What is IT Asset Inventory? An Essential How-To Guide

UPDATE: This post, originally published on November 18, 2020, has been updated to reflect the most current information available about asset inventory best practices that address today’s challenges.

An IT asset inventory is the process of cataloging all the hardware, software, and other assets that connect to a corporate network. While this sounds simple enough, the importance of maintaining an accurate inventory cannot be overstated.

Not only does having an up-to-date IT asset inventory list directly impact the balance sheet and help manage liabilities, but by regularly monitoring these devices, organizations can also detect potential vulnerabilities and active threats, safeguarding their inventory assets.

However, asset discovery and inventory is no easy task in today’s cloud solutions and remote work era. Sure, there are the usual devices IT departments know about, like printers and company-issued laptops. However, there’s also a growing hodgepodge of unmanaged and unknown devices, like personal devices that employees use that connect to the corporate network and bring an even more significant amount of potential vulnerabilities.

Add to this a revolving door of tools and technologies — some with approval and some without — and it’s easy to understand why many organizations lack a clear understanding of their IT assets and how this lack of clarity can lead to risks.

So, what’s the answer to ensuring the security of IT assets and the environments they interact with?

In this post, we’ll define what it means to build, maintain, and use an asset inventory list, discuss common types of assets this list should include, and explore the importance of effective IT asset management (ITAM) in maintaining an accurate inventory list and the impact having an accurate asset list can mean for an organization’s overall performance and cybersecurity efforts.

We’ll also examine how organizations have traditionally created simple inventory lists, why manual methods are no longer sufficient for managing assets, and outline best practices for maintaining an up-to-date inventory list that’s easier to achieve and more actionable for modern organizations.

Lastly, we’ll review the inventory solutions currently available on the market today to help you choose the best option for tracking your IT assets. We’ll also look at the growing role automation is set to play in simplifying efforts to track the devices essential to running your business and improving your ability to keep your IT assets and organization secure.
 

• What is an IT asset inventory list?
• Common types of IT assets
• Importance of IT asset inventory management
• How to build an IT asset inventory
• Best practices for maintaining an IT asset inventory
• Types of IT asset inventory tools
• What to look for in IT asset inventory software
• The future of IT asset inventory

What is an IT asset inventory list?

An IT asset inventory list is a comprehensive catalog organizations must maintain to manage their information technology assets efficiently. This list includes everything from hardware and software assets, such as servers, laptops, mobile devices, printers, and network devices, to cloud services and data assets an organization owns or uses.

Asset inventory management can also take on entirely different meanings depending on whether you’re part of a cybersecurity, operations, or IT team. However, the primary goal of an asset inventory management system is to maintain a complete and up-to-date record of all assets within the organization.

For those charged with streamlining costs, this record helps optimize IT investments and reduce unnecessary equipment purchases, software licensing, maintenance, and support costs. Teams managing compliance can also use asset lists to improve their efforts, like ensuring all assets comply with licensing agreements and regulatory standards, which reduces the risk of fines and legal issues. Regular audits and real-time monitoring of the asset inventory can also detect potential compliance violations early, allowing for timely corrective actions to ensure robust security and operational efficiency.

Recognizing how different stakeholders leverage IT inventories to inform more strategic decision making is key to understanding why it benefits all teams to perform asset management in real time. Since we’ve defined what an IT asset inventory list is and its significance at a high level, let’s examine the various types of assets and devices you must make sure to include.

[Read also: Nine ways to make asset discovery and inventory fast and easy]

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Common types of IT assets

When creating an asset inventory list, it’s important to account for all asset types to ensure comprehensive asset tracking, management, and oversight. Here are some common types of IT assets that need to be in an inventory list, along with real-world examples of what they may look like in your organization.

