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Increasing Demands on IT
Some days it feels like new IT demands and challenges appear around every cubicle, office, rack or data center corner. The demands are coming from all directions, spanning technology trends like virtualization and VoIP to government regulations like Sarbanes-Oxley and HIPAA. The primary business drivers are revolving around corporate governance, business alignment, cost reduction and risk mitigation. Adding to IT’s challenge is the ever present executive level mandate to perform more with less.
These increasing pressures further expose the need for organizations to implement a mature IT Asset Management (ITAM) program.
CHALLENGES AND LIMITATIONS OF DISCOVERY DATA
In past decades, many organizations relied solely on their discovery tools to answer most, if not all, of their asset management questions. Those organizations were not able to identify available equipment, the physical location of an asset, if it was under maintenance or a warranty and the history of changes just to name a few examples of discovery data gaps. Compounding this, today we find many organizations, as the result of mergers and acquisitions or siloed departments, with more than one discovery tool posing the added challenge of providing a consolidated view of all enterprise IT resources.
In addition to the data consolidation challenge, today’s pressures also expose the requirement to manage the lifecycle of the company’s assets, including information that in most cases cannot be discovered. The need for expanded information includes contractual information (i.e. maintenance and warranty information), costs (e.g. purchase, lease, maintenance, and service costs), vendor information, status/availability, and ownership information (e.g. cost center, department, and user). Having ready access to this additional information is critical to field technicians who support the asset base. Service levels cannot be maintained or improved with just discovery data; discovery data must be expanded to reconcile and track this additional information.
Organizations today must compare what they have purchased or leased to what has been discovered. Those who rely on discovery data will never know if a purchased laptop was actually received, or even more disturbing, was received but disappeared. The opposite case is also a concern. If an employee brings his own laptop into the corporate environment, or buys and attaches a non-standard laptop, the discovery tool will not identify the laptop as one that did not go through the proper procurement process posing both security and financial risks. VIRTUALIZATION — BACK TO THE FUTURE The use of virtualization software is rapidly accelerating due to numerous drivers including cost savings by consolidation, disaster recovery and improvements in the software which manages the virtual images. This poses a very interesting challenge. Many organizations started their IT Asset Management program by managing hardware, in part, because hardware is tangible and relatively easier to manage than software. With the increased adoption of virtualization, the trend is to go ‘back to the future’. Today, we are seeing a move toward the mainframe computing model, in which multiple images are consolidated on a single machine.
It is ironic that virtualization, in essence, turns hardware (at least the virtual images) into software. Now, with the advent of virtualization, the relatively simple task of hardware asset management becomes increasingly complicated. You can no longer look at a server and determine if the machine is functioning as a single server or multiple servers. The implications of this change affect all areas — compliance, cost and governance.
The challenge of efficient and effective asset management will only increase as the popularity and ease of using virtualization software grows. The virtualization trend reinforces the need for an enterprise IT Asset Management program.
DISPARATE INFORMATION
Today, nearly every department in an organization has some asset management data somewhere. In fact, most organizations have data ‘somewhere and everywhere’ — in spreadsheets, in a discovery tool repository, (or in many cases, multiple discovery tools), in Access databases, or even on paper! Typically the data is departmentalized, where each group or department (e.g. IT, Legal, HR and Procurement) collects only the information they need on only the assets they have. The challenge is to compile, standardize, analyze and convert this data into information that aligns with the needs of the business and crosses departmental boundaries.
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