IT asset management

With this practice the whole lifecycle of IT assets is handled and managed in order to support the organization to be able to increase values, control costs, manage risks and make decisions about purchasing, renewal, retirement, disposal of assets and also fulfill legal and contractual requirements. 

IT asset: IT asset is a component of service or product that is financially worthful and can support delivering a service or product. Generally, it includes software, hardware, network, cloud services, licenses, and in some circumstances also information and buildings that are relevant to IT services or products. Note that some components were not IT assets before but now they are included in this definition because the coverage of IT has been changed during the time.

There are some different subjects in asset management that should be considered in this practice: 

1. Understanding the costs and values of assets is important to result in better service management.
2. This practice needs accurate data about assets that could be collected during auditing tasks but there’s another method which is collecting data during the processes that trigger the change of the state for an asset. Some examples of these processes are provisioning new hardware by a new request, service configuration management, incident management, change control, deployment management, etc. If asset management has efficient communication with other mentioned practices, then the need for auditing would be less. But the auditing is always required. 

Despite the type of an asset, there’s a common lifecycle and some general activities which are included in this practice. These common activities of this practice are mentioned below: 

1. Initialization, data collection, and maintenance of asset register in both structural and content aspects. 
2. Control the lifecycle of assets in collaboration with other practices and registering the changes on assets. 
3. Maintaining current and historical information, reports, and supporting other practices. 
4. Auditing assets and being prepared for the future. 

There are some specific tasks that are needed through asset management practice and they are related to the type of assets: 

Hardware assets tasks: 

1. Labeling hardware assets for recognition.  
2. Knowing where they are currently. 
3. Keeping them secure against stealing, corruption, or data leak. 
4. They might need a special maintenance process during renewal or provisioning.  
5. They may need some instructions on regulations to follow in disposal tasks. E.g. Disposal of used batteries or other electronic waste. 

Software assets tasks: 

1. They should be kept against illegally copying. 
2. Rules of using licenses should be followed. 
3. Licenses should be released when their related assets are disposed

Cloud assets tasks: 

1. Because of controlling costs and budgets, the use of cloud resources should be controlled and managed.  
2. Like software licenses, following the rules of contracts should be considered.  

Client assets tasks: 

1. They should be assigned to their users. 
2. There should be workflows for lost or stolen assets. 
3. There should be tools for information security and wiping sensitive data.  

Figure 5.21