In today’s fast-paced digital world, IT assets are the foundation of every business. But how many organisations really know the state of their hardware at any given moment? Are outdated devices slowing down your operations? Are security vulnerabilities hiding in forgotten corners of your office?
Without properly tracking your IT assets’ lifecycles, organisations risk unnecessary spending, security breachers, and operational bottlenecks which can limit business growth. By understanding the full journey of IT assets (and other critical assets for that matter) organisations can make smarter decisions, optimise budgets, and future-proof their technology infrastructure.
In this blog, we’ll explore the four biggest benefits of tracking IT asset lifecycles and why every IT team should have a solid asset management process in place.
What is IT asset lifecycle tracking?
How is asset lifecycle tracking different to IT asset management?
Why you need to track IT asset lifecycles for business growth
- Reduce unnecessary spend
- Improve security and compliance
- Increase operational efficiency
- Future-proof your IT
Getting started with IT asset lifecycle tracking
- Decide your IT asset lifecycle stages
- Choose your IT asset lifecycle (and IT asset management) system
- Plan how to keep asset lifecycle information updated
What is IT asset lifecycle tracking?
IT asset lifecycle tracking, or IT asset lifecycle management, is a practice within IT asset management that monitors the lifecycle stages of (usually) physical assets from planning to retirement. It is critical for businesses that want to grow fast to get a grip on what they have.
Many IT assets underpin the everyday working of a business, and without IT teams understanding what they have and how old everything is, organisations risk budget overspend, security breaches, and compliance issues.
How is asset lifecycle tracking different to IT asset management?
Asset management is a broader term that encompasses lifecycle management. Asset management also looks at other aspects of your assets such as the owner, location, dependencies, costs and more, as well as the asset’s lifecycle. Asset management also often applies beyond physical assets to software and other intangible assets. Resources, customers, contracts, and more can be treated like assets. Asset lifecycles as a topic tend to apply more to physical assets, however other assets can also have their own lifecycles too.
Why you need to track IT asset lifecycles for business growth
1. Reduce unnecessary spend
I’m sure the majority of readers here are facing tight IT budgets. Every little bit counts so optimising IT budgets for daily tasks is vital to free up much needed budget for more impactful projects.
Without tracking the lifecycle stages of your physical IT assets, budget optimisation will be difficult. Let’s take the simple example of laptops–you want to ensure some level of spare laptops so that if a colleague suddenly needs a replacement they can be sorted immediately. But equally, you don’t want to be floating lots of spare laptops that eventually have to be retired without ever being used.
Without some kind of asset lifecycle tracking system in place, how would anyone know? How can you predict what will be needed in future? Or how often assets need to be completely replaced due to failure?
Striking a balance between underutilisation and not having enough availability can be difficult, but without data, it is highly unlikely to be achieved. Tracking your assets from the moment you plan to buy them until they are disposed of will help you build up data that then helps you quickly plan and prepare for future spend and check you are not floating too much stock.
2. Improve security and compliance
Without a good overview of hardware assets, staying on top of security becomes a challenge. In the worst case it can lead to financial losses, data breaches, and even legal penalties. Especially when it comes to disposing of your assets.
This is where tracking your IT assets’ lifecycles can help. By having that overview of what you have and how old it is you can ensure timely retirement of potential security risks and avoid the cases where an asset that can no longer be supported with security patches because it is just too old, isn’t happily sitting in a corner running a critical service.
IT asset lifecycle tracking systems can help flag when assets need updating and give advanced notice to the IT team when something needs to be retired. This means that IT teams can make a conscious decision on whether to extend an asset’s lifecycle and accept any increased security risks.
A good lifecycle tracking process also ensures that every IT asset is disposed of correctly, reducing the risk of a data breach and subsequent fine from improperly disposed assets.
When lifecycles are combined with other elements of IT asset and configuration management—for example, knowing what operating systems your assets are running—the power becomes even greater. If an OS has a security flaw, you can quickly pull all the deployed assets running that OS and quickly create a plan to patch them. Instead of spending ages trying to find a missing asset only to find it was retired the previous year due to a malfunction.
