7 asset discovery challenges that Virima can help you solve

Table of Contents

• 1. IT teams struggle to extract accurate details about IT assets
• 2. Monitoring change management can be unnecessarily tedious- –the asset discovery savior
• 3. Inability to be audit-ready—leading to last-minute overload and errors
  • The following are some common mistakes that cause organizations to face severe challenges while performing their audits:
• 4. Inability to detect and monitor newer endpoints thoroughly
• 5. Lack of complete visibility into the entire network due to its complex nature
• 6. Presence of outdated asset data due to expired licenses
• 7. Discrepancies in asset data due to the presence of a dynamic network infrastructure
• Create an efficient IT asset discovery process with Virima

The IT asset discovery process is an essential part of modern IT management. With the massive adoption of hardware and software and the cost of these technologies, it becomes necessary to ensure they are tracked and inventoried.

An IT asset discovery process helps you do just that. It helps you monitor and catalog all your assets and store them in your asset management software. This system provides visibility of all the devices, hardware, and software systems. Also, provides components in your organization and ensures that they are kept safe and up-to-date.

However, it’s easier said than done.
Many IT managers face challenges with inefficient manual processes or expensive. These are overly complicated automated solutions that fail to deliver satisfactory results or meet all their needs.

The right way to go about this is to use a solution that makes the entire process seamless. Also, helps you efficiently manage your whole IT infrastructure. 

IT discovery tools like Virima provide actionable data across your business. It does by automating the entire process and giving you in-depth visibility into your assets.

This article will discuss seven challenges of IT asset discovery that IT managers face with these systems. Also, discuss how Virima can help you resolve them quickly.

1. IT teams struggle to extract accurate details about IT assets

Asset discovery is key to the overall IT asset management (ITAM) process and is a crucial part of any IT asset management software. It involves identifying, documenting, and managing the hardware, software, and data that make up your IT environment.

The goal is to have a centralized database of information about your assets. It is because you can keep track of them at all times. It includes who owns each device, its serial number, etc. Also, includes when it was last updated, where it is located, and whether it is running properly.

The process of discovering assets is complicated and can be a time-consuming and costly exercise. The IT team has to manually log in to each device and record information about its configuration, software, hardware, and application components.

In addition to being inefficient, this manual approach leaves room for error. It can result in inaccurate data that negatively impact your organization’s ability to manage its assets effectively.

To avoid this, you can use an asset discovery tool like Virima that has agent-based and agentless probes to monitor every aspect of your network. Having different probe types that are also customizable makes it much easier to configure them based on your needs. You can also automate this system and conduct “set and forget” network scans that scan your network without manual intervention. 

Virima IT Discovery Console

2. Monitoring change management can be unnecessarily tedious- –the asset discovery savior

Change management is crucial to any IT environment as it impacts how the business delivers its services. It helps ensure that the changes made by the IT team are reviewed and approved by the appropriate individuals before they are implemented so that service delivery is not impacted.

The problem is that this process can be time-consuming and challenging to manage. IT teams often need help to monitor change management because they cannot manually view what changes are made in the IT environment. To make matters worse, these companies are forced to use inefficient manual processes that do not scale well as their organizations grow.

When you use asset discovery software like Virima to discover your assets, you can see all changes in your environment—including ones made by users not part of your IT team. It means you can better manage change requests and ensure compliance with security policies. You will save time when making changes to your network infrastructure.

Typically, manual configuration management can be time-consuming when adding devices or changing settings on existing ones. However, automated IT discovery removes this need and frees time to focus on more demanding tasks. It also reduces the risk of human error during configuration management processes since it is done by machines instead of humans (who may not be as familiar with specific devices).

Using Virima’s automated asset discovery, you can ensure that all relevant information about your assets in your configuration management database (CMDB) are up-to-date. Moreover, if you want to observe real-time changes, you can use the service maps that update as and when you make changes.

3. Inability to be audit-ready—leading to last-minute overload and errors

IT compliance audits are another critical process that asset discovery supports and enables. It helps organizations become audit-ready by identifying, cataloging, and documenting all assets in the environment.

The primary objective of asset discovery is to provide IT teams with a complete inventory of the hardware and software assets they use daily. Using this information to audit and ensure compliance with organizational policies and regulations. For example, IT teams may have to comply with industry standards like:

• Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS)
• Sarbanes–Oxley Act (SOX)
• General Data Protection Regulation is a Regulation (GDPR)
• Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) 

The following are some common mistakes that cause organizations to face severe challenges while performing their audits:

• Inefficient asset discovery process: Organizations need more adequate asset discovery tools to identify and correctly document all their assets. It leads to last-minute work overload, which results in errors or omissions during the audit process.
• Lack of centralized management: Most organizations have multiple locations for their data centers, offices, and other facilities. This leads to a lack of a centralized management system for their assets, making it difficult for them to perform asset audits on time.
• Lack of management support: Most IT organizations need more resources to perform audits on time because they are overworked due to existing workloads in their departments. In addition, managers only support auditing activities if they feel it will cause disruption.

