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Capitalizing on the Cloud: Five Strategic Benefits of ITSM in the Cloud

Wed, 19 Jul 2023 20:10:35 Z

Cloud computing is no longer the future; it’s our reality. This means that the decision to move ITSM to the cloud isn't just an option. It's a strategic necessity. For business and IT leaders in the early stages of this transformation, understanding the benefits of cloud-based ITSM is pivotal. Here are five advantages that this shift can bring to your organization.

1. Unparalleled scalability and flexibility

When your organization’s IT system is tethered to physical infrastructure, you face ongoing struggles with adaptability and scalability. Cloud computing opens up your environment to scalability and flexibility that you could never match on-prem. You can adjust resources rapidly based on your business needs, leading to cost optimization and improved operational efficiency.

The ability to adapt quickly to dynamic business circumstances can provide a significant operational and competitive boost. The dynamic adaptability offered by the cloud ensures that your service management processes are always operating at optimal efficiency, aligning seamlessly with your business needs and fluctuations.

2. Universal accessibility and improved collaboration

Cloud computing democratizes access to ITSM tools and services, making them available anytime, anywhere, with a stable internet connection. This unrestricted accessibility facilitates seamless service delivery, empowering your IT team to perform efficiently no matter where they are located. This flexibility becomes especially important today, when only 16% of IT workers want to work in the office full-time again.

Additionally, a cloud-based ITSM solution fosters enhanced collaboration. Real-time updates, easy tracking of service tickets and seamless information sharing ensure all stakeholders stay synchronized, driving productivity and faster decision-making.

3. Advanced automation and integration capabilities

Cloud computing is enabling the next evolutionary step in automation for ITSM, moving beyond the simple elimination of repetitive and manual tasks achievable with on-prem automation. The new generation of cloud-based automated ITSM solutions enables advanced ticket routing and incident management, sometimes from inception to conclusion.

There are several reasons that the cloud provides a better infrastructure for automation than on-prem:

Cloud solutions are built on modern, flexible architectures that are specifically designed to leverage the power of machine learning and AI, tools that drive automation. For example, machine learning enables auto-classification and auto-routing of support tickets. The system learns from historical data to predict the category of incoming tickets and automatically routes them to the most suitable team or agent.

Cloud-based ITSM tools are updated more frequently with the latest features and functionality, including advanced automation capabilities. For example, advancements in natural language processing (NLP) can significantly improve a chatbot's ability to understand and respond to user queries in a more human-like manner. An on-premises system requires significant time and resources to implement similar upgrades.

Cloud-based tools easily interoperate with other cloud-based applications, opening vast possibilities for automated workflows across different platforms. With cloud-based ITSM this extends beyond individual applications to encompass the entire IT ecosystem, simplifying the integration of ITSM with other ITOM tools such as Event Management, Configuration Management and endpoint and security solutions. As a result, cloud-based ITSM can serve as a central repository of data, insights and control mechanisms, providing a unified view of the IT landscape.

Integration is key. In the cloud, it promotes strategic planning and better-informed decision-making.

4. Enhanced security and compliance

Cloud-based ITSM solutions provide superior security compared to traditional on-premises systems. Cloud providers invest heavily in state-of-the-art security measures, including encryption, intrusion detection and regular audits.

Furthermore, they typically offer robust compliance management tools to help organizations adhere to industry-specific regulations, reducing the risk of non-compliance penalties.

5. Cost savings

Cloud-based solutions eliminate the need for heavy upfront capital investment in IT infrastructure and generally follow a pay-as-you-go pricing model regarding scaling the system.

Additionally, costs related to maintenance, upgrades and personnel training are often lower. You can reallocate these savings to other strategic initiatives, enhancing the overall financial efficiency of the organization.

Moving to cloud-based ITSM offers your organization clear and substantial benefits, from scalability and collaboration to cost savings and enhanced security. As your organization strives to remain competitive in a rapidly evolving business landscape, embracing cloud-based ITSM emerges as a strategic move that can significantly bolster business performance and resilience.

For business and IT leaders, the transition to the cloud isn't just a technological shift, but a strategic leap into a new era of efficiency, innovation and growth.

Explore this eBook to learn how to modernize your ITSM for quicker, simpler and better IT support.

