November 20, 2008, 8:40 AM — Proper management of your IT assets can help you save money and reduce your overall IT costs. According to IAITAM, proactive IT asset management can reduce your IT costs by up to 25%. By knowing which computers and software are used across your company, and matching the inventory information against your financial and contractual records you can make better IT decisions and get more out of your IT budget. IT Asset Management provides the following benefits:
1. Gain control over your assets, know which assets exist on your network, their configuration and the changes to these assets. A good asset management system would help you easily analyze the information to make decisions.
2. Implement procedures that will save you money a good IT asset management system would help you create and enforce policies and procedures that will save you money. You can implement software usage policies, standard hardware configurations, asset request processes and other processes that would help you extract more value from your assets.
3. Make better IT decisions by organizing your IT assets inventory and aligning it with your financial records and contracts you can better IT decisions. For example, you can better prepare for a contract renewal by knowing what you actually use and need to renew, what terms you negotiated in the previous contract or which computers are part of a hardware lease that is expiring soon.
4. Reduce help-desk and support costs by providing your support personal with detailed asset configuration you help them provide quicker issue resolution, and reduce your IT support costs.
5. Detect risks to your IT assets - analyze your IT assets to detect any potential risks such as missing security patches or improper anti-virus / anti-spyware protection.
6. Ensure regulatory and software license compliance
