IT organizations spend plenty of money each year deploying and maintaining technology assets – from the centralized servers and network devices to the desktop and laptop devices for end-users.
With shrinking profit margins and increasing competition in the marketplace, company leaders are increasingly looking to CIOs and IT leaders to improve the efficiency of technology assets. Removing those components and services that aren’t needed helps to cut costs and increase the utilization and value of the remaining assets.
The challenge for IT leaders is determining what technology assets reside in their IT environment so they can work with their peers to make decisions on how to utilize those assets most effectively. Asset management data isn’t just used for operating the IT environment, it is also used for optimizing it as well.
IT configuration and asset data are critical to help leaders manage assets in their environment. They help in keeping track of lists of the existing components and systems, what they are and their dependency relationships with other systems and business services.
If this information is correct and complete, then it will also enable leaders to know where assets are being underutilized and provide insights into how to improve asset efficiency.
Identifying Underutilized IT Assets
The first step to improve IT asset efficiency is to understand your existing assets and their current use. IT discovery, your Configuration Management Database (CMDB), and IT asset management (ITAM) systems are the tools your IT team needs for this assessment.
IT Asset Discovery enables you to collect information from your environment about existing technology assets and their connections to other elements in your environment.
Your CMDB is the repository where you store this information and your IT asset management system is the set of tools used to create and view relationship mappings and other attributes of your assets.
If you have these core capabilities, then you should be able to compile a big-picture view of your IT environment. Operational monitoring of network traffic and CPU utilization and storage, can provide information about the overall utilization of each asset, including how it changes with regular business cycles.
The relationship mapping data in your asset management system can help you correlate the capacity utilization with business functions, worksite locations, and the business activities the assets are supporting. Once this information has been gathered, you are now able to see what assets are underutilized and what assets are fully consumed.
Using Utilization Information to Improve Asset Efficiency
While some organizations just use their utilization information to optimize their current services, the most valuable insights to be gained are the opportunities to use existing assets to support new business needs. Perhaps, you have a new business application that must be hosted, or a new facility coming online that must be connected to the company network.
By understanding where you have available capacity in your existing asset portfolio, you may be able to support business growth goals without having to incur the time and cost involved in procuring something new.
Can that underutilized server from sales also run some manufacturing software? Can leftovers from your recent facilities upgrade project be re-used to complete the building of a new site? Answering these questions will provide the insights that will lead to more efficient, future asset utilization.
Managing asset utilization isn’t just about controlling costs – it’s also using the resources available to the organization in the most efficient way possible to create value for the company. IT environments change frequently and there are often underutilized technology assets either occupying space in a store room or still operating in the environment with useful life. Company leaders are looking to their CIOs and IT leaders to understand what assets are available and find ways to use them more efficiently.
The IT Discovery, IT Asset Management (ITAM) and IT Service Management (ITSM) solutions from Virima will help leaders achieve these goals, providing the tools for capturing data about your IT environment, visualizing, and driving actionable insights from this valuable data source.
Virima is here to help. To learn more, download our whitepaper on discovery and visualization here.
To get started, contact us today to schedule a demo and explore the possibilities!