A Toolkit for K-12 Asset Security

Thu, 16 Jun 2022 12:30:04 Z

If you’re responsible for implementing or supporting the digital infrastructure for a K-12 school or school district, no one needs to tell you how much things have changed in recent years. Unlike most, you had the advantage of knowing that the change was on its way. You may have even spent a fair amount of time helping others – district leadership, administrators, educators – prepare for the coming shift.

The script typically went something like this:

Digital technologies are going to fundamentally transform K-12 education. Right now, we’re in the early stages of augmenting traditional learning models with digital devices and systems. But someday soon we will see not only the classroom, but the school itself, go digital.

And then, sooner than most of us would ever have predicted, “someday” arrived. In the wake of the COVID pandemic, the overnight shift to digital learning models ushered in the age of both the digital classroom and the digital school…just as predicted! And, just as predicted, this rapid shift opened up a whole new world of possibilities for K-12 schools and districts. For the first time, we saw what widespread distribution of iPads or Chromebooks could do to support a full-time learning environment and how tools like Google Hangouts could enable a new kind of distributed classroom experience.

But with those new possibilities came new security vulnerabilities and an unprecedented level of risk. The school itself has, in fact, gone digital, at least some of the time. Today, educators and students alike are working in a hybrid environment where the digital classroom meets the real-world classroom. Managing such a learning environment means managing a wide array – and growing number – of devices and applications. As technology has grown more central to the educational experience, bad actors have increasingly targeted schools with an expanding array of ever-more sophisticated cyber-attacks.

Consider these sobering statistics:

Microsoft’s threat analysis data indicates that education is the number one sector targeted for attack, with attacks against schools reflecting up to 83% of all recorded cyberattacks.
The Multi-State Information Sharing and Analysis Center (MS-ISAC) reports that 57% of ransomware incidents involve K-12 schools.
The Center for Internet Security predicted an 86% rise in K-12 cyberattacks for the 2021-22 school year.

In light of these challenges, many districts are adopting a new strategy to secure their environments and create a better learning experience. This three-pronged approach includes investing in an IT asset management solution, updating IT policies and procedures and training IT managers, educators, and school staff in implementing new policies and tools to ensure cyber security while delivering an improved educational experience.

Invest in an asset management solution

Addressing the challenges that schools face today requires implementing a secure technology to ensure school administration can track, manage, and secure devices at all times. An IT asset management (ITAM) solution can enable educators and administrators to manage all applications and devices from purchase to disposal. This includes the ability to track asset availability and performance, ensure that devices are accounted for and updated with the most recent security software, and manage both hardware and software contracts, licenses, and warranties. Schools benefit from asset management options such as support of barcode scanning of devices, for faster inventory and status updates, as well as the ability to maintain and update a product catalog to facilitate ongoing asset management.

Policies and procedures

On its own, a new ITAM solution can make a tremendous difference in assuring the smooth and secure operation of the hybrid learning environment. But the real change must come at a fundamental level concerning how schools and districts manage their IT assets. Schools must develop standard rules of engagement and sign off procedures for educators, staff, students and parents. At the simplest level, effective practices for tagging, scanning, and checking devices in and out can make a huge difference in avoiding loss and risking a security breach. Such rules become even more effective when guided by policies aimed at managing license and device spend over time and when supported by tools that provide real-time insights into the current asset situation and that recommend or automate resolutions to problems.

Training

Like everything else that occurs within an educational setting, success in managing and securing the devices and applications that support a K-12 environment comes down to people. The ITAM system and new policy guidelines can succeed only if you equip IT Staff, Teachers, administrative staff, and students with the know-how they need to keep devices and systems in place and secure. This requires basic training on the ITAM system for those using it directly, and related equipment such as barcode scanners for teachers and other staff members who will be entering data into the system. The key is to simplify the user experience from the outset so each of these players will easily incorporate the new policies and practices into what they do.

Learn more about how K-12 schools and districts can address the challenges of the digital classroom by reading our white paper, Expand Visibility, See Clearly, Act Decisively: Better IT Insights for Better Educational Outcomes. Learn how Ivanti can help your school or district implement its own toolkit for the digital age by scheduling a chat with one of our representatives today.

