IT Asset Management (ITAM) is the process of ensuring an organization’s IT assets are properly accounted for: deployed, secured, maintained, upgraded, decommissioned, and recycled or disposed of when they reach the end of their lifecycle. Examples of IT assets can include physical technologies like laptops, mobile phones, and wireline network circuits but also virtual resources like wireless network and telecom services and cloud software subscriptions.
The effective management of IT assets is a critical part of IT financial management (ITFM) and a primary activity supporting IT business management (ITBM) — mapping the business benefits that investments in technology can deliver. When done right, ITAM magnifies the value of all IT assets – rationalizing the tech portfolio to minimize waste and redistribute funds in ways that drive growth and innovation.
ITAM is not a one-and-done project but rather a continuous cycle of monitoring, tracking, and analyzing IT assets across their lifecycle to refine usage, align resources to business needs, and ensure continuous ROI as requirements change over time. The process can include auditing and inventory management, orders and provisioning, tech support and help desk, invoice and contract management, cost optimization, and end-of-life support, all which Tangoe can assist with across cloud, mobile, and telecom assets.
Business growth is the goal, but as a company grows so does its number of IT assets. More users mean more computers, more mobile devices, more cloud resources, and bigger networks – all which must be strictly governed from a cost and usage perspective. IT Asset Management ensures all resources contribute to strategic business goals, performance, and innovation.
If your business is growing, or if you aim for continued growth, IT Asset Management is essential for gaining deep visibility into asset usage and spend – improving utilization, eliminating waste, increasing IT productivity, and ensuring alignment and accountability of key stakeholders across the technology expense management ecosystem.
Do-it-Yourself (DIY) approaches to IT Asset Management may have worked during a time when IT departments maintained a short list of resources that were all built, managed, and stored in-house. Today, however, they falter under the weight of an exponentially greater and more complex portfolio of cloud and hosted services that present management challenges:
IT Inventory Management
The first step to successful IT Asset Management involves creating a detailed inventory of all mobile, cloud, and telecom resources across the organization. This includes where assets are located, who owns and uses them, contractual terms, and their cost. This information is often distributed across countless vendors and department leaders, blurring the cohesive view IT and finance teams need to understand their catalog and usage, illuminating spending trends and streamlining financial management. Related service information like operating models, security updates, accessories, and affiliated utility costs throw even more variables into the mix, creating additional blind spots for teams attempting ITAM manually. Visibility problems are paramount.
Financial Governance and Planning
Beyond business continuity and technology performance, the main purpose of IT Asset Management is to gain actionable insights into your inventory. These can help you remove assets that are no longer needed and make the best use of infrastructure, applications, and resources. Vendors are obligated to deliver usage data and invoice information via built-in dashboards, but they’re not responsible for helping IT and finance teams with analytical tools that connect the dots, showing the reasons behind any overage charges or ways to reduce their costs.
Consider the cloud: the FinOps Foundation reports that only 21% of companies use a FinOps-specific solution (like Tangoe’s) to power their cloud services management, whereas nearly 60% use native, vendor-provided tools. It’s no coincidence that companies overspend in the cloud by as much as 70%and waste up to 30% of their cloud resources. A dedicated solution like Tangoe’s helps achieve the biggest savings for the least amount of work.
The biggest benefits include technology uptime and performance supporting business continuity as well as cost optimization and financial forecasting. Here are three examples of clients benefiting from IT Asset Management through Tangoe:
An IT asset includes hardware, software, and services. Here’s a quick breakdown with examples:
Hardware Assets
Hardware assets consist of the tangible components that form an organization’s IT infrastructure, such as:
IT Asset Managers are expected to effectively monitor all hardware assets, track them throughout their lifecycle (this is especially crucial for Mobile Device Management and Managed Mobility Services), and control contracts to avoid unnecessary costs.
Software Assets
Software assetsare not tangible and only exist if they’re installed on a device. The most common ones include:
IT Asset Managers need to track every software asset installed in their IT environment and register its location,compliance, status, and usage to properly allocate resources, prevent waste, and establish a framework for minimizing the cost and security impacts of Shadow IT.
Cloud Services
Cloud services fall under four primary categories: Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), Unified Communication-as-a-Service (UCaaS), and private cloud services.
IT Asset Managers are expected to effectively manage this cornucopia of services to avoid common cost pitfalls and ensure all services are used to their full potential – amplifying the results of a FinOps program or cloud cost optimization initiative.
As the leading technology expense and asset management solution, Tangoe One seamlessly integrates with hundreds of technologies and service providers globally to help companies effectively manage their cloud, mobile, and telecom assets across every phase of their lifecycle but also drive efficiency in IT financial management too. While many companies offer capabilities in one of these categories, Tangoe bridges these needs delivering a comprehensive solution. Using AI analytics and automation, Tangoe’s software and fully managed services help offload the work of day-to-day asset administration as well as financial tracking, monitoring, and optimization.
Some key benefits for asset management include:
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