Asset Life Cycle Management – Why is It Important for your Business?
As an asset manager, you know the importance of asset lifecycle management in a competitive market. As a matter of fact, boosting assets can catapult your business image while maximizing your business ROI. Being the pillars of your organizations, it’s not enough to keep these IT assets in running condition. In order to increase organizational productivity and optimize the profit generated from these assets, you need to do more than that. In fact, you have to plan well ahead if you want to replace, expand or upgrade your IT assets. Moreover, one key element of the IT asset maintenance plan is how often should you conduct the hardware refreshes, discard old software usage and perform license renewals.
- Is your IT asset Lifecycle Management up to date?
- Are you tracking the license expiration of your tech inventory?
Let’s get these cracking.
What is IT Asset Lifecycle Management (ITALM)
Generally speaking, IT Asset Lifecycle Management (ITALM) is a systematic process of maintaining and monitoring your IT infrastructure (software and hardware). Usually, IT asset maintenance includes a set of business practices that helps you optimize asset usage while identifying inefficient processes in each stage of the lifecycle. One significant challenge of the asset management lifecycle is to keep track of your enterprise tech inventory. That is to say, upgrade, replacing a hardware piece, additions, removal, change requests over the equipment’s lifecycle. Regardless of small or the mid-size business, keeping up to infrastructure efficiency and performance not only keeps the technology inventory up to date but also minimize related overhead expenses.
You better know that your IT infrastructure is growing. An asset, no matter, how big or small, goes through respective life-cycle stages. Henceforth, the asset manager must know the asset expiration date before the end-user does. From time to time, new users are added, new IT assets (hardware and software) are updated. Being a system admin, you are responsible to track, manage and monitor these assets. But, how often do you refresh your IT assets for asset lifecycle management? In order to understand this, let’s delve a little deeper to the management of your IT hardware and software’s productive asset lifecycle.
Types of IT Asset Lifecycle
To put it simply, the depreciation of your IT assets lifecycle is twofold:
- Eventually, the machinery wears down and replaced by newer models with upgraded specs
- Software acquisitions and disposal, software licenses expire and move toward new licensing models
Why should you plan for IT Asset maintenance
While it’s not ideal to wait until your asset needs a desperate refresh, planning for the asset lifecycle management solution well ahead can be a great time saver. Ask the Industry experts who recommend not more than 5 years of refresh cycle for servers, computers, and IT hardware. Moreover, when it comes to gaining control over your IT inventory, incorporating asset management solution makes a great sense. In particular, deeper visibility into your hardware and software assets or any other network infrastructure increases the traceability of your assets across the IT landscape.
If you are investing a bare minimum for asset maintenance and management life cycle, you are making a mistake. Operational strategies of your IT assets are greatly dependent on asset management decisions. Remember. Assets, when they break down can cause more delays or downtime while posing greater environmental risks. Besides, without an IT asset maintenance strategy, the entire decision-making process boils down to a risky and costly affair. Henceforth, making the right choice for machines, software, and equipment while ensuring safety for future events is crucial for the asset and maintenance managers. To know about the asset management guidelines and principles, refer to ISO 55000.
Stages of IT asset maintenance lifecycle
IT Asset Management lifecycle stages can be broken down into 4 stages:
1. Planning
This is the first stage of the asset lifecycle which includes verification of the asset requirements. This is where you should identify the management strategies after evaluating the asset requirements to meet service delivery needs. The primary objective of asset planning is ensuring a healthy lifecycle of IT assets that support every aspect of IT infrastructure. Also, it achieves the desired benefits of improved operations and adds value to the business.
2. Acquisition
Once you identify the cost and the requirement for new assets, you need to ascertain which assets to obtain or purchase. At this instant, you look to negotiate the best possible deal to negotiate and procure the activities after choosing the best option. The goal is to ensure cost-effective acquisition to meet service delivery objectives and other identified needs for your organization.
3. Maintenance
As the assets ages, you need to monitor your hardware regularly. This includes installing software patches, proper malware scans, patch upgrades, etc. to increase its productive life. Besides, this ensures that the asset is optimized to function faster than before while delivering a superior quality of work. Here, identify the potential improvement areas that not only secure the infrastructure but improves the asset’s functional efficiency.
4. Disposal
Is your IT hardware machinery functioning correctly? Has it reached the end of the lifecycle? Watch out! If your asset is outdated or no longer meets its intended use, it has to be disposed of. However, the decision of asset disposal is based on productivity and service deliverables. If it incurs productivity losses, it barely makes any financial sense to continue the usage.
Truly, the IT assets lifecycle if well-managed can extend beyond the business as well. Therefore, optimizing asset management not only helps in identifying risks and opportunities but also improves the organization’s cybersecurity posture.
Looking for an asset management system for your organization? Contact us to benefit from our tailored solutions to help you progress to the next stage.