Optimize Browser Experience with Ivanti Browser Manager

Mon, 21 Mar 2022 17:48:40 Z

What do you picture when you think of the Everywhere Workplace? Your home office, beloved pet curled up at your feet, coffee brewing in the next room? Or maybe working in the mountains or at the seashore or some other idyllic location?

There’s more to the Everywhere Workplace than exotic work settings.

Just as new remote work models have changed our expectations about our physical workplace, digital transformation and the move to the cloud have changed where – in the digital realm – our work gets done. With the rapid growth of SaaS systems, we are spending a lot less time on desktop computer applications and a lot more time in cloud-based apps, most often delivered by a web browser.

Why browser-based applications pose challenges for IT

This is an easy adjustment for employees, who are used to browser-based consumer apps. But for IT teams, providing a consistent and positive employee experience is now even more challenging. IT teams must consider browser usage, data and synchronization for all users: local, mobile and remote.

There are two primary challenges associated with browser-based applications.

First, most enterprises have a mix of physical and virtual desktops to help centralize management and upgrades, especially for task-based workers. Because they’re designed for physical desktops, web browsers tend to consume a lot of resources and waste a lot of storage space in virtual desktop infrastructures. This can lead to a negative impact on the user experience.

Next, each web browser on the market — Chrome, Edge, Firefox — behaves differently. Some web applications run correctly only on a particular browser. Still, most of us have a preferred browser we default to and would rather use than one that’s been assigned us. It’s not unusual for a user to end up needing multiple browsers on their desktop to do their job. This not only increases resource consumption, but it also degrades the user experience when each browser has its own sets of shortcuts, cookies and other productivity features.

Synchronize and manage browser data within Ivanti User Workspace Manager

Last year, we introduced Ivanti Browser Manager as a standalone solution to address these challenges. Ivanti Browser Manager provides:

Synchronization of favorites across all browsers
Management of browser-generated data
Redirection of defined URLs to a browser of your choice

The solution also supports resource blocking to enable the blocking of ads and other unwanted web traffic.

These capabilities ensure a consistent experience across all browsers, while making sure that users never access a web app in the wrong browser environment. Ivanti Browser Manager brings many of the advantages of Ivanti User Workspace Manager (UWM) to browser environments. We’re pleased to announce that Ivanti Browser Manager has been incorporated into the Ivanti User Workspace Management suite, along with Ivanti Application Control, Ivanti Environment Manager, Ivanti Performance Manager and Ivanti File Director. Now you can access Ivanti Browser Manager as part of your UWM solution to enable an optimized user experience that provides:

Faster login times
Lower infrastructure costs
Multi-browser support
Complete cookie management
Easy synchronization of favorites
Browser redirection

Learn more by downloading the data sheet, or schedule a demo of UWM and see how Ivanti Browser Manager can deliver these benefits to your users.

A New Kind of Employee Experience

Thu, 11 Nov 2021 17:25:30 Z

When you read the phrase “employee experience” (or even just good-old “user experience”), what comes to mind? One of the first things most of us think about, at least in an IT setting, is probably a system’s user interface. How hard or easy is the software to use? How intuitive is it? How appealing is its design? These are important considerations, but a good experience requires more than a good interface.

After all, you really can’t have a positive experience – no matter how easy or intuitive or appealing the software is – if the system doesn’t deliver the results you want. The thing has to work. It has to get you where you’re trying to go. If it doesn’t, the positive impact of an appealing look and feel turns sour pretty quickly. In fact, a system with an elegant look and feel that doesn’t work is probably, if anything, even more annoying than an ugly one.

Another Dimension

But there is another dimension of experience that goes beyond system capability and beyond look and feel. That dimension has to do with the underlying infrastructure for delivering both software and services. And it is that dimension of experience that really sets Ivanti apart. When you set out to make the everywhere workplace possible, you take on the challenge of providing employees with a consistent experience no matter where they happen to be working, and no matter what device they happen to be working from.

This is, in some ways, the experience you don’t even realize you’re having.

For example, when Ivanti Neurons helps solve a problem before it ever occurs, you don’t notice that anything has happened. (Or rather, not happened.) All you know, without ever thinking about it, is that you are being productive. Nothing is interrupting you or blocking you from doing what you need to do.

