IT asset management (ITAM) is the discipline of managing, monitoring, securing and orchestrating all technology assets owned or controlled by an organization. ITAM is critical for controlling costs, streamlining IT processes and procedures, fulfilling compliance and audit requirements and maintaining a strong security posture.
According to Gartner, “IT asset management (ITAM) provides an accurate account of technology asset lifecycle costs and risks to maximize the business value of technology strategy, architecture, funding, contractual and sourcing decisions.” ITAM is the responsibility of the IT team and the CEO but works closely with the finance and procurement, compliance, technology and security teams to deliver better business agility and performance. Increasingly, as IT and technology have become a core function critical to business strategy and execution and a growing cost center, well-executed ITAM has become a strategic imperative for enterprises.
To this end, ITAM incorporates many traditional IT functions including service and help desk, device and software maintenance, license and warranty monitoring, equipment refresh and more. ITAM plays a key role in service delivery, compliance and audit for important certifications (SOC2, ISO 2700, HIPAA), maintaining a strong security posture and rapid incident response, and delivering a seamless employee onboarding experience.
The scope of ITAM has grown with the scope of technology.ITAM originally focused on hardware and installed software but increasingly it covers the management of SaaS and cloud infrastructure assets. Over time, various sub-functions of ITAM have been stovepiped into their own categories including Software Asset Management (SAM), Mobile Device Management (MDM), Configuration Management Database (CMDB), Cloud Service Brokerage (CAM) and Universal Endpoint Management (UEM). You can also consider asset tracking, asset monitoring, asset inventory management, and asset compliance and security all as features and components of ITAM – each of which is often treated as a stand-alone product (and there are, in fact, stand-alone offerings on the market).
This comprehensive guide to ITAM will cover everything you need to know to compare, shop for, deploy and build a strategy around ITAM. The article will discuss:
ITAM is critical to keeping your asset management process efficient and streamlined. Managing IT assets out of a bunch of spreadsheets scales poorly and breeds inefficiencies. Modern ITAM systems can automate the discovery and management process to improve efficiency.
To manage technology risk, you need to be able to instantly know who controls an asset, where the asset is located, and what is the security compliance status of an asset. Modern ITAM delivers on this promise and enables rapid lookups and automated tracking of all of these factors. This also powers faster security response and enables quick identification and investigation of anomalies such as executives not logging into their devices for a 48 hour period or cloud infrastructure assets showing up in different availability zones than previously.
Today’s knowledge workers expect to receive all the hardware, software SaaS and cloud infrastructure they need to do their jobs from Day 1. Well-executed ITAM can deliver a premium onboarding experience by ensuring that hiring plans and dates map precisely to procurement and inventory so that each new hire gets exactly what they need when they need it. Smart ITAM can also automate workflows around this process so the creation of a new employee record in an HRIS system automatically kicks off a checklist of onboarding steps for provisioning and privileges that previously were manual.
Performing IT audits and compliance checks is a complicated and time-consuming process that involves multiple steps and coordination across different teams. ITAM automates major portions of audits by automatically generating reports on asset location, status and owner, and by verifying the presence of compliance-critical measures such as encrypted hard drives or malware and antivirus protection on all endpoints in an ITAM database.
ITAM plays a key role in keeping a tight rein on IT spending and making sure that this growing area of spend is properly accounted for and optimized. ITAM provides visibility into how each area of IT is used, demand for different types of assets in software, hardware, SaaS and cloud infrastructure, and how well each spend area is utilized. This, in turn, helps CIOs, CFOs and COOs properly plan for the future and provide detailed analysis on IT consumption as part of the core metrics of how to improve productivity and workflows for the entire company.
Do you wish to empower your IT team to work more efficiently and reduce rote and repetitive tasks? Help your security team respond faster to incidents and increase the number of assets in compliance? Enable your HR and IT teams to onboard employees faster. Different ITAM products have different features and strengths for each of these questions.
This audit will shape your product selection based on different needs. Decide whether your enterprise needs to manage hardware, software, cloud, SaaS or peripherals - or all of the above. Different ITAMs handle different types with greater or lesser agility.
Understanding the workflows followed and identifying dependencies will allow you to whiteboard processes that best meet the needs of ITAM stakeholders. Visual models tend to best and can be mapped to workflow automations.
To be efficient, ITAMs must be tightly integrated with other systems such as IT ticketing (Jira, Zendesk, ServiceNow), security and response (Palo Alto Networks), endpoint management (Tanium), SSOs, and employee directory services (Okta, ActiveDirectory, G Suite), and ERP tools (Oracle, NetSuite). Knowing the integration points and requirements can help you plan implementation and select the best ITAM based on integration capabilities.
Deploy to get real feedback on whether the plan. The test is crucial for understanding what works and what doesn’t.
The playbooks become the backbone of your ITAM practice. Refresh them every six months to ensure that they reflect the true state of ITAM and related systems.
populate asset information automatically into the ITAM based on transactional data collected from the vendor or ERP system.
find all software, hardware, SaaS and cloud infrastructure installed on enterprise assets and classify that software by publisher, type and license. It is best not to have to install an agent on all assets and instead to pull in the data via existing agents and systems.
show warranty status of hardware and available licenses of software compared to allocated licenses or licenses in the recycling process
monitor, analyze and analyze total IT spend (including authorized and unauthorized)
monitor usage trends and surface consumption data with regular reports of dashboards interactive dashboards or regular reports. These reports can be used to project procurement needs and to create IT spend forecasts.
quickly find and ascertain the status, owner and location of any asset under management or in use on the network. This is critical for security response.
maintain accurate asset data by automatically comparing data across multiple ITAM sub-systems and deduping or highlighting assets lacking data
a well-structured API to allow for your ITAM to import data or deliver data to external systems or partners and vendors.
Hopefully, this primer provides a useful oversight of ITAM solutions including the benefits, processes, and desired capabilities. As the digital transformation shifts more and more business processes into technology, every enterprise will require an ITAM software solution. Mastery of ITAM will become a core competency and a distinction that separates the most efficient and agile enterprises from the rest of the pack.