Identify Technology Asset Types to Improve Productivity
Published on May 7, 2019,
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Before we talk about managing the assets, let us first define them. Assets come in many different forms. These might include facilities including the infrastructure, furnishings, and of course the people inside. Also, vehicles, communication towers, medical, or telemetry devices are assets that need to be managed. For this blog, we are focused on those technology-based assets, things that connect to the network and the software that runs them and your organization. These assets are typically those critical to keeping your business running and growing.
Identify All Types of Technology Asset to Improve Productivity
Managing your distributed assets, aka anything outside the data center is very important, and increasingly becoming more strategic. Today we can now manage them using Technology Asset Management. Previously we leveraged ITAM (Information Technology Asset Management) to manage software (SAM) and then the compute hardware running the software. However, there are so many more types of technology assets today, i.e. IoT, interconnected infrastructure, and smart devices, ITAM needed to evolve. TAM provides the ability to scan all of these technology devices, identify what they are, how their configuration’s impact on your business, and potential risk associated with them. It is critical for the productivity of your organization to make sure all assets are identified, deployed correctly, and accounted for through their lifecycle. At the same time, you want to validate things are not installed that create a potential risk or breach.
How Can You Better Manage These Assets?
First, you need to know what you have; call it a technology asset baseline. To do this, leverage a next-gen discovery solution that is lightweight and easy to use can identify multiple assets attributes to walk your network and find everything that is connected. This technology asset baseline gives you a detailed inventory of everything found, a single source of truth database of everything you need to know.
This new Single Source of Truth database is now capable of helping you and others in the organization to address critical business initiatives and strategic priorities. These may include; balancing license entitlements to installed instances, supplying finance with asset lifecycle details, documenting network location details, delivering accurate inventory audit detail, etc. Paramount to TAM asset management success is sharing this across the organization by connecting it to Finance, IT, HR, and BMS systems, thus eliminating inconsistent and incomplete data ensuring efficient and accurate operations.
The Next Phase of Technology Asset Management
The next phase of TAM is to reassess your current Asset Management program that takes advantage of the rich data. Look for new ways to interconnect the organization automating tasks while reducing redundant systems and activities. TAM will help you find new ways to save money, reduce risk, and increase vendor and regulatory compliance.
