IT Asset Management
What Is It And Why Does Your Business Need It?
What Is IT Asset Management?
Being an IT Asset Manager in a large enterprise can feel a lot like being the sheriff in the Wild West. Between tracking down your organization’s hardware, staying on top of software license agreements, and trying to control rogue spending, it can be difficult to ensure compliance of every asset. With an intelligent and modern IT Asset Management platform, however, you can easily reign in troublesome assets and keep your IT house in order.
What Is IT Asset Management?
IT Asset Management (ITAM) is a set of business practices that enables enterprises to track, deploy, maintain, update, and discard a company’s IT assets. An IT asset is any valuable technology element that helps your business run. This could be hardware, such as laptops and field equipment, software such as licenses or cloud services, or digital assets like media and digital content.
In addition to tracking a wide range of asset inventory, ITAM focuses on the financial value and risk of an asset. It combines financial, inventory, contractual, and risk management responsibilities so businesses can manage the overall life cycle of their assets in order to aid in tactical and strategic decision making.
What Is ServiceNow IT Asset Management?
ServiceNow IT Asset Management (ITAM) is a product within ServiceNow’s IT Workflows solutions that automates the end-to-end lifecycle for software, hardware, and cloud assets—on one platform.
The application incorporates the physical, technological, contractual, and financial aspects of managing IT assets. ServiceNow leverages automated workflows to assign asset requests, record maintenance activity, and prompt assessments throughout as asset’s lifecycle. The application provides an ITAM data repository that works in conjunction with your configuration management database (CMDB), eliminating the challenges of data integration, normalization, and reconciliation.
ServiceNow Asset Management also works hand-in-hand with ServiceNow’s IT Service Management (ITSM) applications to provide better control of inventory and improve service delivery.
Why Does Your Business Need ServiceNow IT Asset Management?
Large enterprises have a lot of assets. Consider just one subsection of one department. Let’s take your Austin-based customer support team, for example.
Each team member may have a laptop or computer, two external monitors, a keyboard, a mouse, a headset, a desk phone, and a hard drive. What shared hardware is in the office? Projectors, Xerox machines, servers? What about their software? Do you know every program on just one person’s computer? When do the licenses for each of those programs expire?
Can you answer these same questions for your entire organization? Knock, knock – the new Chief Technology Officer is wondering the same thing and wants a comprehensive report. She wants to ensure your enterprise or one specific department isn’t wasting valuable resources on unnecessary technology. Or, even more daunting, a software vendor has just notified your company that they’ll be conducting a license audit at the end of the month to check your compliance. Are you sweating yet?
If these questions fill you with dread as you try to imagine what it would take to find the answers – have no fear. ServiceNow IT Asset Management can help you inventory your assets, stay on top of license compliance issues, and understand the cost and value of every asset in your enterprise.
The Benefits Of ServiceNow IT Asset Management
With ServiceNow ITAM, you can optimize the cost of your assets while also reducing risk and automating workflows to seamlessly integrate various departments into the asset management process.
With ServiceNow ITAM you can:
Gain
visibility
into asset estate to improve decision making, optimize asset utilization, and deliver better services
Reduce
IT costs
by automating processes and tracking expenses throughout the entire asset lifecycle
Mitigate
risk
by enforcing asset policies and compliance requirements
ServiceNow IT Asset Management Applications To Implement For Your Business
How exactly can ServiceNow ITAM support your IT operations? Let’s take a look at a few of ServiceNow’s ITAM applications.
Hardware Asset Management
Enterprises have a lot of IT hardware to manage from laptops to monitors, phones to printers, servers to projectors – the list goes on. Hardware asset management enables companies to track where these assets are, how they are being used and by whom, what they cost, and the value they deliver to the organization.
What Is ServiceNow Hardware Asset Management?
ServiceNow Hardware Asset Management offers a suite of automation capabilities to enable organizations to improve their hardware governance. With Hardware Model Normalization, you can automatically standardize hardware assets and leverage the Hardware Library to continuously deliver lifecycle information to proactively manage assets before they become a risk. By managing hardware lifecycles and corresponding tasks on one single platform, organizations can gain a full and meaningful picture of the hardware they own.
Benefits Of ServiceNow Hardware Asset Management
Improve
productivity
and reduce risk with automated IT workflows throughout the entire hardware lifecycle
Gain end-to-end
visibility
into hardware assets to maintain accurate asset inventory and protect CMDB health
Reduce hardware
cost
with accurate and automated asset assessment
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What Is ServiceNow Software Asset Management Professional?
