The continued surge in the number of obsolete IT assets is jeopardising both business and technology deliverables that are essential for an enterprise’s success in digital transformation.
A new International Data Corporation (IDC) report, IDC PeerScape: Practices for IT Asset Management, documents the five best practices for successful asset management being used by one highly visible world-class enterprise for the intersecting – yet transformational – demands of IT, security, and procurement. The practices address the emerging criticality of asset management to new 3rd Platform imperatives.
The new IDC PeerScape highlights a particular world-class enterprise that prioritized the implementation of an IT asset management (ITAM) process and toolset within the context of how attacks are able to approach data assets of large enterprises.
While the five ITAM practices highlighted are not obvious or self-evident to those initiating an ITAM effort for purposes of cybersecurity or application performance, this large enterprise identified these specific practices as critical to its long-term success in combating cyber-threats and application malfunction.
Validation of these practices has come in the form of multiple peer investigations by both government agencies and commercial enterprises, which have consistently stated that this global enterprise is at least one to two years ahead of the investigating the organisations’ own ITAM initiatives. Interest in the solutions that this enterprise implemented to effectively connect ITAM to cybersecurity continues to snowball.
“Our new IDC PeerScape offers actionable guidance to CIOs and other IT leaders in how to reduce the business risk and increase the critical knowledge of key applications that are associated with cyber-threats as well as resolve critical application downtime. We believe today’s technology leaders can benefit from having guidance on the practices and experiences of enterprises that have already undertaken some of the challenges of implementing ITAM solutions required by 3rd Platform capabilities,” says Bill Keyworth, vice-president of IDC’s Research Network.
IDC asserts that, while cybersecurity will be the key driver and the budget-enabling catalyst for funding such ITAM solutions, the enterprise will subsequently realize other outcomes and benefits dealing with financial IT management, life-cycle management, software licensing, portfolio management, and configuration management — thereby enhancing the whole ITAM value proposition.
While this kind of initiative is often targeted by enterprise architecture strategies, IDC is finding that appropriate questions generated by cybersecurity threats will provide the impetus to create reliable data for the enterprise’s IT assets. Subsequent leverage of effective ITAM within the 3rd Platform will enable levels of risk assessment, compliance, technology integration, and governance that were long thought of as improbable.