IT Asset Management (ITAM) is all about monitoring and managing the assets available in your network. These assets play a huge role in the productivity of any organization. It is necessary to manage these assets with an ITAM solution to avoid risks and unwanted expenditure and improve efficiency and productivity. Equipping yourself with a comprehensive ITAM tool helps in monitoring the assets in your network, and reduce the downtime and discover, repair or replace damaged assets quickly. In work from home scenarios, an IT Asset Management (ITAM) software can help in monitoring the logon activity of employees with the list of active computers. Alerts can be configured to notify you about the changes in the hardware and software inventory. Unwanted applications can be prohibited or uninstalled from the assets automatically. Our IT Asset Management module provides an efficient ITAM solution that has ability to discover, manage and monitor IT Assets.

ITAM stands for Information Technology Asset Management and ITSM stands for Information Technology Service Management. ITAM focuses on hardware, software and networks of an organization whereas ITSM focuses on its customer-oriented IT services. ITAM and ITSM are both branches of IT Management but are mutually exclusive in nature. While ITAM aims on magnifying the value of the company's assets using an ITAM solution, ITSM aims at magnifying the IT service delivery of the company.

A. Hardware Asset Management: Hardware asset management is the part of an ITAM system that involves the management of tangible devices such as laptops, desktops, keyboards, printers, etc. Our ITAM software allows you to categorize your computers based on OS, manufacturer, disk usage, age, and device type and hardware assets based on manufacturer and types. You can also configure alerts to notify you if any new hardware is detected in your network with our IT asset management solution. B. Software asset management: Software asset management of an ITAM system involves the management of all the software applications/executable that are installed on endpoints in a network within an organization using an IT asset management system. It also involves software license management, software metering and much more. You can also prohibit certain applications by adding them on the prohibited software list. Our ITAM software also allows you to configure compliance alerts to stay software license compliant at all times. c. Digital asset management: Digital asset management is a part of an ITAM system that deals with the management of documents, pictures, videos or in general, data in any form that has been paid for, produced or is being managed by your enterprise.

Enterprises now-a-days can have anywhere between 1000 to 100,000+ devices in their networks and it goes without saying that a centralized and automated IT asset management software is required to track and manage these IT assets. ITAM process not only allows you to do that, but it also gives you the visibility and insights required to strategize and make informed IT asset procurement decisions while mitigating the risks in the most cost-efficient way possible. Real-time asset tracking is one of the unique features of ITAM software enhancing the tracking process. An IT asset manager can also be cloud-based offering flexibility in access and management. Also, consistent focus on assets by an ITAM software allows little room for unexpected asset failure and other associated problems.

IT asset management software is crucial to any enterprise that possesses numerous endpoints in its network. Let us say that an enterprise has 500 computers and other hardware components like keyboard, mouse, etc. Each of these desktops and laptops will have various applications installed in them and computer asset management without an ITAM system will become an onerous task. An IT asset manager is required to keep track of all these IT assets in an enterprise. An ITAM process enables an IT admin to monitor the number of assets available to avoid unwanted expenditures, repetitive purchases, and productivity and security issues. The applications installed in a computer may contain prohibited software that may raise productivity and compliance issues. IT asset management software also allows an admin to monitor and manage software assets by overseeing licensed software usage and prohibiting unwanted software.An ITAM tool also allows scanning of specific file types to review the memory usage of these files. Alerts can be configured for every change induced in these assets, thus giving the user and admin control and clarity over the IT assets. A comprehensive IT asset management solution is necessary to offer accurate asset reports irrespective of the number of assets present in the organization. Also understanding the usage of your assets with an IT asset management solution gives you greater control over the efficiency of the organization.

ISO/IEC 19770-1 is a process framework to enable an organization to prove that it is performing ITAM to a standard sufficient to satisfy Corporate Governance requirements and ensure effective support for ITSAM overall. ISO/IEC 19770-2 provides an ITAM data standard for software identification tags ("SWID"). ISO/IEC 19770-3 provides an ITAM data standard for software entitlements, including usage rights, limitations and metrics ("ENT") ISO/IEC 19770-4 provides an ITAM data standard for Resource Utilization Measurement ("RUM") ISO/IEC 19770-5 provides the overview and vocabulary.

The ISO/IEC 19770-1:2017 standard for IT asset management defines this practice as the coordinated activity of an organization to realize value from IT assets, which include equipment, software, media, license contracts, and associated tools and metadata.

The following are five best practices that will help IT organizations to improve their IT asset management processes and derive full value from their investment.
1. Adopt a lifecycle approach End-to-end management of the IT asset’s interaction with the service environment brings the benefits of visibility and control.
2. Ensure governance and accountability Direction and monitoring of IT asset acceptable use (per COBIT and ITIL4 guidance) are vital in ensuring effective usage, coupled with assignment of ownership.
3. Automate and integrate The right digital tool will enhance the visibility of the IT asset deployment and facilitate interconnection with other business systems for full value extraction.
4. Engage in proactive verification and auditing IT asset compliance to internal and external regulatory and statutory requirements will only happen with planned periodic checks on status.
5. Tie ITAM to ITSM practices Incident, change, configuration, problem, and information security management practices can only fulfill their full potential with a well run IT asset management practice.

HAM and SAM Hardware Asset Management (HAM) and Software Asset Management (SAM) go hand-in-hand. A SAM project will not work as effectively or successfully without having HAM processes in place, or some form of HAM management structure.

SAM processes need to incorporate HAM, and vice versa.

Software has impacts on hardware (is the hardware spec powerful enough to run the software?) and hardware impacts on software (legacy software that only works on certain spec desktops).