What is IT Asset Management? ITAM Explained
Discover the essentials of IT asset management, including best practices, real-world examples measuring the benefits, and the future role of automation
IT asset management (ITAM) is a strategic approach to managing and optimizing an organization’s IT assets throughout their entire lifecycle. It includes identification, tracking, and maintenance of various assets, including hardware (computers, laptops, servers, and keyboards), software (like applications and middleware), data assets, and network resources. ITAM ensures that these assets are efficiently used, properly maintained, and securely decommissioned, which maximizes their value while minimizing costs and risks.
ITAM is crucial to your organization’s ability to maintain operational efficiency, reduce unnecessary spending, mitigate security risks, and comply with regulatory requirements.Without proper ITAM, organizations risk losing visibility into their assets, which creates inefficiencies, hampers productivity, and leads to security vulnerabilities and IT compliance issues..
In this blog post, we’ll define ITAM and discuss its key components, including the various asset types and their role in IT operations. We’ll describe ITAM’s benefits using four real-world examples. Then, we’ll provide recommendations for designing and implementing your own ITAM strategy and selecting an IT asset management solution. By the end, you’ll understand how effective ITAM can transform your IT operations and enhance business resilience.
- What are assets in ITAM?
- Top ITAM benefits (with real-world examples)
- How can IT asset management reduce costs for an organization?
- How does ITAM streamline the asset management process?
- Why is managing your IT asset inventory important for reducing risks?
- What impact does ITAM have on improving decision making?
- How to implement an effective IT asset management plan
- What is IT asset management software?
- Revolutionizing ITAM: Embracing automation for the future
What are assets in ITAM?
To effectively manage your IT assets, it’s important to understand what we mean by “assets.”
An IT asset is any resource your organization uses to support the IT infrastructure. Assets can include tangible resources (servers, keyboards, and software) and intangible resources (software licenses and cloud subscriptions).
Common IT asset types include:
- Hardware assets are physical IT devices, such as laptops, desktops, servers, printers, and mobile devices, located in offices and remote locations, and include data centers and devices used by remote employees
- Software assets include licensed applications, middleware, operating systems, and enterprise software
- Digital assets can be databases, cloud storage, intellectual property, and digital documents
- Cloud assets are a part of virtualized infrastructure and include software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications, such as email and customer relationship management solutions, infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) services, such as virtual machines, cloud servers, and storage instances, and platform-as-a-service (PaaS) components
- Network assets include routers, switches, firewalls, and other networking equipment
- Mobile assets can be smartphones, tablets, and other mobile devices used in enterprise environments
Now that we’ve identified the scope of IT assets, we can dig into the benefits your organization can achieve through effective ITAM.
Top ITAM benefits (with real-world examples)
IT asset management offers numerous benefits, such as increased organizational efficiency, lower costs, and improved security. To better understand these advantages, let’s delve into real-world use cases by analyzing customer case studies.
By using their outcomes as primary source material, we can measure the potential impact of implementing effective ITAM to provide valuable insights into how ITAM can transform your organization’s asset management and overall efficiency.
How can IT asset management reduce costs for an organization?
ITAM helps organizations manage their IT assets more efficiently, which can result in significant cost savings. By tracking and optimizing hardware and software use, businesses can eliminate unnecessary purchases, optimize renewals and license management, and ensure compliance with global regulations and standards.
In this example use case, global professional services firm Genpact realized substantial cost savings through effective asset management. The global professional services firm was using native endpoint tooling to manage security and applications on approximately 110,000 endpoints, 50 servers, and multiple FileShare distribution points across 70 locations worldwide. Its legacy software management tool had reached its limit.
The team discovered Tanium and was thrilled by the prospect of getting detailed, real-time inventory and data about all their endpoints in minutes — not the hours, days, or weeks they received from their old system.
While the prospect of saving time was important, the potential cost savings sealed the deal: By migrating its devices and tool environment to the cloud, Genpact reduced its server infrastructure and database costs by 75%, eliminated redundant IT management tasks, and streamlined endpoint management.
Organizations can also more easily ensure regulatory compliance and avoid potential compliance penalties and fines using Tanium’s ITAM capabilities, which align with the standards provided in ISO/IEC 19770, the NIST Cybersecurity Framework, the Australian Cyber Security Centre’s Essential Eight, and several other compliance frameworks.
Additionally, Tanium supports the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) framework of IT service management (ITSM) best practices, designed to help businesses align IT services with their organization’s needs and goals.
By reducing unnecessary IT spending and optimizing asset utilization, organizations free up resources and can focus on broader efficiency gains.
[Read also: What is compliance management? Types and improvement tips]
This brings us to the next step in maximizing the value of IT assets, which is streamlining IT asset management processes to improve visibility, automate tasks, and enhance security controls.
