Today organizations are faced with a number of problems as they try to manage their IT assets

• Constant growth in the number of workstations
• A wide variety of equipment and software
• High turn over of equipment
• Difficulty in managing licenses and updates
• Constant change as companies reorganize and mergers occur
• Increasing growth in mobile and remote computing
• Managing maintenance and leasing contracts

Effective control begins with a comprehensive inventory that should include information about each computer or other network device, a list of installed software, the physical locations of each device and continue by constantly tracking any changes as they occur.

Increasingly, directives from upper management emphasize that inventories must be complete, accurate and up to date.

In the past many organizations have relied on annual physical inventories for the basic asset information they needed. Even now, many organizations are still performing annual inventories that involve a combination of electronic discovery and a team of individuals who collect and consolidate purchasing records and the discovered audit information.

As a result, fundamental information like the current location and configuration of an organization's IT assets often remains unknown until the year-end inventory.
And since assets are acquired, moved, changed, and retired on a daily basis, the year-end inventory becomes obsolete almost immediately.

Organizations are certainly aware of these problems, but before they can proceed, they must answer some basic questions:

• What assets do we currently have?
• Where are these assets located?
• How are these assets changing over time?

With a good asset discovery and tracking solution, these answers can be readily available in a central asset repository.

Any discovery and tracking solution should coexist with the existing business processes and network infrastructure, automatically discovering all the distributed hardware and software assets on a regular basis and transparently assembling a comprehensive list of the enterprise-wide assets into an open architecture repository.

This repository should include an accurate, up to date view and a comprehensive audit history of IT assets, enabling organizations to determine what they look like today, what changes have occurred and where those assets are located now not where they were six months ago.

Additionally, with an asset tracking solution that actively monitors software deployment, organizations can immediately determine if they have excess licenses or license violations of any software application

There is a lot of discussion within organizations about the total cost of ownership (TCO). This is often seen as a textbook concept because of its complexity. A company can often spend months analysing its TCO. The more pragmatic an approach they take – going ahead and implementing an audit discovery and tracking solution – then the more it will get done.

In today’s constantly changing environment to effectively manage your IT assets, installing an automated discovery tool that continually monitors all Installs, Moves, Adds and Changes is the only way to provide the instant feedback that is demanded by senior management.