IT hardware and software asset purchase costs comprise approximately 25% of the overall IT spend. Add to that ongoing maintenance and management and it’s no suprise that the total cost of ownership (TCO) for these assets is high on the agenda.
Gaining control of the total cost of IT estates requires organizations to have a comprehensive asset lifecycle management processes in place eliminating unnecessary waste and redundancy. By implementing a cost-effective best practice IT asset lifecycle management process organizations can reduce inefficient management and maintenance of IT assets while adhering to both internal and external compliance regulations.
Full IT asset Lifecycle Management
Understanding Your IT Assets
Effective IT Asset Lifecycle Management begins with knowing what you have. Complete and accurate asset and license management is a must. Knowing how many machines of what type, their location, and how they are being used is key. Without accurate information, decisions on additional asset upgrades or purchases, re-distribution of currently deployed assets or asset retirement will be made without seeing an accurate picture of the real situation.
Controlling and Managing IT Assets
The ability to efficiently deploy, update and manage IT assets in an organization is a critical part to ongoing IT asset lifecycle management. Once an asset is procured or reallocation of an existing asset is scheduled, organizations then need to provision, rebuild, or migrate the applicable OS, application load-set, and security patches, end user data and personality settings. Common, manual build processes can take several hours or even days and require a technician be dispatched to the asset.
An automated approach reduces costs by minimizing a technician’s involvement, reducing the number and complexity of inflexible images, and automating installation of the OS, applications, security patches, and end user data.