How does ITAM streamline the asset management process?
ITAM enhances efficiency and reduces your team’s manual efforts by automating and streamlining asset management tasks, which results in faster deployment, optimized resource allocation, and more effective incident response.
Jones Lang LaSalle (JLL) is a global provider of real estate and investment management services. With more than 98,000 employees in over 80 countries — most working remotely without a VPN — JLL faced a significant IT asset management challenge that was impeding its ability to effectively manage endpoint devices.
Without comprehensive visibility, the IT team did not know whether end user devices were secure or up-to-date, making them a security vulnerability. For some endpoints, JLL only gained visibility once every 75 days when employees were required to change their passwords.
With more effective asset management, JLL gained real-time visibility into its nearly 100,000 endpoints to instantly identify at-risk devices, apply patches, and enforce security protocols.
Now that JLL has access to reliable, real-time asset data, JLL’s IT team can answer executive questions confidently and with no more guesswork. This proactive approach significantly improved JLL’s ability to manage and secure its IT environment, reduce security gaps, improve operational efficiency, and enhance overall IT resilience.
By implementing standardized workflows and best practices informed by real-time device information, your organization will gain a more structured approach to IT asset oversight that ensures your IT asset managers and security analysts have clearly defined responsibilities, enabling them to efficiently maintain and secure your technology infrastructure.
Next, we’ll explore how effective ITAM not only enhances security but also reduces compliance risks and operational inefficiencies.
Why is managing your IT asset inventory important for reducing risks?
Effective ITAM helps organizations mitigate IT asset risks, such as security vulnerabilities, regulatory noncompliance, and operational disruptions. By maintaining accurate asset information, audits are simplified, compliance with software licensing agreements is easier, and you have a single source of truth to help ensure regulatory compliance.
A great example of reducing risk through effective asset management can be found in this success story involving a government agency’s decision to replace its existing endpoint management tool to address top security requirements.
The agency had been experiencing challenges caused by incomplete visibility into its IT environment, leaving many endpoints unmonitored and at risk, which also made enforcing security policies, meeting regulatory requirements, and responding to cybersecurity threats difficult.
By implementing a more comprehensive solution, the agency uncovered 10-15% more endpoints that had previously gone unmanaged and ensured it gained a more comprehensive and accurate asset inventory at scale and could meet newly mandated security requirements.
With this newfound visibility, the agency significantly improved its compliance posture, enabling it to streamline auditing processes and meet the stringent regulatory requirements of reporting Hardware Asset Management (HWAM), Software Asset Management (SWAM), and Configuration Settings Management (CSM) to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) Dashboard for the Continuous Diagnostics and Mitigation (CDM) program.
With a centralized tool, the agency achieved a single source of truth for managing its many endpoints securely and efficiently — all with just one agent on one platform.
Let’s look at one more customer that illustrates another crucial benefit of effective ITAM — a U.S. federal agency that showcases how ITAM efforts contribute to better decision making by leveraging accurate and real-time asset data.
What impact does ITAM have on improving decision making?
Having a single source of truth for IT asset data enables organizations to make informed decisions regarding upgrades, replacements, and investments using crucial insights into asset utilization, lifecycle status, and performance.
A large U.S. federal agency was challenged with a problem common to the U.S. public sector: quickly and cost-effectively removing unauthorized, under-licensed, and over-installed custom-built, enterprise, and unapproved software applications — whether for cost optimization or security reasons.
For example, during an audit, the agency’s existing asset management tools could not find all software instances across its environment. Using Tanium, the agency scanned the network and discovered where there were extra, unused licenses and could quickly remove them. This software reclamation saved the agency over $150 million in licensing costs by automating manual processes and eliminating redundancies through optimizing asset utilization.
Another eye-opening example of this issue is when the same agency decided to phase out a custom-built, in-house solution using its existing mix of asset management tools. When attempting to remove the software using its previous tools, the agency found that the packages contained unnoticed components that were being left behind during removal.
Unfortunately, the agency did not have the visibility to pinpoint software and file locations across various users, transactions, and machines, which can lead to vulnerability gaps caused by unmanaged, deprecated software.
Using the comprehensive asset management solution in Tanium, they discovered more than 20,000 endpoints containing software components that needed removal. The agency initially estimated that only around 1,000 devices contained the outdated software. This revelation underscored the magnitude of the agency’s asset visibility issues and the danger posed by unmanaged IT assets.
In addition to visibility, Tanium gave the agency a powerful tool for rapid remediation that the IT team used to systematically remove the outdated software — in a fraction of the time it would have taken the previous tools to simply find the software and with far greater accuracy — saving the agency more than 20,000 hours of manual work.
With a centralized, single source of truth for IT assets that provides real-time device information, decision makers can better allocate resources, manage software licensing, reduce risks caused by end-of-life or unpatched devices, and plan infrastructure upgrades more efficiently.