Likewise, when Ivanti User Workspace Manager delivers an ambient experience across settings and across devices, you don’t have to stop and think, “Oh, I can’t perform this particular task from my desktop at home” or “I’m not seeing all my stuff” or “Why is this all so different?” Because, let’s face it, if you’re having thoughts like those, you are not having a good experience – no matter how attractive or capable the system may be.

New Challenges (and Some Familiar Ones)

Over the past couple of years, organizations have faced unprecedented challenges when it comes to delivering a consistent employee experience. The shift to remote work models is one. The rapid and accelerating proliferation of devices is another. And yet in the face of these transformative changes, organizations are also up against the same challenges we have been up against all along. From an IT perspective, we still need to streamline operations, accelerate and automate service management processes and enhance customer experiences.

And in the new world of remote work and ever more devices, we continue to encounter some familiar roadblocks to achieving those goals, such as:

Slow logons and inconsistent user experiences across devices, creating a bloated service management caseload and backlog.
Inflexible and unbalanced allocation of CPU, memory, and disk resources causing performance and productivity issues that add to the backlog.
Improperly assigned administrative privileges that lead to more complex issues (requiring longer resolution times) and severe security risks.

In our new webinar, Transforming the Employee Experience…One Desktop at a Time, we outline how Ivanti User Workspace Manager can help you simplify desktop deployment and administration, reduce IT costs and secure endpoints while creating an amazing employee experience. Join us to learn how the right approach to workspace management can optimize IT service delivery with a flexible approach to permissions and access while simplifying both big projects like migrations and day-to-day operations.

You will see how addressing that next dimension of employee experience can make all the difference. Learn more about User Workspace Manager here. Or if you’re ready for a closer look, schedule a demo today.

Software Spend and the 80/20 Rule

Wed, 04 Aug 2021 15:00:01 Z

A common theme running through a variety of management techniques and methodologies, everything from Agile to Lean to Six Sigma is the Pareto Principle – also known as the 80/20 rule. Named after economist Vilfredo Pareto – who observed that 20% of the pea plants in his garden produced 80% of the peas, and that 80% of the land in Italy was controlled by just 20% of the population – the Pareto Principle tells us that, generally speaking, about 80% of effects tend to come from about 20% of causes.

Productivity guru Kevin Kruse of the Extreme Productivity podcast explains it this way:

While it doesn’t always come to be an exact 80/20 ratio, this imbalance is often seen in various business cases:

20% of the sales reps generate 80% of total sales.
20% of customers account for 80% of total profits.
20% of the most reported software bugs cause 80% of software crashes.
20% of patients account for 80% of healthcare spending

In business, applying the 80/20 rule means looking for those opportunities to get the biggest possible bang for your buck. It means constantly striving to find that 20% of what you do that can deliver 80% of the results you’re looking for.

When it comes to managing software spend, most businesses face what could be described optimistically as “tremendous opportunity for improvement.” Gartner analyst Stephen White writes that 80% of companies surveyed report that between 1 and 49% of their licensed software is “shelfware.” That is to say, they’re paying for it, but they aren’t using it.

And ponying up for unused software is only part of the equation. In an average month, an organization may spend 40 hours or more per SaaS vendor managing usage, overall spend, and contract renewals. Preparing a Microsoft Enterprise Agreement true-up can take two months and consume up to 120 hours of productive time. A full contract renewal may take 300 or more hours to complete.

The seemingly obvious remedy to these challenges is to implement a Software Asset Management (SAM) solution. A good SAM system will automate a lot of the tracking, monitoring and research required. But there’s a catch. In fact, there are several catches. To be effective, the typical SAM solution requires extensive knowledge, managed services, licensing expertise, and tool administration training. So, to manage (and potentially reduce) the costs associated with managing your software assets, you have to incur the costs not only of implementing the system, but also of training, supporting and maintaining a whole team of SAM experts.

This is where the 80/20 rule comes in. What if you could get 80% of the benefit of implementing a full Software Asset Management team at only 20% (or less) of the overhead?

It may sound too good to be true, but it’s not.

