What is IT Asset Tracking?

Introduction

In recent years, with more organizations in all verticals undergoing digital transformation, the terms IT asset management and IT asset tracking gained importance and became widespread. Executives face the challenge of managing a large fleet of IT assets and might wonder, “How should I proceed? Is tracking IT assets any different from tracking regular assets?”

The short answer is yes. Although both of them have similar goals, IT asset tracking denotes more than just physical tracking of the assets. It enables companies to monitor the status of both real and virtual resources they possess. Through this, it can help optimize your company’s IT spending, reduce IT costs, help your company stay compliant, and decrease security risks.

Before going into details of how it works, let’s define the terms which we are using.

What is asset tracking?

In a general sense, asset tracking is a process of following the location of a physical item or asset. Let’s come up with a couple of use cases for asset tracking:

• It’s used in e-commerce to enable customers to monitor their shipments or for baggage tracking in airports. Retail companies operating giant volumes of goods monitor their movements throughout the supply chain. They accomplish this, for example, by scanning unique tags at each facility.
• On large construction sites, GPS trackers help to control the most valuable equipment.

There are various techniques for tracking assets. They range from basic QR codes and machine-readable barcodes to more sophisticated GPS tags and RFID tags. This method of asset tracking is utilized in industries and business processes where assets change their location frequently, like logistics, transportation, inventory, and stock management.

IT asset and IT asset tracking

According to IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL), “IT asset is any financially valuable component that can contribute to the delivery of an IT product or service.” IT assets include tangible assets, such as workstations, laptops, mobile devices, servers, and routers. And intangible assets, such as software, databases, virtual machines, services, and documents, including contracts and specifications.

The term “IT asset tracking” refers to tracking, monitoring, and recording all technology assets in an organization’s IT environment. As we mentioned previously, tracking IT assets covers much more than just the physical location of the items. More than”classical” asset tracking, IT asset tracking may help spot illegal license usage and alert about security breaches, such as when software on a device doesn’t receive the update on time.

IT asset tracking and IT asset management

IT asset management (ITAM) is much broader than IT asset tracking. This term encompasses the entire lifecycle of IT assets, not just their inventory status, location, or hardware/software changes. The asset management process begins with acquiring an IT asset and continues through its retirement and disposal. That includes adaptation, correction, maintenance, reporting, auditing, compliance, etc.

IT asset tracking is only a part of ITAM as it deals with some aspects of asset management. These aspects include collecting and storing information about IT assets, tracking location, ownership status, and more.

IT asset tracking and CMDB

A configuration management database (CMDB) is a database that stores information about the hardware and software assets of an organization, as well as the relationships between those assets. IT asset tracking is closely related to CMDB because the information recorded in an IT asset tracking system can be used to populate and maintain a CMDB. By keeping track of the location and status of IT assets, an organization can ensure that its CMDB is up-to-date and accurate. This can help with a variety of tasks, including inventory management, asset maintenance, and problem resolution.

In addition, IT asset tracking and CMDB can work together to provide a comprehensive view of an organization’s IT assets and the relationships between them. For example, an IT asset tracking system might record the serial numbers and locations of computers, while a CMDB might record the hardware and software components of those computers and the relationships between them. By combining this information, an organization can get a complete picture of their IT assets and how they fit into the larger IT landscape.