IT Audit and IT Inventory Management - Knowing Which Assets You Have

November 26, 2008, 07:52 AM —  SAManage — 

Knowing which IT assets you have and how they are used has become a challenge in today's complex and ever evolving IT infrastructure, yet managing IT Assets is an important task for any business. A typical IT infrastructure has many different assets of various types, and new IT projects are deploying additional assets to support the business objectives. These challenges includes tracking IT assets across multiple offices and IT platforms, detecting software installed and used, and discovering new devices that are on the network.

The Challenge

  • Knowing which assets you have, where they are, and their current configuration.
  • Tracking changes to your assets, such as new computers or software installations.
  • Planning IT migrations and new IT projects.
  • Correlating IT assets against business financial records such as contracts and licenses to better control risks and liabilities.

IT Audit - where is the business benefit?

An updated IT inventory of workstations and software assets can help reduce the cost of administrating your IT assets, improve security and ensure you are always ready for your next IT audit.

  • Reduce IT costs by better managing and administrating your IT assets.
  • Ensure software compliance by knowing what you have and what you use.
  • Align IT with business goals to support business decisions such as license purchasing or renewals.
  • Improve productivity by empowering the IT administration team to easily track and manage assets and their changes.
  • Detect unauthorized and illegal software by adopting a software usage policy and easily detecting any policy deviations.
  • Audit Automation - every organization is facing an IT audit, whether its taking place every year or every month and regardless of the audit trigger (internal or external audit request). An updated IT inventory can save you from manually tracking your assets and managing spreadsheets.

» posted by SAManage

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