If you’re here, you’re likely considering implementing IT asset management (ITAM) or the IT team is asking for it and you want to understand the benefits. Implementing ITAM is one of those projects that can be time-consuming (depending on how you manage assets today), but it pays off quickly.
So, here we will explore all the benefits a business can get from implementing a solid IT asset management system and process and why the outcomes more than justify the initial time and money investment.
Do we really need IT asset management?
ITAM is the process of managing your valuable IT assets. It’s there to ensure that every asset over a certain value, or that could be a security risk, is tracked, maintained, and disposed of safely when it reaches its end of life. This includes hardware, software, cloud resources, and other important items.
Your IT team will already be doing asset management in some form or another today. It could be in a spreadsheet or a Notion page, which is fine for small companies. But once you reach around 300 assets, it quickly becomes a beast of outdated data that’s difficult to analyse. Take a moment to ask your frontline IT staff how long they are wasting trying to work with bad asset data. From our experience, it will be much longer than anyone wants.
Without an IT asset management system in place it’s hard to understand what assets you are short of, what types of assets are costing the business money due to poor quality, or which assets are long past their end-of-life date and could cause a critical failure any day now.
ITAM isn’t a nice-to-have process that makes things slightly more efficient. It’s a critical foundation that can save a business thousands and supports other critical processes such as onboarding new staff. Like many IT processes, a good ITAM practice is invisible to most until something goes wrong, such as failing an audit.
Let’s look into what great ITAM can bring to a business.
Benefits of investing in ITAM
1. Cut spending
So many businesses spend too much money (and time) due to poor asset planning.
And that’s just software. It’s not even taking into account hardware or cloud assets!
Extra costs come from two primary sources: not knowing what you have, so you purchase again. Or last-minute planning, where businesses pay far more than they should for hardware because it’s needed urgently.
With ITAM, you get a simple log of everything you have, reducing double spending. It also allows you to see the history of every asset (unlike a spreadsheet) making them much harder to lose. And ITAM systems can alert you when laptop stock is running low, for example, and help you plan ahead.
Planning saves money that can be redirected to innovative projects, improving overall company efficiency.
2. Slash downtime
Downtime of business systems and IT hardware is inevitable at some point. According to the Ponemon Institute, the average cost of IT downtime is $9,000 per minute for larger organisations. For smaller businesses, it can be as high as $427 per minute according to Carbonite.
While the exact cost for each business and how much that cost will impact the business will vary, all businesses can reduce the risk with ITAM. IT teams can better track maintenance schedules, identify assets that are failing in advance, and plan replacements before things go wrong.
3. Improve business security
Security is a complex and sometimes tedious task, yet absolutely crucial for any business, as the ramifications can be very costly. Both to your reputation and your bottom line. And assets play a crucial role. If you don’t know your organisation's assets, how can they be kept secure?
According to cybersecurity firm Kaspersky, 1 in 10 security issues come from shadow IT. IT teams need to know what they have and where. They need to know when a device or software has a vulnerability to address, when the next security patch needs to be deployed, and so much more. And for that, ITAM is critical. While tracking 100% of software may be unrealistic in the age of SaaS, getting as close as possible significantly lowers the security risk for your organisation.
4. Pass your audits without a headache
Audits can be daunting Instead of the IT team spending ages piecing together asset data for an audit, with ITAM in place, they can pull reports in minutes of assets and their history to show to auditors.
All good ITAM systems have help with auditing and compliance built in to make things much smoother, increase your chances of passing, and reducing the risk of fines. IT saves time better spent elsewhere and your business passes your audit. Win win.
5. A more efficient IT team
Hunting down assets is a pain if there’s no ITAM system in place. Usually, such an organisation has a combination of spreadsheets, documents, emails, and Slack or Teams threads that contain essential asset information, such as where assets are currently located and changes made to them. Frontline IT staff can spend hours trying to track this information down when it’s needed, which is not a good use of time.
And they need to find this information often. Perhaps there’s an issue with company-wide software, and IT needs to explore whether the assets running the software are the issue. Or an employee has a problem with their device. But without easy access to asset information, IT has to first waste time finding an asset’s history before they can focus on what they need to do, which is fix the issue.
While implementing an ITAM process will take up a chunk of their time initially, it pays it back quickly. It allows your staff to focus on actually important tasks like improving critical business services and fixing user problems, rather than playing hide-and-seek with company assets.
6. Enhance the employee experience
From the moment employees join the business, they interact with IT. They need the right devices, software, and access from day one to ensure a smooth onboarding. And when they have technical issues, they want quick help from IT so they can get back to work.
A smooth experience is only possible with good ITAM. Without it, there are often delays in getting hardware or access to new employees, or issues take ages to fix, as explained in point 5.
Did you know a survey from Capterra for HR professionals shows that 71% of employees didn’t return all of their devices! ITAM can help with that too and save a lot of money.
Building out asset management for the IT team is important for any business looking to provide a top-notch employee experience.
Final thoughts: Don’t put off IT asset management
IT asset management does take time, energy, and budget to implement. But not as much as all the digging through scattered asset records that IT need to do to keep the business running. And the longer you leave it, the harder it is to implement a robust ITAM system when it becomes completely unavoidable.
Think of it like this: every minute and every bit of budget spent setting up ITAM now is time and budget you are banking for the future by offloading the IT team and eliminating future issues and risks.
Our recommendation is to confront IT asset management head-on. Establish an ITAM system and process that helps your IT team to reduce costs and gives them more time to implement other critical projects.
Want to learn how? Book a meeting with us and we'll explore your situation and offer advice on how to implement IT asset management.
