For years now, change seems to be the only constant in the software business landscape. Change, however, can throw processes and workflows off balance; and, the great tsunami of digitalization that we’ve been experiencing in the past few years, doesn’t make things easier. On the contrary, the Fourth Industrial Revolution is probably why IT costs tend to get off the charts. Despite its — often unexpected — complexities though, change can also bring new opportunities; that is, new tools, and technologies that can help optimize these costs. That’s how top-performing businesses keep their IT budget under control today: they leverage Unified Asset Management solutions.
From a scattered IT Asset Management approach, to a Unified Asset Management strategy
IT Asset Management (ITAM) is not a new concept in the world of IT. However, due to the large — sometimes, innumerable — amount of IT assets that most businesses keep nowadays, it’s almost impossible to track and manage them properly. What’s more, the complexities that the new digital reality creates, can reduce the IT team’s capacity even more. At the end of the day, just another ITAM approach, won’t do. An IT manager needs a Unified Asset Management strategy.
To elaborate, Unified Asset Management proposes a new, cost-effective way of managing IT assets, through a central interface. This means that an IT manager can have an overview of the status of assets residing in the Cloud; thus, gain insights on their usage and take action, towards optimizing unnecessary costs; often stemming from avoidable inefficiencies.
How can Unified Asset Management help optimize IT costs?
To understand how adopting Unified Asset Management can help optimize IT costs, first, we need to understand what the latter entails. IT cost optimization is the process of continually monitoring, evaluating, and configuring all the cloud resources that drive the applications, infrastructure, and workload for a company. Using a Unified Asset Management tool can not only help fix or replace damaged assets, but also allocate asset usage across employees efficiently. Let’s see how!
1. Aggregating all IT assets under a centralized plane of action
Having all IT assets and resources on a single pane of glass makes it easier to track and manage them. A sophisticated Unified Asset Management tool not only does that, but also allows IT managers and admins to customize tasks and automate workflows; all of which, translate into greater visibility and simpler processes. This also means that IT managers can finally avoid unnecessary expenses, duplicate purchases, tools that offer similar functionality, as well as productivity and security issues.
2. Streamlining asset management
Using a single-point asset management tool, helps distribute the required resources only to the employees that need it; based on hosts, host groups, or other requirements. Moreover, through detailed inventories, IT managers can reduce costs by:
- making the most of on-demand software capabilities — tracking and deploying only the IT assets needed, every time
- identifying under-utilized, similar or duplicate software
- retaining greater control over licenses
3. Saving time, and resources
IT managers are always busy, trying to juggle a number of complex — and often unexpected or unforeseen — tasks that fall under their responsibility. Therefore, it’s important to them to be able to detect and manage every single asset, across the entire company. Thankfully, with unified IT asset management solutions, it’s easy to collect all the metrics needed to make data-based decisions, and identify opportunities for further efficiency; or utilize them for other purposes, e.g. auditing.
4. Unifying IT team members
It should be clear, by now, that companies adopting a unified approach to IT asset management can keep IT assets neat and tidy. But, how can such an approach help avoid compartmentalization and silos, and unify employees? It’s quite simple, IT teams only have to work on one, centralized point of action to manage and use assets; thus, avoiding chaos and confusion. By extension, IT infrastructure management gets simplified, too.
Also, training and onboarding new employees becomes a much simpler process. And, best of all, a unified approach to IT asset management provides a strong IT backbone that can enable agility, and growth.
IT cost management simplified
Software-driven businesses, today, have all kinds of IT assets swarmed in their tech environments; from IoT devices, tools and software components, to whole systems, services and applications. However, tracking and managing these assets in real-time requires a Unified Asset Management tool; it’s the only way to keep everything under control.
Such a tool — or feature within a piece of cloud management software — also provides IT managers with the visibility and insights they need to make informed IT asset procurement decisions. At the same time, they mitigate risks in a cost-efficient way. Besides, Unified Assets Management leaves little room for unexpected asset-related problems; thus, costs.
Finally, since IT cost optimization could not possibly be a one-and-done effort, but an ongoing discipline, a centralized automated IT asset management tool helps streamline the whole process, and simplify IT cost management.