Hardware assets

Hardware assets are physical, tangible components that often form the backbone of an organization’s IT infrastructure, including:

• Computers (desktops and laptops)
• Mobile devices (smartphones and tablets)
• Peripherals (printers, scanners, and monitors)
• Servers (web servers, database servers, and application servers)
• Networking equipment (routers and switches)
• Storage devices (external hard drives and NAS)

Software assets

Software assets include all software applications and licenses used within the organization, such as:

• Operating systems (Windows, macOS, and Linux)
• Productivity software (Microsoft Office)
• Specialized applications (CRM and ERP systems)
• Security software (antivirus and firewalls)
• Software licenses and subscriptions (Microsoft 365 subscription and Salesforce CRM license)

Cloud services

Cloud assets are services and resources provided over the internet, including:

• Cloud-based storage solutions (Google Drive and Dropbox)
• Cloud computing services (AWS and Azure)
• SaaS applications (Salesforce and Slack)

Data assets

Data assets include databases and data repositories on devices that store critical business information, such as:

• Customer databases
• Financial records
• Employee records
• Business intelligence data

Ensuring your IT inventory list includes all the asset types your organization depends on is key to gaining a comprehensive view of your IT environment. Now that you know the various types of IT assets to include in an inventory list, let’s explore other ways maintaining up-to-date asset records can significantly impact your organization’s efficiency, security, and performance.

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Importance of IT asset inventory management

While it’s true that maintaining an accurate IT asset inventory is crucial to helping organizations understand what’s in their environments, this is only part of the battle.

In addition to gaining a much-needed holistic view of their environment, effective IT asset management can also help you understand where the assets are, how they are being used, and several other benefits, including:

• Improving data security: Detecting and tracking an organization’s known and unknown assets uncover endpoints that could be subject to malware, viruses, and cyberattacks. With this asset information, organizations can streamline workflows to shore up their environment.
• Preventing penalties: Unlicensed software discovered during an audit can result in vendor fines. Asset discovery and inventory efforts also identify potential compliance issues before they become problems.
• Gaining insight into network architecture: IT can better understand the organization’s network architecture by uncovering physical and virtual network assets, on-premises and cloud vulnerabilities, and potential attack vectors.
• Simplifying maintenance and optimization: Asset discovery and inventory insights inform an organization about hardware and software status, enabling more streamlined network updates and required device upgrades to minimize downtime and improve overall lifecycle management.
• Saving costs: Visibility into the organization’s IT assets identifies unused licenses, duplicate software, and device lifespans, all of which cost organizations money.

The most common sources of wasted spend include unused licenses, redundant tools, and duplicate functionalities across departments.

Given the importance of IT asset inventory management, let’s delve into the practical elements of creating an asset inventory. We’ll start with simple guidance on manually compiling an asset list and then explore why these manual efforts are quickly becoming insufficient for maintaining an accurate and efficient inventory.

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How to build an IT asset inventory

Creating a basic IT asset inventory is quite simple. You can capture a snapshot of the assets in your IT environment by identifying and cataloging your organization’s hardware, software, network, and other devices in just two steps:

1. Discover all IT assets: This initial stage involves identifying all IT assets within the organization by scanning the network to detect hardware devices, software applications, and cloud services. The goal is to create a complete and accurate list of all assets currently in use.
2. Classify and document asset details: Once the assets are discovered, the next step is to catalog them in an organized inventory. This involves recording detailed information about each asset, such as its type, location, owner, configuration, and status, and constantly maintaining this information as devices move, change owners, are updated, and other changes.

However, once this initial setup is complete, the real challenge becomes continuously maintaining this list.

Due to the vast and complex nature of today’s environments, where devices are constantly being added, removed, or modified, the simple practice of manually building an IT asset inventory by discovering, classifying, and documenting assets and relying on manual updates is often insufficient for creating an actionable IT asset inventory that reflects the current state – even for organizations with the best intentions of manually updating every time assets change.

