5 benefits of automated asset discovery for your business

It’s not uncommon for companies to have assets that are never inventoried, or even known to exist. This means that when a disaster or other event occurs, you may be without critical resources that were never accounted for in your inventory management system. 

Automated asset discovery can help you find these hidden assets so they can become part of your official inventory and risk management plan.

Manually searching for assets can take days or weeks depending on the size of your company’s physical footprint and the amount of data about assets you want included in your search. Automated asset discovery can help streamline this process by automatically identifying items based on their physical characteristics (like barcodes or serial numbers) or other indicators like location information and date/time stamps.This allows you to quickly identify all relevant resources within seconds instead of hours or days!

Why does your business need automated asset discovery?

Automated asset discovery is the process of locating and identifying all of an organization’s assets. It can be used to discover any type of asset, including software applications, hardware, data, and people.

The purpose of an automated discovery tool is to make it easier for an organization to know what its assets are, where they are located within the environment, and how they relate to each other. This information can then be used to better understand the relationship between assets and processes in order to improve overall efficiency and effectiveness.

Automated asset discovery provides real-time visibility of all assets, including those in remote locations. It eliminates the need for manually collecting and documenting IT inventory, which can be time-consuming and error-prone.

With automated asset discovery, you can quickly and easily prepare for audits by providing a complete view of your IT environment, ensuring regulatory compliance and reducing risk.

Automated asset discovery is a great way to improve your organization’s ability to make decisions based on accurate data, as well as streamline processes such as change management or purchasing new equipment.

By automating asset discovery, you can improve the process of gathering data about your organization’s assets and making that information available to all of your employees. You’ll be able to quickly find out which systems are running on outdated software and need an upgrade, find out where there are issues in the network that need to be fixed, and even determine the best way for your company to move forward with its IT strategy.

Find out how network asset discovery benefits your business

Automated asset discovery also allows you to focus more time on other aspects of running your business. Let us take a look at some of the benefits automated asset discovery has to offer.

Benefits of automated IT asset discovery

There are many benefits to using this method of asset management. The first is that it saves time. Having an accurate inventory of your systems allows you to quickly locate them if they become lost or stolen. It also helps you better plan for upgrades, maintenance, and purchase orders because you will know exactly what kind of hardware and software you need in order to perform those tasks.

1. Complete visibility into assets and better management

You’ll be able to track all your assets across your entire business with ease. Automated asset discovery helps you monitor how long an asset has been used by adding its usage date into your system so that you can see how long it’s been in use without having to manually add it each time it’s used by someone else within your organization.

You’re able to streamline the whole process of managing your company’s assets from start to finish using automated solutions. Automated discovery helps you quickly find the assets in your entire IT environment based on any input you choose, helping you react quickly to issues like a vital patch release.

In addition, an automated service mapping solution maps the relationships between each entity so you can understand the impact every entity has on application flows, application services, and other processes. This helps you understand the downstream impact of changes so you can appropriately prepare when undertaking maintenance, overseeing a migration, or replacing an asset.

2. Lowers your mean time to resolution (MTTR)

Automated asset discovery is a key component of an effective CMDB. It helps IT staff increase their mean time to resolution (MTTR), which means they can respond faster to a service outage and get people back up and running. A lower MTTR means you can save money on operational costs while also improving customer satisfaction.

By automating the discovery process, you can get updates into your configuration management database (CMDB) in real time, rather than waiting for someone to manually enter them. And by using a single system to collect data from all of your tools, you’ll have better visibility into what’s happening in your environment—and where problems might be headed.

An accurate CMDB fueled by an automated dependency and discovery mapping ensures that IT staff can leverage the latest inventory information to quickly pinpoint the source of an outage so they can make a quick decision about how to fix it. Because every entity also has every dependency mapped, IT staff can also see the upstream and downstream impact of all assets. This can help them identify the root cause of an outage or anticipate any knock-on effects of their proposed solutions.

Also read: How to improve service delivery with Virima Discovery?

3. Reduces time and cost of asset maintenance

Automated discovery along with dependency mapping reduces the time and cost of maintaining your CMDB by identifying all assets in your environment, making it possible to easily identify high-value assets that are at the end of their lifecycle. It also makes it simple to identify and remove non-critical assets from your business applications, so you can reduce costs by removing equipment that is no longer needed.

What’s more? You don’t need a large team or expertise in IT asset management software for this. Automated discovery helps you identify all of your assets without any complex setup or training. 

4. Improves overall performance

The ability to accurately track your IT assets and the relationships between them is critical to achieving an accurate CMDB. Without accurate information about your assets, you can’t keep up with the changing needs of your business.

The use of automated discovery tools helps ensure that you have a complete, accurate picture of what’s in your environment. This not only helps you identify problems before they arise, but also allows you to create solutions that meet the specific needs of your business—both now and in the future.

But there’s another benefit: better performance. Once you achieve CMDB accuracy through the use of an automated discovery and dependency mapping, you can use this insight to update your change management strategy. By prioritizing projects, you can continue to help your business scale and introduce new IT services without the need for additional IT staff or resources. At the same time, you’ll be able to meet the growing business expectations of today’s IT operations, ensuring that IT is seen as a strategic partner that can create new opportunities.

5. Provides up-to-date information of assets in your network

The problem is, most systems for tracking and managing assets are not designed to reflect the right time to retire an asset. Instead, they rely on manual data entry by IT staff—which means there’s no way to keep track of all the devices that have been added or removed from the network over time. That leaves you with no way of knowing which devices are still in use, which ones haven’t been used in ages, and which ones need to be retired immediately due to obsolescence or security risks.

However, with automated asset discovery tools like Virima Discovery, you can take control of your asset management process by automatically collecting information about every device connected to your network and ensuring that the information stays up-to-date at all times. This allows you to easily identify unsecured or discontinued devices that may pose security risks and retire them before they cause any damage.

Read: Why should your asset discovery tool support multi-cloud?

Get the visibility you need with Virima Discovery

Automated IT asset discovery is the key to saving time and money, not to mention reducing risk.

The benefits of Virima’s automated IT asset discovery are endless. This holistic IT asset discovery tool for data center, edge, and cloud environments can discover thousands of physical and virtual computers, network and storage assets easily, quickly and cost effectively.

The extendable probes automatically find your IT assets without the need to install agents or deploy agents on remote machines. You just select subnets and ranges to scan.

Our IP-based IT discovery tool makes it easy for you to identify what devices are present in your network environment. You can even extend the product with additional probes that meet your specific needs.

Discover what you can’t see with Virima Discovery and ViVID Service Mapping. Talk to the experts at Virima right away to get started.