IT asset management is the practice of managing and tracking the hardware, software, and other IT assets within an organization. It involves the entire lifecycle of an asset, from procurement to disposal, and includes activities such as inventory management, license management, and asset utilization.

Effective IT asset management can help organizations reduce costs, optimize the use of their assets, and ensure compliance with various regulations and policies. It can also improve security, as IT asset management helps to identify and track potential vulnerabilities in an organization’s IT infrastructure.

There are several key components to effective IT asset management:

1. Inventory management: Maintaining an accurate inventory of all IT assets is essential for effective asset management. This includes tracking the location, ownership, and status of each asset.
2. License management: Properly managing software licenses is important to ensure compliance with vendor agreements and avoid costly fines for using unlicensed software.
3. Asset utilization: IT asset management can help organizations optimize the use of their assets by identifying underutilized assets and reassigning them to other areas of the business where they are needed.
4. Disposal: When an IT asset is no longer needed, it is important to dispose of it in an environmentally responsible way properly. IT asset management can help organizations to securely erase data and properly dispose of assets to prevent data breaches and protect sensitive information.

Effective IT asset management requires a systematic approach and specialized tools and software. These tools can help organizations automate many tasks associated with IT asset management, such as tracking asset information, generating reports, and managing licenses.

Implementing an effective IT asset management strategy can provide numerous benefits to organizations, including reduced costs, improved security, and enhanced compliance. By taking a proactive approach to managing and tracking their IT assets, organizations can ensure that their IT infrastructure is running smoothly and efficiently. Regenerate response

By every measure, Apple’s App Store is a huge success. Apple maintains complete control over the App Store, everything from the applications available to billing and delivery through its self-service portal. It is simple, direct, and ruthlessly efficient. 

Apple’s App Store has over 2 million applications available, and the App Store has racked up billions of dollars in sales since its inception in 2008. Children of all ages and even elderly adults have accessed the store to install applications on their devices without making a single call to a help desk.

Now, contrast the excellent user experience that Apple provides to the less than excellent experience of installing applications within your business. Most likely, the process is cumbersome, slow, and labor-intensive. Application installation requests usually will require an end-user to make numerous calls or to submit tickets to a help desk. Since installing an app on an iPhone is so quick and painless, does tying-up support with the mundane task of deploying applications even make sense? Imagine how streamlined life could be if you applied that same efficiency to the task of application deployments within your business.  

Of course, there is a stark difference between mobile applications and PC/Mac application deployment. Unlike mobile software, computer application licenses are quite a bit different. Most notably are the issues of OS compatibility and varied system resources. Software license costs are also far more expensive. Moreover, desktop license and usage rights further increase complexity with the need to track:

• Available license inventory
• Reclaim license when an application goes unused for months at a time, or when an employee leaves.
• Role-based access control (users have access to only the applications they need)
• Approval workflow for one-off license requests
• Upgrade your entire enterprise to a new version or application – and be able to see the progress of the install/uninstall.
• Bundle items needed for new hires based upon their role
• Remove applications that you don’t want in your environment (Blacklist)

However, If you could address all of those challenges, then installing new applications would be immediate and frictionless. You would also achieve the welcome benefit of eliminating calls/tickets to the help desk. 

In this scenario, specialized application licenses are properly controlled, license inventories are accurate, unused licenses reclaimed, and role-based access controls are enforced. Business users would gain immediate access to needed applications without enlisting the help of a technical middle-man. Best of all, spiraling application costs would be constrained.

Since the benefits to this approach are obvious, ask yourself, why doesn’t something like this already exist? 

Well, you’ll be glad to know it does, the product is aptly named Universal Enterprise App Store, and it’s available from Flexera. Check it out; https://www.flexera.com/blog/application-readiness/2015/07/universal-enterprise-app-store-the-real-world-benifits/ 

You’ll be glad you did.

If you don’t have your (bleep) together, a vendor license audit is painful. IT audits cause disruption to operations, are often complex and pose the risk of significant unplanned and unbudgeted spend.

Picture this all too familiar scenario; you receive notice that you are the target of an audit by one of your vendors. They provide you with some scripts to run. Then you run those scripts which spider your network collecting data. You then send the results back to the vendor, and you wait. A few days later, you open your inbox to find an e-mail summarizing the results of their findings. The news is not good; to your shock and surprise, you are shown to be out of compliance to the tune of millions of dollars.

Suddenly, you feel like you’re sitting in a casino, playing against the house with the odds heavily stacked against you. After uttering a few choice words, many thoughts start racing through your head; How can this be true? Where will you get the money? How will you message this to Finance? Will this unplanned spend put important projects at risk? Should you accept the vendor’s claim and settle?  

My first piece of advice: don’t panic. Formulate a solid game plan and make some quick difficult decisions. The first decision is to either accept or challenge the vendor’s findings

The difference between the vendor’s findings and your findings will likely be significant. In the extreme, this difference could mean that you might not be out of compliance at all.

