IT Asset Management (ITAM) is the process of managing and tracking an organization’s IT assets throughout their lifecycle. This includes hardware like computers, servers, printers, and mobile devices, as well as software licenses, network devices, and other IT-related components.

The goal of ITAM is to ensure that an organization’s IT assets are being used effectively, efficiently and securely while minimizing costs and reducing the risk of data breaches and other security incidents.

A few of the key activities involved in ITAM include asset inventory management, software license management, vendor management and procurement, and disposal. These processes typically involve using specialized software tools and best practices to manage the entire lifecycle of an organization’s IT assets. This includes tracking asset usage and maintenance monitoring of potential security vulnerabilities, and ensuring compliance with relevant regulations and policies.

Hardware Asset Management (HAM) can often be pushed to the side as people focus on the day-to-day needs of a business, but it’s a vital function that can save every company time and money when done correctly.

We’ve put together a list of all the reasons regular hardware asset management audits will benefit your business.

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 They become out of date, they become unneeded or the employee in question leaves the company.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.

While technology and strategies put in place can make life a lot easier, it can still be a huge challenge for any company to know where their IT equipment is at all times. This is especially so when it moves around, which is exactly what happened in March 2020.

With the announcement that the world was fighting a pandemic, almost all of the global workforce (those who could anyway) made a transition to work from home and with them, went the necessary computer equipment.

Due to this, a huge amount of companies have lost track of their IT equipment and are struggling to locate their entire estate as a result. The only way to rectify this however, is through an effective asset management system.

COVID changed our lives and turned them upside down, approximately one year ago. Businesses up and down the UK found their entire workforce, or at the very least a large chunk of them, being made to work from home and quite rightly so. In doing this however, the vast majority of multiple business’s IT assets went with those workers in order to allow them to carry out their jobs from home. For some, this happened within hours.

Fast forward 12 months and now a great deal of company’s have found themselves with huge discrepancies in their IT asset register, asking themselves, “do we really know what IT equipment is really at people’s homes?”