Your organization is growing and so is its IT infrastructure every day. With growth, comes addition of people, resources, and hardware and software assets. It is of essential importance that all assets of your organization are tracked accurately and managed properly by IT Administrator. This helps in resolving IT related issues with ease. It is important that the admin has visibility into all assets belonging to the organization’s IT landscape such as network, data center, user workstations, and remote sites.
A few years ago, a British firm carried out an audit and found that there are almost 20,000 redundant assets existing, and the admin does not have a count on these. This means that there are underutilized assets existing within the organization and is a serious IT resource and management issue. An efficiently managed Configuration Management Database (CMDB) is of great use in this case. It releases load from the management’s head. Therefore, we need to understand what a CMDB is.
Configuration Management Database
A CMDB has been an essential part of Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) asset management. It is a database designed to support ITIL resource and asset management. ITIL talks about six key tasks that a CMDB is assigned to do.
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Identify:
The first step is to identify the resources and assets existing across all parts of an organization. Once identified, the same need to be included in the database.
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Control:
This includes the management of all items with a specification regarding who is in control to change or alter a particular item.
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Maintain Status:
This task involves recording the status of all items within the CMDB and maintaining the same.
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Verify:
This step involves verifying whether all information contained within the CMDB is accurate.
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Manage Asset Lifecycle:
This essentially means recording and storing all information of an asset starting from its procurement, assigning to its decommissioning.
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Send Alerts:
A CMDB contains all information regarding the purchase date, expiry date, and decommission date. Hence, when an asset is about to expire, it is necessary to send notifications to users so that a sudden shutdown does not cause data loss.
A well maintained CMDB brings about a considerable amount of savings for the organization. However, there are a few overhead costs associated with the maintenance of data in the CMDB. Before making an investment, it is of vital importance to make decisions regarding how closely should all assets associated with the organization be managed. However, a rightly implemented asset management system will end up saving thousands of dollars for the organization in question.
Asset Management:
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Hardware Asset Management:
Hardware asset management is the process of tracking and managing the physical components of computer networks and computer parts from the time of acquisition to disposal. The main goal of hardware asset management is to keep a track of all hardware assets in the IT infrastructure and provide visibility of the same to the service desk. It also provides assistance in making forecasts on budgets on the basis of business requirements and stock of assets available.
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Software Asset Management:
Software asset management focuses on the procurement, installation, expiry, and licensing of software assets of an organization. ITIL states that the main goal of software asset management is to reduce IT costs and risks related to security and legal issues related to the ownership of IT software and the use of the same.
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Asset Lifecycle Management:
Every hardware or software asset has an expiry date. ITIL asset management helps you keep a track of when a hardware or software asset was purchased, how long it has been in use, and whether the date of expiry is approaching. For admin, it is crucial to know what version of software or hardware has been in use and whether the operating system is the latest or outdated. The data serves as actionable items and comes in handy for IT teams to decide when they should replace outdated software with the new one, uninstall an application or update firmware on a system. The information is extremely important for vendor management so that they know when they have to renew or extend a contract with a vendor.
Benefits of Asset Management
A few distinct functions asset management performs include acquiring assets while keeping the cost low, discarding assets for which maintenance cost is more than the benefits derived, ensuring the optimum use of all assets acquired, and providing all necessary information regarding license renewal, regulatory compliance, and contract renewal.
Asset management yields cost benefits and enhance efficiency within an organization. It provides all necessary information regarding software and hardware assets to the service desk. The service desk, having all information in hand takes less time in resolving problems and incidents which enhances the overall efficiency of the organization. An efficient asset management system also keeps accurate track of license accrual, renewal, warranty, etc. Therefore, unnecessary time waste and expenses associated with software expiry can be avoided. This yields benefits both in terms of cost and time-saving.
Few other distinct benefits of asset management include:
- Managing asset compliance
- Reducing the number of purchases by identifying the unnecessary ones
- Redeploying assets fast and efficiently
- Automating the contract renewal process
- Improving the management of depreciation of assets
- Improving the utilization of budget
- Reducing expenses made due to expiry of warranty and licenses
- Managing every asset from procurement to retirement and
- Facilitating better measures of IT costs
Asset management forms a vital part of all IT organizations especially organizations having a presence in multiple nations and having a considerably large employee database. For such organizations, It is not possible to keep an accurate track of all assets without having a management system in place.