Not only can inventory lists quickly become outdated, but relying on manual efforts to create and manage them can also lead to overlooking critical assets. For example, suppose a critical server that hosts essential business applications is added to the network but not promptly recorded in the manual inventory list because the responsible stakeholder is busy with other tasks or simply forgets to log the new asset. As a result, the server remains undocumented, and its existence is essentially unknown to the rest of the IT team, resulting in potential security vulnerabilities, inefficiencies, and increased operational costs that today’s organizations cannot afford.

In the next section, we’ll outline best practices for how modern approaches to ITAM are integrating with other key IT management and security processes to help improve the process of creating, maintaining, and using inventories — including lifecycle management, compliance tracking, and risk assessment — to optimize asset utilization, reduce costs, better understand potential security risks, and maximize the overall benefits of having comprehensive and real-time IT asset inventories.

[Read also: What is IT inventory management? Why tracking assets matters]

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Best practices for maintaining an IT asset inventory

To create an IT asset inventory system that works for you, rather than making you work harder to avoid stale data and incomplete asset views, you can implement the following best practices to more easily maintain an inventory that’s not only accurate but also actionable:

• Define asset lifecycles: Overseeing each asset’s lifecycle is essential for maintaining efficiency and cost-effectiveness as part of your inventory tracking efforts. Managing a device’s lifecycle includes tracking assets from procurement through deployment, maintenance, and eventual retirement. It also involves scheduling regular maintenance, updates, and audits to ensure assets remain functional and secure throughout their lifecycle.
• Ensure compliance: Compliance with relevant regulations involves implementing policies and procedures to meet legal and industry requirements, such as data protection laws and cybersecurity standards. Regular audits and reviews of your IT assets can help verify compliance and allow you to address gaps or issues that may put your organization at risk for noncompliance.
• Perform risk assessments: Conducting thorough risk assessments is crucial for maintaining the security and integrity of your IT assets. By keeping an up-to-date inventory of all IT assets and regularly auditing your asset inventory to identify and address any discrepancies, you can perform risk assessments to identify potential threats and vulnerabilities, prioritize these risks, and develop mitigation strategies successfully.
• Share visibility: Leveraging a central, comprehensive IT asset inventory list across relevant teams creates a single source of truth, ensuring everyone can access the same accurate information. This unified approach improves collaboration, helps teams more easily identify security vulnerabilities, streamlines asset management, and supports compliance efforts by providing a clear record of all assets, which can help make audits and regulatory requirements easier to meet.
• Automate inventory management: Of all the best practices to prioritize, implementing automation is growing in popularity as a way to reduce effort and significantly increase inventory accuracy. Automating as many of the inventory management tasks as possible not only saves time by continuously updating asset lists without manual involvement, allowing teams to focus on more strategic tasks, but it also ensures that dependent efforts like asset tracking, compliance checks, risk assessments, lifecycle management, and reporting can also be streamlined — leading to enhanced operational efficiency and a more secure IT environment.

Having outlined the best practices for creating an effective IT asset inventory management system, it’s clear that automation is key to streamlining operations while also ensuring accuracy and efficiency.

The next section will examine the various types of IT asset management tools commonly used today along with their pros and cons. We’ll also explore how new automated solutions are transforming the way organizations manage their IT assets and making it easier to meet the demands of modern environments.

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Types of IT asset inventory tools

Organizations can adopt different IT asset management strategies and tools tailored to their size and needs to create and maintain an inventory list. Common options include:

• Manual spreadsheets to track hardware and software assets are the original and most basic form of IT asset management.
  
  While this method can be considered cost-effective and straightforward, it becomes cumbersome and not scalable as the organization grows. As the volume of assets increases, manually maintaining these lists becomes not only time-consuming but also resource intensive.
  
  Additionally, the manual entry process increases the likelihood of data inaccuracies and inconsistencies, which can lead to significant inefficiencies and potential security risks, and, frankly, it’s frustrating to keep updated.
• Standalone asset management software is a dedicated tool designed specifically for IT asset management.
  
