Manage Asset Life Cycles with IT Asset Management Tools

Work from home and its smooth enablement has been a hot topic of discussion ever since Coronavirus forced people to work from home amidst global lockdowns. This also gave rise to scattered hardware and software deployments overnight, which left no time to define clear policies for asset management.

Challenges in asset management

Hasty adjustments to the new work order have resulted in IT teams being left with incomplete or patchy information about IT assets. This lack of information about the assets they must protect, hampers their efforts to track and secure them.

Apart from overnight adjustments, manual and legacy IT asset management practices are making asset management increasingly difficult. Employee lay-offs are further exacerbating the problem. In addition, most IT teams still depend on Active Directories to keep track of their organization's inventories. In this report, Ivanti reveals that 43% of the organizations still use spreadsheets to track their IT assets. The report further observes that nearly 56% of the respondents do not track the complete asset lifecycle, which not only opens them up to risks but also leads to additional purchase costs.

Updating spreadsheets is not only time-consuming but also requires a lot of man-hours that can otherwise be spent more constructively. Further, manual updations increase the risk of errors creeping in. This can open up serious security loopholes and expose the organization to many cyber threats. Therefore, it is of prime importance that the IT teams know what assets—hardware, software, mobile devices, and the cloud—they have so they can manage them efficiently.

Use IT asset management tools to streamline efforts

Once this baseline is ready, an IT Asset Management toolkit can help IT teams reduce the manhours and effort spent in maintaining inventories and securing them. ITAM not only provides information about the kind of assets but also about their location and the way they are being used. Since IT asset management tools provide greater visibility into the assets, IT teams are better positioned to manage them. For example, if an asset doesn't report into the network, ITAM notifies the IT team and enables it to take appropriate remedial action.

Depending on the devices and connections added to the business network, some of the tools that organizations may consider for their ITAM strategy include tools for vulnerability assessment, identity access management, network data mapping, cloud access security brokers (CASB), and IT asset management reporting. That said, ITAM is not a one-time activity. It will require continuous monitoring of the IT asset management tools to ensure the inventory is up-to-date to facilitate efficient protection.