Tracking IT assets has become more complex as the nature of these assets has rapidly changes. Given these changes, how should IT manage its assets?
Managing corporate assets has been an essential function of every enterprise, and now IT is being pressed to do the same with its technology assets. To learn how this change came to be, what assets should be measured, and what’s driving the need for IT inventories.
Enterprise Strategies: What kind of assets need to be measured? How has this changed in the last 10 years? How do you expect it to change in the next 10?
The diversity of technology asset classes and their total count has grown exponentially over the past few years. As technology-driven innovation continues to penetrate new industries and business functions this diversity, the count is going to grow even more dramatically. IT assets will need to be measured for a variety of business, risk, and operational management reasons in the future.
Looking backward 10 or 20 years, IT assets primarily resided in a data center — large and easily countable mainframes or minicomputers, storage devices, and networking equipment sitting in highly protected environments.
The client/server evolution of the early 1990s, and then the dramatic impact of the Internet in the late 1990s onward, has changed this scenario. From a few big boxes, the world of IT assets has grown to include millions of desktops and laptops, hundreds of millions of PDAs and other handhelds, to a growing number of IP-based telephony and similar equipment. The data center has evolved from a few mainframes to thousands of mid-range servers and blades, some of which can often be in a wiring closet at a branch office rather than in a dust-free data center.
As we look 10 years hence, the landscape changes will be even more dramatic. They’ll be driven by three major trends: increased technology-driven innovation of business processes, greater adoption and sophistication of mobile devices, and dramatic penetration of virtualization.
Business assets that will be “on the network” and need to be continuously monitored; this will include a broad range of equipment from MRI machines and CAT scanners in hospitals to intelligent pumps at gas stations and checkout counters in supermarkets (and in fact, some of these are already here).
Mobile devices will continue to become the preferred computing platform for a range of professionals, who will expect secure access to many of their key applications, and thus IT will need to ensure that they’re appropriately configured and tracked.
Finally, virtualization of computing and storage environments will become pervasive in data centers and on desktops, creating a much more dynamic infrastructure that will need to be constantly measured and managed.
The diversity and complexity of these devices, and their critical need within the business, place significant pressure on IT organizations to measure them and ensure that business and operational risks are mitigated.
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