In these real-world examples of the benefits effective ITAM can provide, all four organizations shared similar challenges, including the need for improved visibility, a stronger security posture, and more efficient IT operations.
In the next section, we’ll provide tips on how to create and implement an effective ITAM strategy for your organization that improves decision making, efficiency, ensures lasting cyber resiliency.
How to implement an effective IT asset management plan
To maximize the visibility and control of your IT assets and the insights you need to make sound strategic decisions, your organization should follow a structured ITAM approach that will help you stay ahead of potential issues and maintain a robust IT infrastructure.
Here are five ways you can help ensure an optimized asset management system:
- Conduct an asset audit: Use real-time data to create a comprehensive IT asset inventory.
- Calculate lifecycle costs: Evaluate the total cost of ownership, including procurement, maintenance, and disposal, to help prioritize inventory management.
- Standardize ITAM processes: Develop clear policies for asset procurement, utilization, and disposal.
- Ensure compliance: Monitor software licensing, regulatory requirements, and data security standards.
- Continuously optimize: Regularly analyze asset data to optimize costs, improve efficiency, and mitigate risks.
While following these best practices lays a strong foundation, having a well-defined strategy is only part of the equation. Let’s learn why even the best ITAM plans can fail without the right tools and why choosing the right solution to support and implement your ITAM strategy is often crucial to its success.
What is IT asset management software?
IT asset management software is a complete solution that helps organizations manage and optimize their IT assets throughout their lifecycle, including acquiring, tracking, and managing hardware, software, and related assets.
To achieve this, key components of effective ITAM software must include:
- Asset discovery and inventory management: By cataloging all IT assets, including cloud resources, mobile devices, and equipment, organizations can create a comprehensive inventory that helps them understand asset availability, status, and location.
Generating detailed inventory reports can help organizations monitor the condition and status of IT assets and more easily manage license agreements. Additionally, ITAM software can streamline the maintenance and disposal of assets, ensuring organizations avoid penalties and security issues. This comprehensive approach not only enhances asset visibility but also safeguards from potential risks. - Asset tracking: Continuous monitoring of IT assets ensures that their status, location, and usage data are always up to date. Accurate data allows your organization to maintain asset control and optimize resource allocation.
ITAM software can provide alerts and insights into changes in the IT environment, allowing organizations to address issues proactively, supports audit, and enable more informed decision making that allows organizations to stay ahead of potential problems and maintain a robust IT infrastructure. - IT asset lifecycle management: ITAM software should enable tracking throughout an asset’s lifecycle, from procurement and deployment to maintenance, retirement, and disposal. Effective lifecycle management optimizes the use and value of assets while reducing costs.
- Cybersecurity risk and vulnerability management: ITAM software plays a critical role in endpoint security by ensuring all IT assets comply with organizational policies and industry regulations. Organizations can also better protect their assets against potential threats by identifying and mitigating vulnerabilities identified through ITAM insights.
- Real-time visibility: ITAM software should provide insights into IT assets that accurately reflect their current state, which is essential for making informed, strategic decisions, improving reporting, and helping organizations address vulnerabilities and issues before they become critical.
How to achieve complete IT visibility with Tanium
The bottom line is that by leveraging these critical features, ITAM software enables proactive management of IT resources that allows organizations to streamline tasks and ensure IT assets perform as expected while remaining free of security risks. This approach leads to significant cost savings and improved productivity, making it an invaluable tool for any organization.
Embracing ITAM software is a strategic move that empowers organizations to stay ahead. However, as technology advances, so does the scope and capability of ITAM solutions.
The next evolution in ITAM aims to leverage automation to streamline processes further and extend its benefits beyond IT departments, impacting other key business areas. Let’s delve into how automation is set to transform ITAM and the broader implications for organizations.
Revolutionizing ITAM: Embracing automation for the future
As IT infrastructures continue to become more complex and distributed, traditional ITAM approaches are becoming insufficient.Why? The increasing diversity of IT assets, the rise of remote work, and the proliferation of cloud services demand more advanced and automated solutions. Traditional ITAM methods now struggle to keep up with the dynamic nature of modern IT environments, leading to gaps in asset visibility, compliance issues, and inefficiencies in asset management.
How? Next-generation ITAM solutions are designed to embrace the power of automation to streamline processes, reduce manual effort, and improve accuracy.
Automation in ITAM can significantly enhance your ability to continuously monitor and update your inventory by leveraging real-time endpoint data, ensuring accurate tracking and management, and supporting immediate issue identification and resolutions to help maintain operational health and security.
By leveraging automation and advanced analytics, modern ITAM tools ensure efficient asset utilization, enhance security, and support regulatory compliance.
