As organizations grow, so does the number of IT assets and organization silos and inability to keep track of all IT assets, their end of life, end of support or license status. In many enterprises, asset service information is maintained by IT personnel in spreadsheets. But the fact that IT asset information is also maintained in many different places and in many different forms, in spreadsheets, databases, ERP or CRM or other systems makes it difficult to gather lifecycle information. All these challenges can easily increase annual compliance risks for any organization.
If we take software license compliance as example, the penalties imposed by software vendors for being out of license compliance can be very high. The bad publicity that gets generated by these actions results in damage to the reputation of the organization. Any failure in an asset that is past its end of life or end of support could result in downtime to business operations and expensive remediation by supplier or manufacturer.
How often companies / organizations audit their assets?
An organization must audit IT assets on periodic basis to make sure hardware and software assets are in compliance with regulations and local governing laws. It is difficult process to gather all assets information and audit their status on a periodic basis, if the assets are distributed across many data centers and need different ways to gather the data. It takes lots of resources.
How this can be addressed?
Companies need to have ITAM and ITSM solutions that meet the the following criteria.
- Catalogue of current assets –
- The ITAM tool should be able to discover and document all your assets (hardware, software or cloud-based services/products).
- The ITAM tool should be able to gather all asset information and should be able to collect information from various data sources – file systems, databases, ERP, CRM systems, other asset management software, etc.
- Ingest relevant asset information –
- The ITAM / ITSM system should be able to read and maintain relevant asset information such as make, model, software versions, etc.
- The system should be able to retrieve relevant asset information such as end of life data published by device vendor / supplier.
- Provide relevant asset information at the right time –
- The ITAM/ITSM systems should provide meaningful insights and actionable intelligence when devices are going out of life or out of support so that the IT/business teams can proactively take necessary actions.
cfxDimensions provides automated discovery of assets, asset inventory and visual representation of asset life cycle information like End of Life, End of Support for hardware, software including geographical map of the asset location.
Visit https://www.cloudfabrix.com/solutions/asset-intelligence-and-analytics/ for more information.