The trick is to take a lightweight approach, without compromising on the need for complete and timely software asset information. While most SAM efforts are focused on enabling you to create time consuming ELP (Effective License Position) reports – which tend to fall quickly out of date and which, it turns out, are not always what you need, anyway – a growing number of organizations are finding that what they really need is a solution that captures the software asset information and provides quick and intuitive access to it. A summary of software asset data, continuously updated and presented in dashboard form, provides immediate insights to support renewals and to mitigate against the dreaded shelfware. Quick and easy access to asset data also ensures a more secure environment, enabling IT managers to isolate and exclude out-of-date software versions lacking the most recent security protections.

And just imagine what you can accomplish, both in terms of managing software assets and elsewhere, with that 80% savings on overhead.

Businesses are finding exactly this combination of capabilities in Ivanti Neurons for Spend Intelligence, which provides instant insights into your software landscape and application spend for on-premises, cloud, and edge environments. Spend Intelligence helps you improve operational speed, asset visibility, and utilization. It provides detailed analysis within minutes, presented in dashboards showing your licenses, purchases, and instances so you can track your purchase history, upcoming license renewals, contract expirations, and ongoing spend more effectively.

Schedule a demo to see how easily Ivanti puts the 80-20 rule to work for you.

IT Asset Management 101

Thu, 15 Jul 2021 12:00:00 Z

If your business is growing, it won't be long until you need to develop an IT asset management protocol that allows you to manage your hardware and software assets throughout their lifecycle, helping to reduce business interruptions, plan budgeting effectively, mitigate risks, and gain high-level insight into how IT is driving success for your organization.

If you're ready to build the business case for IT asset management at your organization, we're offering a big short-cut with this in-depth primer into its benefits. We'll explain what IT asset management is, what kinds of assets it can be used with, how it differs for hardware and software, and how it can help organizations maximize return on their investments in both IT equipment and software licenses, whether on premises or in the cloud.

We will also talk about the risks that IT audits represent and look at the disposition process for assets at the end of their lifecycle. By the end, you'll have an overview of everything needed for success with IT asset management.

What Is IT Asset Management?

IT asset management is a system of business practices that seeks to maximize the value of IT devices and systems by combining financial, contractual, and inventory data to track the status of IT assets across their lifecycle. IT assets can typically be characterized as either hardware (the physical computing equipment that the organization owns), software (program assets that the organization either owns or licenses) or cloud services.

Here's how IT asset management applies to each category:

Hardware - Organizations with robust IT infrastructure can own a lot of computer hardware: desktop computers, laptops, keyboards and other peripheral components, printers, copiers, and more. To ensure that the hardware is well-maintained, organizations must keep track of what assets they own, where those assets are deployed within the organization, how they are used, how frequently they are used, their repair status, lifecycle information, and when they need to be replaced or disposed of.

Software - Software assets are typically licensed by the organization based on the number of users that will install the software. IT asset management processes for software allow organizations to monitor their compliance status with the end user licensing agreements that allow them to use licensed software applications. Your organization can monitor the status of your software licensing agreements, plan appropriately for future licensing payments, and monitor how many licenses are in use to ensure you're getting the most value for each software license that you pay for.

Software as a Service (SaaS) - Software hosted on the cloud and licensed via a subscription model raises a unique set of considerations when it comes to managing consumption, users, compliance, and spend. As SaaS continues to grow to represent a larger share of an organization’s software assets, processes and tools designed to address these considerations become increasingly important.

The role of IT asset management is to help organizations extract the maximum value from their IT investments. In that sense, IT asset management is really a set of business practices that enable businesses to make better decisions about how they manage their IT resources. The practice of IT asset management may involve the collection and management of IT asset data, but the real value is created when that information supports decisions about how best to maximize existing IT assets, when and whether to invest in new IT assets, and how to dispose of aged IT assets in a way that maximizes returns.

What Are the Features and Benefits of IT Asset Management Software?

At its core, IT asset management is a discipline based on the collection and analysis of data. In the past, organizations might have kept paper records that detailed their inventory of hardware and software assets, costs for each asset, and other data, but the proliferation of IT within organizations has made it virtually impossible to track IT assets in detail using a paper system.

