IT Asset Tracking
Tracking of your IT Assets is not an easy task. IT Asset tracking can be divided into two categories,
inventory of hardware and inventory of software. The inventory of software are twofold, first the
tracking of the actual installed software and then the software license compliance aspect.
Why implement an IT Asset tracking (Inventory) Solution?
First you have to identify why you need to track your IT Assets.
- OS Upgrade - You are in the process of upgrading your Operating Systems to a new service pack or even a new version and need to find out if your current hardware can run the new upgrade/version.
- Audit - You make an audit because of proactive software license compliance reasons. (Software Asset Management is an important ITIL
process. Read more about ITIL in our compliance section.)
- BSA (the Business Software Alliance at www.bsa.org) contacts you and wants to know your software license compliance status.
- Dilligence - Another company is buying your company and need to find out what your comapany's IT Assets are worth/costs
- Consolidation - You are in the process of consolidating your servers and need to know what you have today
- Contract Management - You want to track your Support And Maintenance contracts as well as your license agreements and proactively plan for renewals or consolidation.
- General compliance - Are your hardware and software platform compliant to the company standard platform? If not, identify which machines does not comply.
Automate IT Asset tracking
When you have decided upon implementation of an IT Asset tracking solution you should automate the inventory management process and have it natively integrated with your Windows environment.
If not, you have to purchase new servers and spend a lot of time designing the new solution. This is probably something you don't want to do.
Another important aspect is that the product must be quick to install, easy to understand and operate. In addition you would most likely also
need a deployment product together with your IT Asset tracking/inventory solution. It benefits you if the inventory and deployment solution are both integrated into Active Directory and Windows.
We suggest you look at our IT Asset tracking product Specops Inventory. Specops Inventory uses Group Policy to work so you don't need
any extra hardware or configuration to make Specops Inventory work.
If you are in need of a software deployment solution as well please read more in the Software Deployment solution section.
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