You can avoid these asset discovery issues using Virima’s secure asset discovery software. It catalogs your assets with in-depth information like model, serial numbers, network adapters, peripherals, relationships, etc. 

Asset attributes within Virima’s Discovery tool

Plus, the CMDB stores all this data—acting as a single source of truth for your entire network infrastructure. Using this, you can remain audit-ready at all times—without investing too much in maintaining your network.

4. Inability to detect and monitor newer endpoints thoroughly

With the rise of remote work, cloud services, mobile devices, and the Internet of Things (IoT), there has been a considerable increase in endpoints and dispersed assets that need to be monitored.

To keep track of these often scattered elements, IT managers must rely on manual approaches or automated asset discovery tools, which are increasingly becoming inadequate in a rapidly changing digital landscape.

Moreover, the influx of personal devices being used by remote workers for online collaborations increases the risk of malware infiltration into an enterprise’s network. 

Thus, IT managers require an automated asset discovery tool to stay on top of all the endpoints within their network. Such a tool should be able to do the following: 

• Scan for new assets continuously
• Provide information about each asset’s characteristics and status
• Present real-time updates related to security risks 
• Automate specific actions that would otherwise demand significant time from IT personnel

For example, Virima IT discovery helps you uncover assets from different environments such as cloud, edge devices, data centers, or virtual environments. No matter where your assets are hosted, it can detect and pull all its configuration details without too much effort on your part.

Plus, you also have the option to choose from multiple integrations like ServiceNow, Ivanti, AWS, Microsoft Azure, and more. With such broad coverage, the discovery process becomes much simpler and more efficient.

A graphical representation of how Virima Discovery works

5. Lack of complete visibility into the entire network due to its complex nature

IT managers are constantly struggling with the lack of complete visibility into their entire network due to its complexity. With a holistic view of the IT infrastructure, they often can identify dependencies and vulnerabilities in the environment. An automated asset discovery tool ensures complete visibility and control over enterprise networks. 

With this tool, IT managers can quickly map out all network assets, dependencies, and relationships to identify any weak links in the system. Additionally, they can keep track of any changes made to the system and take corrective actions if needed. 

Moreover, an automated asset discovery tool like Virima provides detailed information on hardware and software assets across the entire network, including their location, configuration settings, and security status. For example, the hybrid discovery process pulls relevant data and feeds the dynamic service maps with timely data at all times. 

It enables IT managers to make informed decisions about deploying resources for optimal performance and spot potential risks before attackers can exploit them. It also helps administrators detect unauthorized devices or applications that malicious actors could use as a gateway into their system.

6. Presence of outdated asset data due to expired licenses

IT managers often need help with outdated asset data due to expired licenses. It is because manual processes do not account for license expiration, and there is no reliable way to track when a license expires or if it has already done so.

Manual processes leave a lot of room for errors, such as misplacing paperwork or not being able to identify the exact number of licenses owned. It can lead to software running on outdated versions and using expired licenses, resulting in productivity losses and excessive costs.

To avoid this, IT managers need an automated method to monitor licensing data that includes information about both expiry dates and current license usage. Asset discovery tools like Virima help them detect outdated licenses quickly and maximize productivity by optimizing their IT spend across all areas. It does so using a software licensing meter that automatically tracks all your asset usage, license issues, and renewal dates and collates the data in one dashboard. Plus, with an automated system, they could manually compile purchasing records from multiple departments, which is often time-consuming and tedious. Automated IT discovery tools are necessary for organizations today as they offer real-time software usage tracking, allowing for proactive management instead of reactive patching when things go wrong.

7. Discrepancies in asset data due to the presence of a dynamic network infrastructure

Assets might be added, removed, or reconfigured by users without the IT team’s knowledge. This process can significantly reduce visibility into the network and increase the risk of vulnerabilities.

To counter this, IT managers need to use automated tools for asset discovery to quickly and accurately detect any changes in the environment. Tools like Virima IT discovery have sophisticated features like continuous monitoring capabilities that alert IT teams when new devices connect or existing ones disconnect from the environment.

Automated asset discovery can also provide insight into system health, so IT managers can identify problems before they become costly disasters. Additionally, it provides tracking capabilities for compliance management, reporting, and risk analytics to identify potential security threats. With these features in place, IT managers can ensure their networks remain secure and up-to-date while reducing manual overhead.

Create an efficient IT asset discovery process with Virima

Asset discovery can be time-consuming and burdensome for IT departments. Transferring the responsibility of discovering assets in your infrastructure to automated tools is a convenient option that frees up internal company resources. 

Still, it also brings with it the risk of incorrect or incomplete data. IT teams must evaluate their options based on their business objectives to truly extract value from these discovery tools.

Tools like Virima asset discovery help companies discover all their IT assets for the first time and make subsequent annual or even quarterly asset audits easy and inexpensive. It is a solid solution for IT asset discovery that has helped many companies avoid these issues and gain confidence in their reported data.

If you are looking for an IT asset discovery solution that powers real-time service maps to detect and catalog IT assets within your network, book a demo with Virima today.