ServiceNow Software Asset Management Professional (SAM Pro) is essential for businesses to accurately track their software spend and manage compliance of their on-premise and SaaS products. The application systematically tracks, evaluates, and manages software licenses, compliance, and optimization. With SAM Pro, businesses can reclaim unused software rights, purchase new software rights, and manage the internal distribution of ownership rights with the push of a button. SAM Pro can also be connected to ServiceNow Discovery to automatically distribute key data from the CMDB, the single source of truth in the Now Platform.
Benefits Of ServiceNow Software Asset Management (SAM Pro)
Maximize your
ServiceNow investment
with the only single-platform solution to feed critical software data with digital workflows
Gain control of rogue
software spending
with automated reclamation workflows, lifecycle planning, cost trending, and true-up estimations
Mitigate software
license risk
with actionable views into software positions including over-deployment, unlicensed or black-listed installations, and license harvesting options
Software Asset Management
Software Asset Management (SAM) enables businesses to track their organization’s software assets throughout their lifecycle from deployment to retirement. SAM is particularly important for maintaining software licenses and managing legal risks related to software ownership and expiration, ensuring that corporations follow ethical and technical software compliance regulations.
What is ServiceNow Software Asset Management?
ServiceNow offers several editions of Software Asset Management (SAM):
-
SAM Basic: Part of ServiceNow ITSM, only allows users to track purchases
-
SAM Foundation: No longer recommended, as it was a manual creation of software models for reconciliation and requires some migration effort to get to SAM Professional
-
SAM Professional: Only full-featured Software Asset Management option, has data feeds from ServiceNow Content Service, provides automated software model discovery and normalization
Due to the limitations of SAM Basic and SAM Foundation, GlideFast Consulting strongly recommends that enterprises adopt SAM Professional.
Share the Wealth
Software Asset Management Professional (SAMP) In ServiceNow
Configuration Management Database
The Configuration Management Database (CMDB) is your single source of truth on the Now Platform.
What Is ServiceNow Configuration Management Database?
ServiceNow Configuration Management Database (CMDB) is a cloud-based single system of record for infrastructure and service data used across the entire IT value stream. ServiceNow CMDB serves as a single source of truth and will help you better understand your ITAM application and other ServiceNow solutions. Your CMDB is the foundation of your data— maintaining the health of your CMDB is essential to effective and continuous uses of ServiceNow.
Benefits Of ServiceNow Configuration Management Database (CMDB)
Accurate real-time
views
of resource availability enable accurate resource allocation and faster resolution of requests
Precisely align
resources
with requests via calendars and schedules, improving workflows between resources and management
Deliver
consistent
resource management to every operational and project-related IT task
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What Does A Healthy CMDB Look Like?
Download our free guide ‘7 Ways To Set Up A Healthy CMDB’ for a comprehensive resource for cleaning up your CMDB.
What is ServiceNow Discovery?
ServiceNow Discovery enables users to identify IT assets in their organization’s network to create an integrated system and directory of how they all work together. Discovery offers an agentless way to update your CMDB with your enterprise’s relevant hardware and software assets and tracks changes within your on-premise and SaaS infrastructure. Implemented successfully, ServiceNow Discovery sets a strong foundation with accurate data for many other ServiceNow solutions.
Benefits of ServiceNow Discovery
Gain full
visibility
into your entire IT infrastructure and maintain an accurate record of your CMDB
Automate the discovery
of hardware
and software assets, and their relationships, across your entire enterprise
Accurately assess
service impact
with asset inventory and relationship information for automated service maps
Discovery
Gain complete visibility to your on-premise and SaaS IT assets with ServiceNow Discovery.
Gain visibility into your on‑premises & cloud resources with ServiceNow Discovery.
The implementation and management of Discovery is a continuous process. Download our free checklist to ensure a seamless implementation.
Implementation Services for ServiceNow IT Asset Management
It’s time to put the days of scrambling during a software audit and blindly spending on technology behind you. Leverage the power of ServiceNow ITAM to get your assets in order.
Whether you’re already using ServiceNow or are looking to migrate to a cloud-based solution, GlideFast Consulting will maximize the full potential of your ServiceNow IT Asset Management implementation with tailored solutions and process expertise. As an Elite ServiceNow Partner, GlideFast Consulting helps businesses leverage the full value of their ServiceNow investments.
Partner with our team of experts to modernize your ITAM solutions, gain control of your IT spend, and gain actionable insight into the health of your IT assets. Our developers and architects have unique perspectives and skillsets when it comes to implementing, integrating, and managing a ServiceNow IT Asset Management solution that will transform your organization.