Organizations that lead the way in IT use IT asset management software to keep up-to-date records of their IT assets that can be used to facilitate important decisions about how IT equipment is managed. Below, we've listed some of the key ITAM capabilities and what benefits your organization can expect from each one:

Comprehensive Hardware and Software Asset Tracking

A comprehensive data tracking system must lie at the heart of every effective IT asset management system. The ability to track assets and their attributes across several dimensions is a critical value driver for organizations that want to leverage IT asset management to improve their decision-making when it comes to IT.

The inventory tracking functionality of IT asset management software goes beyond a simple list of what assets you have at your disposal—it includes specific details and specifications for hardware and software that enable real transparency into your IT capabilities. Organizations use IT asset management software to track their computing assets, along with details like the product number, SKU, and date of purchase, as well as technical specifications like CPU type, processor speed, memory, available disk space, IP address, and numerous other parameters.

License Compliance Management Functionality

Software license compliance is a major issue for organizations that license third-party software. If you license software for multiple users at your organization from a third-party supplier, you may be subject to external audits to ensure that you are compliant with the terms of your service-level agreements. The world's biggest software providers pull in billions of dollars annually by investigating subscribers who are suspected of abusing their services. Whether you're aware of the situation or not, your organization could be hit hard by:

"True-ups" - Outstanding fees that must be paid if the organization is found to be using licenses in excess of what is allowed in their service-level agreement
Additional financial penalties for violating the terms of the service-level agreement
A bill for the cost of the software audit that discovered the non-compliance issues
Retroactive licensing fees if there is a long history of improper deployment of software that violates the service-level agreement

The bottom line is that organizations need to remain in compliance with license agreements to avoid an expensive software audit that results in big fines. IT asset management software allows organizations to automatically detect what software has been installed on each computer that is connected to the company's network. Automated software detection can be cross-referenced with service-level agreements to ensure compliance and avoid hefty penalties associated with an unsuccessful software audit.

Software Usage Data and Analysis

When an organization purchases 10 software licenses but installs the software 15 times, it could be subject to penalties for violating its service-level agreement with the software provider—but what if the organization purchases 15 licenses and only installs the software 10 times?

Organizations are using IT asset management software to assess software installation and analyze software usage data, helping to eliminate excess costs associated with unused software licenses. Software applications can be used to track the number of machines on which a certain application has been installed, as well as the actual usage statistics for the application. After all, a license paid for is still wasted if the application is never touched by the user—and that's an opportunity for the organization to cut costs.

Purchasing and Contract Management

Many organizations track IT purchases through a procurement system while managing IT inventory through a separate system; in many cases, the link between the two systems is missing. This means that the folks responsible for managing IT assets may not have full visibility of the service-level agreements and contracts that govern software licenses and may not be able to properly plan for future purchases or see when software contracts need to be renewed.

IT asset management software needs to provide the big picture view of how the organization is addressing its needs for hardware and software by integrating procurement, contracts and IT management into one dashboard. In this way, organizations can accurately assess their current software and project their future needs in the same interface, allowing for effective strategic planning and budget allocation.

On the hardware side, transparency into purchasing allows IT asset managers to budget correctly for turnover of IT inventory, plan for new purchases in accordance with inventory that is approaching the end of its lifecycle and analyze financial data alongside IT inventory usage data to determine the best route for IT asset disposition.

What Is IT Asset Disposition?

IT asset disposition (ITAD) is a business built around the safe and ecologically responsible disposal of obsolete, outdated or unwanted IT products.

When a piece of hardware reaches the end of its normal lifecycle, IT inventory managers need to make informed decisions about what will happen to the equipment. Is it worth the cost to refurbish the equipment? How much could the life of the equipment be extended by an investment in refurbishing, and is it worth the cost? Should the asset be resold? If so, how should it be priced and what resources will the organization allocate towards coordinating a sale? Should the asset be recycled? What are the applicable rules and regulations (and rebates!) associated with that, and what are the risks of improperly recycling the asset? The organization may even choose to dispose of the asset altogether through a third-party ITAD firm.

Getting Started with IT Asset Management

Ivanti provides industry-leading solutions for organizations that wish to enable better strategic decision-making by increasing visibility and transparency of their IT infrastructure.

Get started today by requesting a product demo and see what Ivanti can do for your organization.

