provide stakeholders with a real-time view and audit trail.
Schedule a demo with ReadyWorks to see how you can take the pain out of IT asset management.
