In November of 2004, the Department of the Navy announced an ambitious plan to
inventory the Navy's plethora of IT networks, servers, and applications. As of
June 2005, the Navy catalogued over 250,000 hardware and software systems
worldwide!
Most businesses, especially small and medium-sized
enterprises, don't have to worry about keeping tabs on hundreds of thousands of
systems scattered worldwide. Then again, SMEs don't have multibillion-dollar
operating budgets either.
It's absolutely necessary for businesses to
know the various IT assets they own and operate. So IT staffs must perform
periodic inventories of hardware and software assets. The key to a successful
inventory is developing a method that accomplishes the goal without busting the
budget.
Why Inventory?
Beyond the obvious fact
that knowing your assets makes good business sense, a few reasons specify why
it's a necessary task.
Regulatory initiatives, such as
Sarbanes-Oxley, HIPAA, and others, require that businesses keep close tabs on
the data their IT systems generate. Backup and archival strategies must ensure
data is easy to retrieve when it's needed.
Managing the life cycle
of data from generation to archival begins with a thorough understanding of the
IT assets that generate the data. Hardware and software asset inventories are
absolutely essential for gaining this knowledge and for prioritizing the efforts
required to protect important business systems and the data they generate.
Another reason for conducting IT asset inventories is to discover
areas of your IT infrastructure that require attention. For example, an asset
inventory might reveal that various servers in your data center need upgrades.
Without taking stock of what you have, purchasing new technology is a crapshoot
that may result in wasted money, time, and effort.
Finally,
inventorying your IT assets is especially important to ensure that you maintain
compliance with the various software licenses your business needs to operate. If
you don't know about a server a branch office purchased that suddenly puts you
out of compliance with a software licensing agreement, your business runs a
substantial risk of violating its licensing agreement. Plus, conducting an
inventory can help you quickly ferret out illegally installed, unlicensed copies
of software in your business.
Timing
One of the first questions that comes up regarding IT inventories is
frequency. How often should you inventory your business IT assets?
While there is no definite rule for the timing of inventories, the
frequency of change of your IT infrastructure should be the determining factor
here. If your business is growing and you are constantly purchasing new software
and/or hardware, you may need to conduct inventories more frequently, perhaps
every quarter. Conversely, if your IT infrastructure does not change very often,
you can get away with more time between inventories, for instance, once a year
or once every two years.
What To Track
What specific items
should be at the top of your inventory list? What items can you safely exclude?
Most hardware items in your business, such as servers, desktops, laptops, and
networking equipment and appliances, should be part of your inventory. This is
especially true for hardware operated under the terms of a contractual
agreement, such as a lease or a maintenance service contract.
In
fact, many asset management applications let you combine various properties of
an asset into one database application. For example, Peregrine Systems'
AssetCenter Portfolio lets you enter various financial, contractual, and
physical properties of an asset into a single, integrated data management
system.
In terms of prioritization, the more mission-critical assets
should receive the closest scrutiny. The same goes for software. For example,
you want to be sure that your business ERP system software stays fully compliant
with the terms of your licensing agreement with the vendor.
In fact,
software inventories and protection from damaging liability go hand in hand.
Software companies take an active interest in protecting their intellectual
property and in most cases (especially giants such as Microsoft and Oracle) have
the financial resources to go the distance in a legal dispute. The last thing
you need is a looming lawsuit because employees in your business installed
unlicensed copies of software applications.
Tools For Inventory
Control
IT asset management tools are available to help you
manage your data center infrastructure with ease. These applications are
specifically designed for asset management of servers, network equipment,
desktops, and software. Items you can track with these applications include
software licenses, OS update status, patches and updates, and the various
financial, contractual, and physical properties of hardware and software assets.
Examples of asset management applications that won't break an SME
budget include Altiris Inventory Solution and Executive Software's Sitekeeper
(primarily for inventory and tracking of software licenses). Peregrine Systems'
AssetCenter and IBM's Tivoli are examples of products aimed at the
larger-enterprise marketplace, but keep your eye on these companies because they
are making a concerted effort to reach SMEs. See the “Inventory Control Programs
& Tools†sidebar below for more information on inventory tools.
Another technology that may eventually play a role in IT asset
management and inventory control is RFID. RFID systems use small chips called
tags to store information about a product or a piece of equipment. The chips are
attached to a product or equipment; a business can then use an RFID reader to
retrieve information from tags and manage inventory, track product shipments as
they move down the supply chain, prevent theft, etc.
By its very
nature, RFID is ideal for situations where inventory control is a requirement.
RFID tags that store IT asset information could eventually let the vital
properties of an asset such as a server or router stay with the equipment
throughout its service life. For example, extracting details about a maintenance
or service contract for a server may be as simple as downloading the information
stored in an RFID tag on the server.
Humming Along
IT asset inventories and overall management are a crucial part of
keeping your data center infrastructure humming along smoothly. The advent of
new regulatory requirements that impose strict data control requirements on
businesses will force many IT staffs to improve the way they manage their
hardware and software assets. After all, you can't manage critical data if you
don't even know what equipment and applications generate it, so compliance
begins with good inventory and asset management controls. 
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