The Business Value of Integrating ITAM with ITSM

Mon, 17 May 2021 15:32:01 Z

As organizations experience increasing complexity and expanding perimeters, IT professionals are looking to get a better understanding into their distributed software and hardware assets. IT teams need immediate access to detailed information in context of services and underlying assets they run on to make more intelligent decisions about their IT investments. Having asset visibility at their fingertips enables them to maximize cost savings, secure assets, and improve the employee experience. In doing so, they align digital infrastructure with their business needs.

IT asset management, or ITAM, enables greater control over IT landscapes, and optimizes asset lifecycle management. Organizations are able to more quickly and easily manage costs, and improve agility and compliance.

ITAM starts with knowing what you have within your IT estate. As enterprise perimeters expand with multi-clouds, the everywhere workforce, and IoT, managing digital assets and their costs grows more complicated and expensive.

Visibility of digital assets improves help desk services

Without question, ITAM and ITSM are more effective when integrated. If you already use ITSM, but still use spreadsheets to track assets, integrating ITAM will make help desk staff and system admins more effective and improve the employee experience. By better understanding the lifecycle of enterprise-wide assets, and having the information easily consumed within an intuitive dashboard and in context of the service, they can make better service delivery and management decisions.

ITAM enables proactive service management by identifying, classifying and managing assets, no matter their location. Service desk personnel need detailed information about their user’s software and hardware. The information needs to be instantly available, so they can better support their users. With asset information at their fingertips, greater insights will be at their disposal to help resolve issues with efficiency and speed. ITAM helps service desk personnel identify trouble ticket patterns developing within specific software versions and hardware models. They can instantly see the product’s warranty status, so they can effectively guide the user.

Integrating ITAM helps improve IT service management operations and outcomes:

Service desk personnel need detailed information about hardware and software to understand the root causes behind the issues. ITAM can assist by quickly identifying and helping resolve conflicts related to unauthorized software that causes operational issues.
When users request new assets, it’s important to understand what they already have. ITAM helps the service desk avoid overprovisioning and overspending. It also prevents incompatibility issues, when new software is known to conflict with certain OS’s or applications.
Detailed information about the assets helps automate self-service capabilities. This is particularly true for role-based IT profiles. A new application request can be compared to the assets already installed on the user’s device, verified against approved software for their role, and automatically installed.

Leveraging spend intelligence

Integrating ITAM with IT service management helps save time and resources, lowers costs, and improves the utilization of IT assets. Research has shown that on average, organizations have 12 or more discovery and inventory tools. It’s no wonder IT spends an average of 10 hours per week resolving data-accuracy issues.

Clear visibility of IT assets, services, security posture, and processes leads to better IT insights, and therefore, better business outcomes. It lays the foundation for properly managing, securing, and optimizing your IT estate. According to the survey linked above, 43% of organizations still use spreadsheets to track their assets, 50% use endpoint management solutions, and 45% use inventory tools. These siloed products generate siloed service desk activities that take too much time and effort to identify, associate, correlate, and solve issues. ITAM uses a single dashboard view that correlates your entire asset inventory, to provide optimal service to customers.

Improving the digital experience

The challenges of expanding asset locations with work from anywhere users, clouds, and IoT devices, have never been so impactful. The swift and unprecedented changes we’ve experienced in the work environment have created avoidable security risks and preventable cost inflation. Detailed and accurate information of all assets is required for an agile enterprise, enabling flexibility for employees and apps delivered and supported from anywhere. IT teams need visibility that shows context. They require policies that dictate how assets are managed, deployed and used.

Enterprises are going through a digital transformation journey to improve business operations. However, no matter what stage they’re in, many still track their assets manually. ITAM is fundamental to a mature digital transformation. The advantages and use cases for ITAM abound, beginning with the enormous benefit of eliminating the manual effort of finding and keeping information up to date within spreadsheets. ITAM can help reduce the time required to understand contract positions and prepare renewals from weeks to minutes. Knowing where and what your assets are enables you to secure them and ensure software patches are current.

Complete visibility provides clarity and enables your service desk to act more decisively. Enterprises can improve the user experience, while ensuring IT will be even more productive and effective. The fusion of ITAM and ITSM significantly improves the IT organization’s ability to improve service quality and customer satisfaction. The end result is increased efficiency, a reduction in costs and risks, and overall improved effectiveness.