IT Asset Management: Saving Money, Reducing Risk

Executive Summary
IT asset management controls a company's IT assets from budgeting and planning through end of life. With today's budget restrictions, hiring freezes, and increased cost-cutting pressure, monitoring IT assets is a classic case of being forced to do more with less. Without a comprehensive management program in place, IT assets can cost far more than necessary through waste and redundancy (direct costs) and overly complex management and maintenance (indirect costs). By implementing an effective IT asset management program, companies can view every asset in their enterprise, allowing them to control and manage IT assets, eliminate waste and redundancy, and comply with ever-tightening government compliance regulations.

Why Track and Manage?
With constant pressure to reduce costs, the growing frequency of software vendor audits, and government regulations, managing IT assets is a vital corporate function—and a potential liability if not performed properly. Inadequate or inaccurate reporting no longer simply wastes money; it can open a company to legal action. Regardless of a company's size, it must comply with software licensing requirements and, as it grows, increasingly stringent government regulations.
State and federal lawmakers have introduced numerous legislative acts to safeguard data integrity and business assets and to ensure consumer privacy. Compliance is mandatory; violators will be prosecuted. If a company does not have systems in place to meet these legislative requirements, how will it demonstrate compliance while carrying on its dayto- day business?
From a cost-saving standpoint, knowing the inventory of IT assets is critical when deciding whether to purchase more assets, redistribute current assets, or retire them completely—along with their costly maintenance contracts and renewal fees.
Maintaining and distributing assets across the company, ensuring employees have the tools they need to do their jobs, is difficult and costly when the assets cannot be readily found. Knowing where assets are, how they are configured, and how they are used allows a company to ensure that these assets are in the right place at the right time, properly equipped and supported.
Many companies don't have the resources to devote a full-time employee to IT asset management (ITAM), so the job often falls to already overworked IT personnel. ITAM is often overlooked as other IT concerns take precedence, reducing its effectiveness and opening a company to costly compliance issues, as well as wasting money through redundant and unnecessary spending.
The general consensus is that companies have two options: address ITAM by purchasing a software solution or outsourcing the ITAM function—or do nothing and hope for the best. Companies that choose the latter option may be gambling with their future.

What Is IT Asset Management?
IT asset management lets organizations optimize IT assets—hardware, software, and services—to achieve business goals and meet all legal requirements such as software license agreements and government regulations regarding accountability.
ITAM programs use software tools to "inventory" hardware and software, but it is much more than that. ITAM knows when each machine was purchased; what processor it uses; who installed what software on it and when; how often it is used; and when and how it will be (or was) retired. ITAM enables remote monitoring and provisioning, rather than laboriously tracking assets physically. An effective ITAM solution provides central management and configuration capabilities, cutting IT costs and speeding the upgrade and provisioning cycle.
With these tools in place, a company can tell where its IT dollars are and how they're being used. By automating ITAM, it is no longer a full-time job. A member of the IT staff can monitor the ITAM process along with his or her other tasks, eliminating the need to dedicate a valuable employee to this one pursuit.
The need to account for every IT dollar is driven not only by economic necessity but also by increasing government regulation. No one organization within a company is responsible for compliance; as such, an effective ITAM program must involve every department in every company.