  IT asset management software can offer features like asset discovery, tracking, and reporting. Small to medium-sized organizations may use these tools to streamline their asset management processes and reduce manual effort.
  
  However, using a point product solely for asset management can be limiting due to a lack of integration with the rest of your tech stack, scalability issues, and increased complexity, making it less efficient and more costly than integrated solutions that provide more comprehensive insights to improve device performance, security, and overall management.
• IT Service Management (ITSM) combines IT asset management with other IT service management functions, such as incident management, change management, and problem management.
  
  Larger organizations with complex IT environments may use ITSM tools to ensure a holistic approach to managing IT services and assets.
  
  It’s important to note that an ITSM solution is only as effective as its ability to leverage real-time asset data. Accurate, up-to-date information is crucial for making informed decisions, managing incidents, and ensuring compliance. Organizations risk inefficiencies, increased downtime, and potential security vulnerabilities by not leveraging real-time data in ITSM and similar solutions.
• Combining manual processes and point solutions can be an option to help organizations address their asset-tracking needs.
  
  For example, they may use spreadsheets alongside legacy tools to fill gaps in their awareness of their IT assets.
  
  However, this piecemeal approach often fails to meet the asset management requirements for maintaining ongoing device visibility. Without a continuously updated and accurate list of IT assets, organizations can face significant security and business operations challenges.
• Autonomous endpoint management (AEM) solutions provide a unified approach to managing IT and enterprise assets alongside the capabilities you need to ensure endpoint security and performance.
  
  With advanced features like automated patch management, software deployment, and security compliance, these solutions can benefit organizations of all sizes, especially those with diverse and distributed endpoints, such as on-premises desktops, mobile phones, IoT devices, and remote endpoints.
  
  These next-gen endpoint management solutions are built to significantly reduce manual effort by prioritizing automation, allowing IT teams to focus on strategic initiatives. Additionally, real-time monitoring and automated responses to potential threats help enhance security and operational efficiency — all in one centralized platform.

Since we’ve explored the various types of tools and strategies commonly used for IT asset inventory, what should you look for when selecting the right asset inventory solution to meet your needs? In the next section, we’ll provide guidance on key features and considerations to help you make an informed decision.

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What to look for in IT asset inventory software

When selecting an IT asset inventory solution, it’s crucial to consider several key features that can significantly impact your organization’s ability to streamline efforts, more easily identify potential cost savings, and enhance security efforts by using automation, leveraging real-time data, and seamlessly integrating with third-party systems.

• Automate discovery and categorization: Having visibility into all hardware and software assets across your environment, including on-premises and cloud assets, with the ability to find commonly unknown endpoints like remote assets, provides the level of device oversight organizations need to maintain an accurate and up-to-date inventory essential for effective asset management and security.
  
  Look for a platform that continuously discovers and categorizes new endpoint devices entering the environment to ensure all assets are identified. The software should also automatically manage these new devices, providing comprehensive visibility and control over managed and unmanaged endpoints.
• Real-time data: Consistently collecting and centralizing asset details into helpful dashboards provides a current, reliable, and comprehensive picture of an organization’s environment, with accurate, high-fidelity data like a complete list of software products and vendors installed in your environment, along with key information, such as last used date and usage statistics, that can be used across IT operations, security, and risk teams, ensuring a single source of truth for decision making.
  
  By accessing real-time data, teams can proactively manage assets, ensure compliance, and mitigate risks more effectively. This level of visibility and control is crucial for maintaining the security and efficiency of IT operations.
• Cost savings: By identifying unauthorized or underutilized software, you can more easily reclaim or redistribute licenses, avoiding unnecessary software costs and audit fees. This not only reduces expenses but also ensures compliance with software licensing agreements.
  
  Additionally, analyzing usage and unused percentage data across hardware and software assets helps rationalize procurement decisions, ensuring you realize maximum value from existing assets.
  
