Organisations today manage offices with an inventory of desks that are filled with desktops and laptops. And these IT assets are packed with all sorts of applications. These assets, hardware, software, and its licences need to be maintained, updated, repaired, and replaced continuously. Wouldn’t it be a great help if you knew which IT assets your organisation has? And if you had a process in place to keep this information accurate? For instance, tracking all your laptops and their warrantee information can help you with budgeting, planning for replacements and support. And putting all your software licences in a database lets you keep track of when your licences expire. This, in a nutshell, is what Xari ITAM is about.
The Xari ITAM is a framework and set of processes for strategically tracking and managing the financial, physical, licensing and contractual aspects of IT assets through their life cycle.
The IT Asset Life Cycle
Life cycle management practices are required to improve the return on investment for IT assets, avoid internal and external audit consequences, and adopt future technology. We identify five stages to the asset lifecycle – requisition, procurement, deployment, maintenance, and retirement – and while many companies mistakenly believe that IT life cycle management begins when they receive an asset, the lifecycle actually commences when an asset is requisitioned. Similarly, life cycle management continues after an asset is no longer operationally active, extending to retirement and disposal activities.
Requisition 🡪 Procurement 🡪 Deployment 🡪 Maintenance 🡪 Retirement
We focus on the centralised management of financial (e.g. purchase price, cost events, supplier, etc.), contractual (e.g. terms and conditions, software entitlement, support agreements, leases, warranties, etc.) and physical (e.g. location, ownership, assignment, etc.) data about IT assets in an organisation.
Few businesses today could function without the IT assets – the hardware, software, network and other technologies – that support business operations. Not only are IT assets numerous, they’re expensive to acquire, configure, and maintain. IT assets are frequently moved, rapidly depreciate and require constant update and replacement.
We take on a holistic approach to managing the total useful life of your company’s IT hardware to maximise your return on investment. Your company’s hardware needs to be managed properly to ensure that you are making the most out of them. We help companies design, procure, deploy, secure/maintain, upgrade and ultimately choose the best option for disposition for their IT assets.
Our extensive knowledge and experience allows us to assist clients define their requirements and select the devices that meet their requirement and budget. Our engineers can assist in creating a structured deployment strategy and process-oriented implementation plan.
There are four main benefits to signing up with Xari ITAM: avoiding penalties, increasing efficiency and reducing costs, improving security and improving the agility of your organisation.
- Avoid penalties. IT Asset Management helps you keep track of legal, contractual and regulatory obligations. This can especially come in handy if you face regular audits. For example, if you register all your software licences, you’re not likely to overuse them.
- Increase efficiency and reduce costs.Know exactly which hardware and software your employees use, and more importantly don’t use.Xari ITAM helps you understand how and where your software is being used, and which technology is not. Removing assets that you don’t use and stockpiling surpluses prevents unnecessary purchases. This not only saves costs on maintenance, support and energy usage, but also reduces your carbon footprint.
- Improve security.Your IT security team or partner hardens, patches, monitors and audits each of your IT assets. Every redundant IT asset you can strike off your list is one less application to take care of, which increases your security. But the benefit is two-fold. Thanks to ITAM, and understanding who uses what, you also get the knowledge of who has access to sensitive data. Moreover, you can more logically restrict user permission.
- Improve agility. How do you make your IT purchases? On feel? Or more on knowledge? With ITAM, knowledge is power. You can track how your organisation uses assets over time, giving you the data to make decisions on operational need as well as strategic business sense.
