How does ITAM help?

When it comes to achieving cost savings and increased efficiencies and maintaining regulatory compliance of your IT assets, ITAM is essential, but as a strategic initiative, a sound ITAM strategy enables you to accomplish the following objectives:

• Accurate asset tracking
• Effective IT asset management
• Effective software asset management
• Efficient asset disposal
• Timely asset replacement
• Risk mitigation (for example, around software compliance, patch management, antivirus, and many more)
• Cost reduction

However, ITAM involves more than accomplishing these objectives. Your strategy must be broad enough and sound enough to include other necessary asset management objectives, such as contract management, license compliance, and IT financial management.

Historically, hardware assets were "written off" when they reached obsolescence. However, today's hardware assets hold considerably more value, even when replaced. Before an asset can be evaluated, it must first be located and assessed. When dealing with a leased equipment, it's wise to remember that the aim is to return the assets by the negotiated end of the lease agreement, thereby avoiding costly penalties. Here, the challenge is to quickly locate the equipment that has been in use for some time, but may have never been tracked. A fundamental aspect of ITAM is tracking the location of each hardware asset all the time. Therefore, no matter how the equipment is acquired—either through purchase or lease—effective ITAM practices enhance cost efficiencies.

Tracking the flow of software throughout your organization can also be a challenge. Best practices are all well and good, but the consistent application of those practices is the key. Remember, compliance is about meeting and maintaining audit-ready status all the time, not only when the audit time rolls around.

Most businesses succeed in logging the first user of their software or equipment, but fail to track the changes that occur during the normal course of business. These include routine items such as the installation or deinstallation of software, applying necessary patches, adding memory, installing a larger hard disk, or reassigning the asset to a different user.

The failure to track any of these changes frequently results in a lost, unlicensed asset, hacking and security breaches. An asset management solution that does not track these changes is not a solution at all.

Other information worth tracking includes contract information, such as leasing/replacement dates, insurance contracts, maintenance agreements, and software license agreements. These types of data are invaluable to ITAM because they provide insight and accuracy into the costs associated with these items. This in turn provides you with clarity when it comes down to deciding whether to purchase or lease a specific equipment. Although lease rates may look attractive initially, your total cost for that lease may actually end up exceeding the cost of purchasing the equipment outright. Remember that 3 years into the lease, you may be paying for obsolete equipment, and those rates lose some of their luster.

In a nutshell, building the discipline required to make ITAM work for your enterprise results in the following benefits:

• Ensuring compliance
• Maintaining audit readiness
• Effectively managing service costs
• Maintaining your competitive edge
• Enhancing operational productivity
• Ability for IT to respond to vulnerabilities in a timely manner
• Implementing consistent and repeatable processes
• Reducing the cost of change
• Managing asset utilization
• Releasing capital
• Improving bottom-line profitability
• Increasing organizational ability to meet service-level agreements
• Improving customer satisfaction
• Managing financial accountability for IT
• Collaboration with IT Security to discover possible and unknown cyber threats

Implementing ITAM within your organization leads to faster and greater success to existing and new initiatives. The following table provides a sample list of key CIO initiatives and shows how leveraging ITAM enables a more proactive approach:

CIO initiatives	IT Asset Management enablement	Executive team interest
Cloud computing	Cost versus benefit analysis with accurate understanding of all assets required for a function that might be moved to the cloud	Greater efficiency and control at the enterprise level
Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA)	Usage data allows consolidation, reduced maintenance costs, and alignment with business	Significantly reduced cost center Business intelligence Performance measurement Security
Compliance	Managed software list, snapshots of current system configurations, and document management	Cost control Compliance
Service management	Continual updates of asset data, usage, costs, users, populating service management incident, problem, change, and asset management	Improved productivity Reduction in resources dedicated to this function Ability to bring business back to home nation
Vendor management	Manage approved vendor list, manage terms and conditions, reduce risk, and evaluate vendors	Cost savings and align IT financials enterprise-wide Reduction in risk Compliance
Manage IT as part of the business	Align investment with business priorities, analyze financial opportunities for savings, and evaluate Provide a snapshot of current system configurations for compliance and capacity planning	Savings all around from financial to other resources Greater flexibility during business changes
Legacy systems integration	Impact assessment, cost versus benefit, and data capture	Cost savings that are unimaginable
Security and risk management	Identify suspicious configurations, enforce standards, and highlight vulnerabilities on unsupported software and noncompliant software instances	IT Security Cyber Security Network Security Behavior-based Security Social Engineering