Transformed ITAM can deliver tangible benefits only by involving an increasing number of “business side” stakeholders including key functional teams such as finance, procurement, risk management, security, cloud teams etc. as well as the business units themselves which utilize the various organizational IT elements.
IT asset management as we know it is shifting from basic asset tracking to serving a more strategic function as organizations realize the benefits of leveraging accurate, up-to-date asset information, improving collaboration, and streamlining workflows across several key business areas, including:
- Operations: Next-generation ITAM solutions automate routine tasks such as asset discovery, tracking, and inventory management, reducing the manual effort required to maintain accurate records on the status and location of IT assets.
With up-to-date asset information, critical departments like service desks can promptly identify and address issues and device behaviors that impact the ability of employees to perform their jobs. This enhanced visibility into the IT environment allows service desks to monitor asset usage for deviations from operational standards, manage risks, enhance user experiences, and avoid disruptions.
Leveraging real-time asset data can also help enable better self-service remediation, which allows employees to resolve common issues and reduces the number of tickets submitted to IT service desks, minimizing downtime, improving productivity, lowering costs, and ultimately increasing customer and employee satisfaction. - Security: Automated ITAM solutions significantly enhance the capabilities of security stakeholders by providing real-time data and predictive insights, which are crucial for maintaining a secure IT environment.
These solutions can ensure that security stakeholders have up-to-date information on the status and location of IT assets, which makes it easier to identify and address security vulnerabilities promptly, including automatically patching vulnerabilities and enforcing security policies.
[Read also: What is security automation? Benefits, importance, and features]
By allowing security teams to monitor asset usage and detect anomalies from security policies proactively, automation capabilities can help effectively mitigate risks and avoid breaches.
Additionally, next-gen ITAM solutions streamline the process of generating security reports and conducting risk assessments, allowing security teams to quickly produce accurate and comprehensive reports, reducing the time and effort required for audits.
- Compliance: ITAM solutions with automation can help reduce the manual effort required to maintain accurate records, ensuring compliance stakeholders have up-to-date information on the status and location of IT assets that makes it easier to generate compliance reports and conduct audits.
[Read also: What to know about compliance vs. risk management]
Enhanced visibility into the IT environment also allows organizations to proactively monitor asset usage and detect potential compliance issues, helping to mitigate risks and avoid penalties associated with noncompliance. By providing real-time data and automated reporting capabilities, ITAM solutions will enable teams to address issues promptly and maintain regulatory standards efficiently.
As you can see, next-generation ITAM solutions will play a key role in enabling compliance, security, operations, and other stakeholders to collaborate more effectively and extend the benefits of ITAM beyond IT departments to impact various key business areas and improve overall efficiency.The ITAM team of the future should comprise of a group of smart specialists who can tie everything together in a more collaborative setting, where a critical source of competitive advantage arises from technology as well as insights shared by others. Stakeholders’ buy-in can be harnessed in newer and cleverer ways, leveraging sweet spots such as the ability to provide full visibility of the IT estate across all types of technology deployment.
Through the power of smart automation and the ability to integrate seamlessly with other systems, these ITAM solutions will empower teams to perform their duties more efficiently and effectively, align their efforts more easily with overall business objectives, and ensure their initiatives are cohesive and well-coordinated while minimizing operational risks, reducing costs, and maintaining a secure and compliant IT environment.
By embracing modern ITAM approaches, organizations can stay agile, secure, and competitive in an ever-evolving technological landscape.
Tanium Asset Discovery & Inventory is built to grow with your evolving needs. With Tanium, you can discover every endpoint in your environment – even in remote subnets – typically within minutes and also choose to block unmanaged assets or bring them under management actively.
Forget error-prone spreadsheets and multiple discovery tools; Tanium can help you build a real-time inventory that continuously discovers and categorizes new assets for efficient management.
By integrating with your other essential business platforms, such as Microsoft and ServiceNow asset management solutions, Tanium provides your organization with real-time data to enhance endpoint management and ITSM workflows. For example, you can connect Tanium directly to your CMDB to keep endpoint and usage data fresh and accurate, ensuring consistent reporting, better collaboration, and informed decision making across security, operations, risk, procurement, finance, and leadership teams, providing a single source of truth.
This seamless integration ensures your organization always has an accurate, up-to-date inventory of its assets, helping to maintain security, optimize costs, and streamline operations. You can also easily identify unauthorized or underutilized software with a comprehensive, real-time list and reclaim or redistribute licenses to reduce software licensing expenses and audit fees.
Tanium Asset Discovery & Inventory is a dynamic, adaptive, and highly scalable ITAM solution and part of the greater Tanium autonomous endpoint management (AEM) solution that provides the visibility, automation, and integration essential for your organization to keep pace with modern IT challenges.
Ready to modernize your endpoint strategy? Request a demo today.