IT Asset Management Risks
Don’t be surprised the next time you look for IT asset inventory data. Whether you are trying to resolve a major incident, planning a technology migration, assessing a security risk or effectively managing IT costs – accurate and complete data of your IT assets and their relationships are essential to make data-driven decisions.
For most companies, the data they require to make these IT asset decisions is found in their Configuration Management Database (CMDB) or IT Asset Management (ITAM) system. This IT asset discovery data is recorded in these systems either in the form of a manual inventory or as a part of the original procurement records when the asset was purchased.
Your IT Environment Is Constantly Changing. Are Your Configuration Records Current?
IT environments are constantly changing as a business evolves. Users move to other physical locations and/or tasks, and new technologies are introduced. Change is good in IT because it means your company is taking advantage of new and improved technology capabilities to support user productivity and business challenges.
Unfortunately, companies that rely on manual processes to update their asset and configuration records often struggle to keep their data up-to-date with the pace of business changes.
Once you fall behind, it is almost impossible to be current again because the pace of business doesn’t slow down. Manual inventory techniques are not only costly and slow, but also introduce the potential for human error.
After a period of time, the data you thought was quite good has lulled you into a false sense of security. This in turn affects the quality of the data your leaders are using to make critical business decisions.
You can’t rely on the knowledge in people’s heads – you need discovery and you need asset management!
It’s great to hire smart people for your IT team and leverage knowledgeable and experienced vendors for your IT ecosystem. You can’t, however, rely on the knowledge in people’s heads to keep track of the total breadth of your environment, especially when it’s constantly changing.
Every time someone changes roles, leaves the company and/or you change vendors, you risk losing information about your IT environment. Further, this information may be critical for situations such as major incident management and migration planning.
To maintain this information consistently and to keep it current and make it available to decision makers, you need automated IT Asset Discovery capabilities to indicate what data you actually have in your environment and asset management capabilities to keep track of everything. The scale and rate of change in modern IT environments are far too complex to expect even the best IT staff to manage manually.
Data You Can Trust Leads to Confident IT Asset Decisions
The key to confident decision-making is to have the right amount of data with the right level of quality. IT asset inventory management is important and your data doesn’t have to be perfect, but you must understand how good it is and its limitations.
The biggest risk of IT asset management data is to assume a higher level of quality. It is easy to see how much it asset discovery data you have. It is much more difficult to assess its current status and accuracy and determine what data may be missing. These factors largely contribute to the trustworthiness of the data for business growth and continuity.
Automated IT Discovery, relationship mapping, a centralized CMDB and visualization capabilities can help you understand not only what you have, but also reveal gaps and issues that must be resolved to have better data for decision making. Your data may be quite good or it may not.
Confident decision-making is a result of knowing how good something can be. With Virima, you will know with certainty what data is in your IT environment, not just what someone thinks. To learn more, watch our latest BrightTalk ITSM Summit webinar. It explains the importance of knowing the data you have before your next major incident occurs and learning how to connect the dots to help deter issues from becoming major incidents.
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!
