IT Asset Management Best Practices

Maximizing ROI through better control over your IT assets

Effective IT asset management (ITAM) is essential for any IT organization. Identifying, tracking and managing IT assets throughout their lifecycle improves ROI and ensures that the entire IT inventory runs smoothly with minimal downtime.

Benefits of an effective ITAM process

• Comprehensive view of the IT environment
• Supports other ITIL processes with accurate asset information
• Improves compliance, eases audit prep and reduces legal and security risks.
• Improves ROI through optimized asset usage and controlled IT asset purchases.

ITAM best practices

1. Build your asset inventory using multiple discovery sources

Discover and track every asset in your organization. There are a wide range of tools available for the discovery process, including Windows domain and network asset management scans. This is a critical first step in identifying on-site inventory, but may even help uncover costs beyond your walls. One of our clients even discovered that they were paying for data center rack space for machines that weren’t even turned on.

2. Track the complete life cycle of assets – including end-of-life disposition

A complete lifecycle analysis addresses all stages of an asset’s lifecycle in your organization. Working with an asset recovery organization can recoup costs and avoid additional expenses for asset disposition.

3. Manage licenses, warranties and maintenance contracts in one place

A single dashboard for all licenses, warranties and maintenance contracts is critical to efficient ITAM. A variety of tools are available, including our Velocity Asset Management Portal.

4. Conduct regular audits with defined policies.

Define the people and tools required for your audits and be sure they have a clear audit execution strategy. Audits can be time-consuming. Prioritizing vendors based on their importance in your inventory and likelihood of an external audit can make the process more efficient.

5. Treat ITAM as a process.

Your IT hardware inventory is constantly changing. Your ITAM process should keep pace with changes in your inventory.

6. ITAM should be proactive.

Have a comprehensive plan and execute routinely.

7. Don’t try to do it all at once.

Start with an asset inventory and then move on to licenses, warranties and maintenance contracts.

How Velocity Tech Solutions can help

One place for everything – Velocity Asset Management Portal

The goal of ITAM is to create a centralized location to oversee the organization’s entire inventory of IT assets, a difficult task that’s not fully feasible for most companies given the scope and size of most organization’s IT inventory. Our new Velocity Asset Management Portal provides a single pane of glass giving you visibility to all of your assets and their licenses, warranties and contracts.

Removal/refurbishment – reduce your TCO

At some point, most IT assets will become redundant, outdated or broken and your organization will need a strategy for how to dispose of these discarded assets. You’ll need to consider backups, relocating software, managing data, information security and mitigating any risks associated with disposal. Velocity Tech Solutions offers a secure, sustainable asset disposition service that can dramatically reduce disposition costs and security risks.

Ask us about financing – reduce your upfront investment

We partner with some of the leaders in IT finance. Ask us how we can reduce your upfront capital expenses through a flexible, affordable financing package on your new IT hardware purchases.

Gain control of your IT assets

ITAM’s ability to foster deeper insights into your organization’s IT assets can help IT executives visualize the ROI on IT assets and deliver data to other key stakeholders. A successful ITAM strategy will bridge the gap between technology requirements and business needs, ensuring everyone in the organization is working toward the same organizational goals.

Contact us to learn how we can help you develop a comprehensive ITAM process – and for a demo of our new Velocity Asset Management Portal.