What is IT Asset Tracking?
Discover the difference between asset tracking and IT asset tracking, as well as why and how it works.
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.
Start your trial with Alloy Software today
Tracking of physical IT assets
When it comes to tracking physical assets, teams normally go through the following cycle.
Asset discovery
First of all, you need to define what exactly you need to track. That means discovering all physical assets, creating a database to store information about them, and defining the guidelines on how to update and manage this information. An effective tool for this situation is network inventory. It allows for fast discovery of all networked devices and updating of their configuration status.
Regular inventory
The next task is a regular physical inventory. It leverages unique identification tags like barcodes or QR codes that are widely used in “classical” asset tracking. With mobile inventory, front-line workers can run inventory without manual data entry. They will need to scan the tag that each asset is labeled with. After you scan the tag on an item, data about the asset is collected into the configuration management database (CMDB). After you have a full picture of your IT infrastructure, you need to monitor its status and track changes, e. g. via network inventory solutions. Network monitoring tools can also help you check if the assets are working properly.
Asset usage: lending
You can also use barcodes and QR codes to improve the process of equipment lending – be it laptops in a university library or devices for your distributed team. With this workflow, every loaner device is labeled with a passive tag that is scanned when the device gets checked in or checked out. This gives administrators a picture of how devices are used: which ones are borrowed more often and by which departments.
Retirement
And eventually, all physical IT assets move into the retirement phase. That is when IT staff must carefully dispose of them because they might store sensitive information.
Tracking of virtual and software assets
Virtual assets are service subscriptions, documents, contracts, virtual servers, and similar. To track these types of assets, you’ll naturally need more than just physical location tracking. In many cases, the very term “physical location” is not applicable to such assets. Now that companies spend increasingly more on cloud infrastructure services, it’s essential to collect data about all those virtual resources.
Tracking of virtual resources enables you to:
- discover networked virtual assets and track their changes (run network inventory), e. g. discover all installed software;
- record the status of documents, contracts, and subscriptions;
- set up rules to alert license expiration deadlines;
- manage license compliance.
What are the benefits of IT Asset Tracking software?
Nowadays, every business is an IT business as much as it is dependent on its IT assets – virtual and physical resources to maintain IT processes. IT infrastructure needs constant maintenance to function smoothly. For this, the ITAM framework is a recommended solution. IT asset tracking is, in turn, one of the critical components of ITAM. If the company has implemented an effective IT Asset Management solution, executives and leaders will see the following:
- increased productivity,
- reduced IT costs,
- high level of compliance,
- reduced security risks.
There are many more benefits to IT asset tracking – book a demo with Alloy Software to learn more about our ITAM solution.
You might also be interested in…
IT Asset Management
Track and manage assets throughout their lifecycle more efficiently with IT workflows that work as you see fit.
Network Inventory
Discover the depths of your IT infrastructure and gain complete oversight of your physical and virtual resources
IT Service Management
Streamline your IT processes, empower your support team and drive value across your organization
IT Service Desk
Enhance your support teams, automate daily tasks and resolve issues faster than ever.
Let’s Overcome Challenges Together
