5 Risks You May Face Without IT Asset Management

It’s no secret that your IT assets are a foundational piece of your business. From servers to laptops and everything in between, these devices keep your network and your team up and running. To keep these items in working order, you need to accurately track their status and condition through IT asset management.

IT asset management is the practice of managing your organization’s technology assets throughout their lifecycles, from acquisition to disposal. When done well, IT asset management can help you gain visibility and control over your entire asset estate so you can improve operational efficiency, optimize asset usage, and minimize your total cost of ownership. While there are numerous other benefits to IT asset management, there are also several operational risks at stake when you don’t properly manage these items.

Let’s look at 5 risks you may face without IT asset management.

Lack of visibility into your assets

Without real-time data on your asset estate, you may not have the correct information on a device’s status, condition, or whereabouts. A lack of accurate information could cause you to assign a device to one employee when it’s already checked out to another. And without proper asset control, you’ll be unable to hold someone accountable for damaged, lost, or stolen devices.

Decreased productivity

When you don’t have the right tools to manage an essential part of your workforce – your IT assets – your team can’t work as productively as possible. They may be using old or damaged devices because the full asset lifecycle isn’t being tracked and they can’t easily request repairs in one centralized place. Without the best devices available, your team won’t be able to work as quickly or efficiently, causing you to lose a competitive advantage in the market.

Potential business disruptions

Lack of insight into your IT asset estate not only hurts your team’s productivity but can also lead to business disruptions. Whether a device gets lost or needs an unexpected replacement, that team member won’t be able to perform their job duties for the time being, and you’ll need to make an unforeseen purchase to get them up and running again.

Inability to report on and audit your asset estate

To understand what’s happening with your IT asset estate at any given time, you need to be able to pull real-time reports. When the leadership team or finance department requests IT asset reports or audits, you’ll have to input a lot of last-minute manual work to make that happen without the data readily available.

Inability to forecast future purchasing needs

Without accurate data on the full lifecycle of your IT assets, you’ll also struggle to accurately forecast and budget for future device purchases. This could land you in several unfavorable situations, from having too little to having a surplus of assets, not getting enough budget for the device models your team needs to perform their best, and so on.

Conclusion

When your organization’s IT devices aren’t effectively tracked and managed, your team will inevitably suffer from one or all of these risks at some point. And while it may seem overwhelming to plan and implement an IT asset management strategy, the benefits of doing so will certainly outweigh the cost.

But don’t worry, you don’t have to go it alone – we’ve laid out best practices for choosing the right IT asset management software and building an effective program that saves your team time and money. Read our IT Asset Management Best Practices blog post to get started on the right foot.

Whenever you’re ready to select your IT asset management platform, Asset Panda can help. Our easily customizable platform serves customers across 160+ industries, which means we adapt to the way you work. If you’re ready to see how Asset Panda can serve your use case, request your demo today.