Companies expect their IT departments to provide a set of systems and services to enable business agility, ensure robust user experiences, and manage technology assets for their organization using comprehensive IT asset tools.
That is a tall order, especially for a function that is also under intense pressure to manage operational costs. For IT leaders, the completeness and accuracy of IT Asset Management (ITAM) data has a big impact on whether they will be able to achieve the department’s objectives.
For those of you who aren’t familiar with ITAM, it keeps track of a company’s technology assets, so leaders can make better decisions. In this article, we shed light on three ways you can empower your IT environment with ITAM tools:
1. IT Asset Tools: Managing Costs and Risk
Managing operating costs and managing technology risks are two of the most common challenges IT leaders face. As assets age, they require more maintenance, patching, and upgrades to remain stable and secure. Eventually, newer devices with higher capacity density, processing power, and modern features must replace the assets.
ITAM tools provide companies with the means to track the IT asset management lifecycle to understand and predict when maintenance activities are needed. They also project cost vs. benefit to determine when they should replace an IT asset that has exceeded its useful life.
Security and technology risk is also a big concern for IT leaders. With the proliferation of third party components in the IT environment, and the increase in malicious activity such as hacking, it is important companies understand their security risk exposure and the status of patching activities to remediate vulnerabilities.
IT asset management data serves as the master inventory of devices and services installed in your IT environment. This data is linked to configuration data and threat data from your governance, risk and compliance system to provide leaders with a big-picture view of what you have and where action is needed.
(See, “IT Asset Management is more than just lists of data”)
2. Addressing Performance Constraints
The old adage, “a chain is only as strong as its weakest link,” is very applicable to IT environments. Most IT services comprise a complex set of components and dependencies such as software, hardware, storage,, etc. This is known as the service’s dependency chain.
With most resources and assets shared across multiple services, it is not uncommon for some components to become overloaded, slowing performance, and limiting capacity of services that depend on them.
IT asset tools combined with configuration and performance monitoring data helps leaders see capacity utilization and understand what resources in their environments are constraining the delivery of services to end-users.
This insight enables them to make informed decisions about where to add capacity and/or upgrade components to have the greatest positive impact on end-user experiences.
3. Enabling Agility
Companies are constantly evolving and their needs for technology and information are constantly shifting as well. Business agility requires IT environments to be agile too. Modern technology includes features that make it easier to support frequent change and manage operations of systems in the IT environment.
Many organizations struggle with “technical debt,” or the legacy components, configurations, and implementations that impede the ability to change easily and adopt new features. The asset portfolio is part of ITAM and provides critical information about what legacy components are present, so their replacement/upgrade can be planned.
IT leaders have a tough job balancing the growth and agility needs of the business, demand for new/modern features, and the mandate to control costs and risks.
High-quality IT asset management data, efficient tools to keep it current and make it accessible for analysis, and decision-making are essential to enable informed IT decision-making.
Virima: Your IT Industry Partner
Virima is an industry leader in ITAM and ITSM solutions, providing discovery, configuration management, and ITSM solutions that allow IT staff to take control of their IT asset management data and enable leaders to make better decisions.
Virima features can automatically discover and map your critical IT resources and the interconnections that link them to one another, your applications and services, and your users.
Virima is here to help. To get started, contact us today to schedule a demo and explore the possibilities!