3. Increase operational efficiency
Assets have a finite lifespan, usually based on leases, manufacturer warranties, or until the hardware is so old no modern software can be supported. Being able to proactively plan ahead is key to ensuring reduced service disruption and hopefully less stress.
The IT teams we meet that are yet to implement robust asset lifecycle tracking usually rely on some form of list in a spreadsheet or other documentation tool. This list will include purchase dates and sometimes the warranty expiration dates. But without manually checking these lists periodically it’s hard to be proactive about assets. Instead, it’s best to implement a dedicated asset management system that can flag when assets need to be reviewed.
We often hear stories about critical assets that nobody knew needed to be assessed until the last minute. But without warning and IT planning to handle it, the organisation is forced to keep something past its retirement date because they don’t have time to deal with it right there and then and then naturally things get forgotten. While we can’t promise this will never happen again, getting advanced notice certainly helps avoid this situation.
4. Future-proof your IT
Having a good grasp of the assets you have and tracking their lifecycles helps you plan ahead and align your purchasing to support the business’ long term goals. As businesses grow and technology evolves IT teams must ensure their infrastructure remains scalable.
IT asset lifecycle management plays a vital role as it helps with planning, upgrading and spending on hardware. Without it IT teams are flying blind when trying to allocate budget for hardware to new initiatives. It’s no good allocating your budget to a new project and suddenly finding out later that two servers and a few high-end UPS need replacing.
Asset lifecycle management helps with digital transformation in other ways too. For example, for companies migrating to the cloud they firstly need to know which on-prem assets still need migrating. And also in which order to carry out the migration projects which will be partially influenced by the age of the assets in question.
Getting started with IT asset lifecycle tracking
Now you know the benefits of tracking IT asset lifecycles, the next question is how to implement a robust solution for your organisation.
1. Decide your IT asset lifecycle stages
First of all, you need to decide what lifecycle states make the most sense for your organisation. And what triggers transitions between those stages which should be standardised where possible. In our experience different teams use different terminology to mean broadly similar things so it’s important to decide a set of guidelines for your business.
You can read our recommendations for asset lifecycle states here.
2. Choose your IT asset lifecycle (and IT asset management) system
Next you need to decide what system to track your asset lifecycles in. For smaller companies just getting started with formalising their IT practices, we know the temptation for using spreadsheets is high, but it should only be an interim solution. They quickly become messy and tracking the history of an asset is next to impossible.
For those that already have an asset database in place, you can likely skip this step. The vast majority of commercial IT asset management solutions support asset lifecycle tracking so you should be fine to use what you have.
If you are looking to change, we recommend picking a solution that can not only track asset lifecycles but also help you with other aspects of asset management like mapping dependencies, tracking ownerships, booking equipment, and creating dashboards such as Starhive.
You will also want to consider your IT service management practices here. If you already have something in place, being able to integrate your asset database with your ticketing system can be very helpful for closing tickets faster. If you haven’t started implementing ITSM at your organisation, picking a solution that can expand into ITSM can be a good idea so you don’t need to reassess your tooling if you want to add, say, incident management or service requests that can link to affected assets.
3. Plan how to keep asset lifecycle information updated
The last major element to plan is how to keep data updated. You can use automation rules to update lifecycle statuses (for example, setting the status based on certain dates). But you will also need some kind of process to ensure:
- That when assets are being planned, they are entered into the system
- What actions trigger transitions between lifecycle stages
- When an asset is retired that they are moved to the final stage
Summary
Tracking your IT asset lifecycles is important for any business that wants to grow in a scalable way, reduce unnecessary spending, stay ahead on technology, and work more efficiently. While it can be time consuming to implement, the earlier you can do it the easier it will be and the more budget you can save long term.
If you wish to discuss your asset setup and get advice on how to manage them better, contact the Starhive team for a discovery call.