 The difference between the vendor’s findings and your findings will likely be significant. In the extreme, this difference could mean that you might not be out of compliance at all. Here are several reasons why:

You’ll most likely receive a call from the vendor’s sales rep, offering you a sweetheart deal to make the “problem quickly go away.” I strongly advise against it. ALWAY’S verify a vendor’s findings. Here is why, even though your vendor has the results from collected data, they are missing the complete picture. You need to fill in the incomplete data before deciding on an appropriate course of action. 

1. Vendors seek to maximize, not minimize your compliance obligations.
2. Most vendor’s records of your purchases over the years are likely just as disorganized as your records are.
3. Vendor’s terms and conditions may have been different during the time of sale than they are today, but the original terms still apply today.
4. How and where you deployed software matters for compliance and often does not factor into audit findings

To challenge the vendor’s findings, you’ll need to collect and correlate information across multiple dimensions; including the following:

1. The software you have licensed
2. The software you have installed
3. The hardware specifications of the machines where the software installed.
4. The current software usage.
5. The percentage of the software is in use.
6. How the software is being used: 
   • Development
   • Production
   • Disaster Recovery
   • Hot Standby
   • Cold Standby

Once you collect, correlate, and normalize this information, you can move towards adhering to a more optimized license position. It’s complicated, confusing, and time-consuming work to arrive at a precise count, let alone an optimized position, but thankfully, there is a better way. Software exists that will do this hard work for you, and help you maintain a continuous optimized state not only for this one vendor but for all of your vendors. 

Instead of placing your casino bets with the odds stacked against you and hoping for a favorable outcome, you can use a more scientific approach by applying a rigorous and intelligent technology to the practice of managing your IT business.    

Flexera is THE leader in helping businesses optimize IT spend for Software, Cloud, SaaS. Collectively, we have helped our customers save over a billion dollars in vendor licensing costs. If you would like some help tackling an audit, or optimizing your IT license position, we’re here to help.

Full disclosure, I never enjoyed trying to solve a Rubik’s cube, and to me, it always seemed like a ridiculous waste of time. Although, if someone told me that solving the puzzle would net me millions of dollars, I would work at mastering it. It’s pretty safe to assume that no one is going to pay me millions to solve the Rubik’s cube. However, if you are the CIO or CFO of a business that spends millions a year on IT, you’ll be happy to know that there is an equivalent puzzle that, once solved, can net you millions.

So, what’s the puzzle? Much like the Rubik’s cube, it’s making sense of information across six different dimensions. However, instead of colors, the dimensions are:

1. What you have purchased
2. What you have installed
3. Information about servers
4. Information/Data regarding Usage
5. Software as a Service Spend
6. Cloud use

Sounds simple? Well, just like the Rubik’s cube, it seems simple until you try to solve it. Unlike the Rubik’s cube that can be mastered in time, the complexity of IT licensing is considerably more complicated. Each of the six dimensions spawns new dimensions. To illustrate, let’s walk through one example: You buy from many vendors such as Oracle, IBM, Microsoft, Amazon, etc. Each vendor has many products, each product has different terms of use, and each contract may contain one-off exceptions to standard conditions. Also, the programs your business has installed vs. the programs in use can differ significantly, and thanks to Moore’s Law, hardware capacity is also continuously evolving.

Businesses license SaaS applications, but sometimes employees purchase a license and expense it. Also, moving on-premise applications to the cloud introduces new complex factors; virtual utilization, API access, network throughput, and data backups introduce new pricing challenges. Given all the permutations and changes, it’s no wonder why IT often throws their hands up in despair.

How are businesses managing this today? The answer is not particularly well. That’s where the payoff of solving this puzzle comes in. Gartner estimates that 25 – 35% of IT spend is wasted. Translation, for most businesses, solving this puzzle can save millions. The real challenge arises because solving this puzzle is not just a one-and-done proposition. To maintain efficiency, you’ll need to continuously monitor and update this puzzle. As employees come and go, you refresh hardware, you make new purchases, or you introduce new services.

Imagine you’re working on solving the Rubik’s cube, and someone comes along, rips the cube from your hand, and rejumbles the puzzle. Besides wanting to throw the cube at them, are you prepared to handle that?

The fastest recorded time of an individual manually solving a Rubik’s cube, on their best day, is 5.25 seconds. In contrast, a computerized robot has been tuned to consistently achieve the same results in just under .38 seconds (if you blink you’ll miss it). Grab the cube, jumble it up, and bam, in less than a second, the computer/robot solves again, each time, every interval, always right, and always efficient. This same relentless efficiency can be applied to solve the business challenges of complex IT environments. Only, instead of seeing the panels of coordinated colors on a Rubik’s cube, you enjoy reduced risk, eliminated budgetary waste, and optimized IT spend. Now, aren’t those benefits worth solving the puzzle?