In order to maximize the return on their IT investments, businesses and other enterprises must maintain a precise, up-to-date inventory of their hardware and software assets, one that can keep pace with constant change, enable detailed technical and financial analysis and ensure legal compliance. Whether they want to save money on licensing, accurately budget for software purchases, prepare for a software audit or prevent one, an automated software inventory management system is the perfect tool for the task.
A scalable distributed architecture provides valuable flexibility. It is a major advantage if your asset management solution adapts to the growth of your business by allowing for upgrades and additions without the need for complicated procedures.
If gathering, tracking and reporting data about an enterprise’s inventory of computer hardware and software are crucial to increasing organizational efficiency and improving its planning capabilities, how should this process be executed and what elements would it consist of?
An optimum asset management solution would include:
- A scanning mechanism that targets all the IT resources on a network and identifies any IP-enabled device;
- A central repository / database application where the information gathered by the scans is sent and stored;
- A streamlined, straightforward user interface that allows convenient access to the data.
Such a system would contain features that, among other things, give it the ability to:
- Determine what hardware and software assets are in the network, where they are and how they are being used;
- Monitor and maintain all hardware and software inventories by means of a convenient and flexible management feature;
- Enable detailed understanding and analysis of installed software through userfriendly database query tools;
- Demonstrate asset and license compliance and permit response to audits;
- Report inventory results that can be easily printed or emailed to the user on a definable time schedule; help manage vendor contracts and making purchasing decisions;
- Expand as the organization itself does.
