Greetings, tech enthusiasts! Today, we dive into the realm of IT assets and uncover their secrets. Whether you are an IT professional or just curious about the world of technology, understanding the concept of IT assets is crucial for navigating the digital landscape.

In any organisation, a company will assign not only devices but licenses for software to certain users or employees. By doing so, you give access to the necessary software or company information to the employee or member of staff who needs it in order to carry out their role. Not only can you track information with regards to who has access but you can essentially pay for who needs it and save money by not paying for those who don’t.

The question is, what happens when devices become unused? Devices can become unused for any number of reason. They become out of date, they become unneeded or the employee in question leaves the company.

When this happens, to help your company save costs, you can reassign unused licenses and unused devices to another person within your workforce. This is a great way of avoiding extra costs, however for it to work, quality asset management needs to be in place, with regular IT estate verification.

Without this, your company will, like thousands of other businesses out there, fall into the trap of double purchasing – increasing costs when not necessary.

Keeping track of assets is a fundamental part of life, since the very beginning of time. Ever since the concept of ownership arose, we as a species have been assigning a value to our items and thus needing to know their physical location in order for us to retain ownership and subsequently retrieve that item at a later date.

This essentially, is the same for companies all around the world who need to keep track of commercial items, such as their IT equipment. Businesses need to know, in fact they have a responsibility to know where their inventory is and they do so via inventory management. Not only does this protect them from loss, but also ensures they avoid problems such as data leaks etc.

While technology can indeed make this job a whole lot easier, it can still be a rather arduous task, finding each and every piece of equipment, unless of course, you have the people-power and the software to carry out regular hardware asset management.

With so many different balls for a business to juggle, asset management can often find itself falling to the bottom of the priority list. Not only it is often seen as low priority, but for many without the correct software and action plan in place, it can become too time consuming to manage through Excel spreadsheets alone.

Inadequate asset management can have long term consequences for a business and yet despite this impact, statistics show that the majority of businesses don’t know where around 25% of their IT assets actually are.

A recent poll conducted by the ITAM Review found that IT departments continue to experience pressure from software companies to audit licence usage

Preliminary results show that about one-fifth of IT asset managers claim a significant increase in audit requests, while 27% have noticed a slight increase.

Martin Thompson, founder of the ITAM Forum, said: “Audits are a tried and tested way to increase revenue.”

On average, a software audit takes 60 working days to complete and, typically, an IT department could be asked to undertake two to three audits a year, said Thompson.

“People are experiencing sales snooping, with a formal audit ‘love letter’,” he said. In effect, the software companies ask permission to run a script on the company’s internal network, which, Thompson warns, provides a backdoor that they then use to interpret audit data.

According to Thompson, hospitals experienced audits during the pandemic. “Seeing NHS and private hospitals being audited doesn’t seem right,” he said.

It’s all too easy to forget how quickly certain technologies have infiltrated the enterprise. Not too long ago, mass adoption of cloud computing was seen as a pie-in-the-sky prediction. Today 85% of mid-to-large-sized businesses use multiple clouds, and enterprise networks are now required to support an average of 4.6 mobile devices per user, as smartphone and tablets use has risen.

This speedy uptake has mostly been positive, increasing productivity and efficiency, while giving staff more flexibility. However, as IT assets become more multi-layered, the task of maintaining visibility over the entire IT estate has also become more challenging.