  Select software that enables you to identify which assets are fully utilized and which are not to assist you in making informed decisions about optimizing your IT budget. This thorough approach to cost savings ensures that your organization can effectively manage its IT assets while minimizing unnecessary expenses.
• Integration with third-party systems: When evaluating IT asset management software, consider its ability to integrate with third-party systems to allow for seamless data sharing, enhancing operational efficiency.
  
  Providing accurate, real-time data to other tools, such as Configuration Management Databases (CMDB) and Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) systems, is crucial for unifying multiple teams with a centralized source of truth and ensuring everyone can access the same up-to-date asset information.
  
  For instance, feeding valuable, real-time endpoint data, alerts, and reports into SIEM systems can improve threat detection and response capabilities. Similarly, integrating real-time updates into a CMDB ensures that asset information is always current and accurate. These integrations help streamline workflows, improve collaboration across IT operations, security, and risk teams, and provide a comprehensive view of the organization’s IT environment.
• Enhance security: When assessing IT asset management software, prioritize robust security features. Look for a solution that can secure and manage endpoint health by combining flexible discovery and automation to reduce risk. This involves validating and deploying security tools to ensure all endpoints are compliant, improving your ability to prioritize critical assets and mitigate risks and inefficiencies.
  
  Effective IT asset management software should also allow security teams to identify and address potential threats proactively. Automated compliance checks and continuous monitoring are crucial for maintaining endpoint security and regulatory compliance. Additionally, the software should integrate seamlessly with other security tools to enhance its effectiveness in managing and securing endpoints.

[Read also: What is IT compliance? Basic overview and guidelines]

By choosing an IT asset management solution with strong security features, you can ensure that your organization’s endpoints are well-protected, reducing the risk of breaches and improving overall security posture.

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The future of IT asset inventory

How organizations create and maintain IT asset inventory lists is poised to become even more dynamic and intelligent in the future. With advancements in AI and machine learning, these lists will not only provide real-time data but also predictive insights, helping organizations anticipate and address potential issues before they arise.

This evolution will facilitate more proactive management of IT assets, ensuring optimal performance and security as organizations navigate complex and continuously evolving threats and the need to safeguard their expanding environments.

[Read also: The ultimate guide to AI in cybersecurity]

Instead of manually updating or using piecemeal tools to stitch together a potentially outdated view of your inventory, imagine having a single, powerful platform that offers all the capabilities you need and transforms how you manage IT assets.

Next-generation endpoint tools, like autonomous endpoint management solutions (AEM), are set to provide a supercharged command center for all your IT needs. AEM solutions provide accurate and comprehensive visibility and control over all your IT assets, enhancing operational efficiency, compliance, and cost optimization with minimal human intervention while still keeping users in complete control.

These automated solutions also aim to improve collaboration across departments by streamlining as much of the IT asset management process as possible and serving as the source of truth to make asset management more effective for all stakeholders.

The truth is that protecting what you can’t see is nearly impossible. Today, effective ITAM demands a more robust asset inventory solution that allows organizations to build and maintain complete, up-to-date IT asset inventories with little effort and high returns — and that starts with embracing what AI and smart automation can help you achieve.

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Endpoints serve as the primary interface through which users interact with IT assets. By managing endpoints effectively, organizations can ensure that their assets are secure, up-to-date, and accessible when needed.

This is why Tanium AEM and capabilities like Asset Discovery & Inventory are crucial — they provide comprehensive visibility and control over both the endpoints and IT assets they store, ensuring optimal performance and security.

Tanium is built to easily integrate with key vendors like ServiceNow and Microsoft to provide real-time data and 100% device visibility that enhances outcomes, improves experiences, reduces vulnerability risks, and ensures compliance in our joint solutions.

Empower your IT team with the tools they need to succeed. Schedule a free, personalized demo of Tanium in your environment to see firsthand how Tanium can help you manage your assets today.