Strategies to mitigate IT asset management risks
Your people might be your business’s most important asset, but in the digital age, your technology is a close second. Yet, the same devices and software solutions that keep your team connected and productive can also expose your company to a variety of risks, from security threats to wasteful spending to business continuity issues.
Mitigating those risks is an essential part of IT asset management (ITAM). A robust ITAM solution helps you identify vulnerabilities in your tech stack and your device management processes. This way, you can develop actionable strategies for responding to threats—in advance and in real-time.
Types of technology risk
Understanding IT asset management risks can help you determine your company’s risk exposure and develop effective mitigation strategies. The most common types of IT asset management risks include:
- Security risk: lost or stolen devices, “leaky apps,” malware, ransomware, unauthorized access
- Compliance and regulatory risks: non-compliance with software licensing, state and international privacy laws, and industry-specific data protection regulations
- Financial risk: uncontrolled IT costs, noncompliance fines, device depreciation, taxation
- Operational risk: system outages, business continuity/disaster recovery, shadow IT
Many of these IT asset management risks can’t be completely avoided, but you can take preventive measures to reduce the likelihood of these risk events occurring and limit the business impact if they do occur.
The risk of poor IT asset management
Effective ITAM combines IT asset management software and risk mitigation best practices to ensure proper tracking, data security, and tech compliance. What is the risk of poor IT asset management, and what impact could it have on your business?
Data losses
Data is the lifeblood of any modern company. If you can’t effectively manage the devices and apps that manage your data, your data could easily fall into the wrong hands. Unperfomed software updates, unpatched systems, outdated hardware, misconfigured devices, shadow IT, and lost or stolen devices can all leave your data vulnerable to hackers.
Security vulnerabilities are a major risk of poor asset management, considering cybercrime is steadily rising, along with the cost of data breaches. In 2022, nearly half (47%) of all U.S. companies experienced some form of cyberattack, costing an average $18,000 for a single attack, according to the Hiscox Cyber Readiness Report. Cybersecurity Ventures predicts cybercrime will grow by 15 percent per year over the next three years, costing companies $8 trillion USD globally in 2023 and $10.5 trillion by 2025.
Productivity losses
When IT assets are not properly managed, they’re not properly maintained, making them more likely to break down or malfunction. And when your business technology isn’t working, your team can’t work either.
Unplanned downtime decreases productivity for affected end users and can negatively affect the customer experience. It also requires your IT helpdesk agents to spend precious time and resources troubleshooting and repairing assets—responding to incidents that could have been avoided with routine maintenance.
Noncompliance-related losses
Compliance is an important aspect of ITAM. Many industries require businesses to maintain accurate records of their IT assets and to meet certain asset maintenance and disposal standards. Some industries, regions, and states also have strict data privacy policies governing the use of customer and employee data. Meanwhile, individual software vendors often have strict policies regarding how their products can be used. If your business fails to comply with any of these standards, laws, or policies, you could face steep fines or even legal issues.
According to KPMG, 55% of businesses have been penalized for some sort of regulatory or compliance breach, costing them 1.5% of their profits.
Financial losses
Security breaches, noncompliance, and productivity losses all take a toll on your bottom line. Poor asset management can also put a dent in your IT budget. Lost or stolen assets must be replaced, leading to unnecessary spending. Meanwhile, poorly maintained assets drain IT resources and depreciate more quickly, leading to costly repairs.
Inadequate asset tracking can also increase your business tax rate. If you can’t properly track asset depreciation, your business might unknowingly submit inaccurate financial reports. If you get audited, this can come back to haunt you, affecting both your taxation and credibility.
Reputation losses
Security breaches, privacy policy violations, and unplanned downtime all reflect poorly on your company and can damage your relationship with customers, partners, and investors. Customers might not trust you to protect their data, while investors and partners might not trust you to meet their deadlines.
Either way, the loss of confidence in your business can negatively impact your sales, publicity, and even your legal standing.
Understanding risk across industries
Accurate IT inventory management and robust cybersecurity are important for all businesses in the digital age, but the stakes are higher in highly regulated industries such as healthcare, financial services, transportation, and manufacturing.
For example, healthcare providers are subject to Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) regulations, which sets strict standards for how patient data (and any devices or software that access patient data) must be secured. Failure to comply can cost providers between $100 and $50,000 per violation, with a max penalty of $1.5 million per year. Due to HIPAA and other data compliance issues, healthcare data breaches are the most costly — on average, $4.45 million per incident.
Financial services firms such as banks and credit card vendors are subject to Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI-DSS) compliance, and data breaches can cost up to $500,000 per incident.
Even if your business is not part of a highly regulated industry, you might be subject to state or federal data privacy laws such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), and the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act of Canada (PIPEDA). You must also consider software compliance, which can be costly to violate.
Whatever compliance issues you face, device and software asset management are critical to mitigate technology risks and protect your business.
Risk management strategies
The key to effective technology risk management is informed decision-making. That starts with having a clear, complete, accurate understanding of your organization’s assets, their configuration/status, where they are in the asset lifecycle, and what they are being used for.
A good asset management tool—or an ITIL-compliant IT Service Management (ITSM) solution with ITAM capabilities—can help your organization implement the following risk management strategies:
1. Unify your asset inventory
Your IT team can’t manage, maintain, and secure all your IT assets if they don’t know what (and where) they are. And if this information is spread out across multiple databases and spreadsheets, it’s hard to keep this important information up-to-date. This is one of the major risks of not having IT asset management.
Modern ITAM software lets you consolidate your asset inventory in one, always-updated place so you can glean real-time, AI-enhanced insights into your IT asset inventory. It also lets your IT team build a multisource Configuration Management Database (CMDB), which serves as an integrated source of truth for your assets and their complete lifecycle. At a glance, you have complete visibility into your on-premise and cloud infrastructure and the relationship between all your hardware and software, so you can monitor them and analyze IT asset management risks.
2. Install a remote monitoring agent on all your devices
By integrating a device management or endpoint management solution into your ITAM software, you can monitor your IT assets in real-time, no matter where they are. This way, you’re continually gathering important information about each asset, including:
- Location
- Installed software
- Antivirus and firewall status
- Update requirements for the device’s OS and software
- Preventive maintenance data
- Security vulnerabilities
3. Prevent shadow IT
The greatest threat to your organization’s data security is your end users. Gartner predicts that human failures and IT talent shortages will contribute to more than half of all significant corporate data breaches by 2025. Gartner also found that 69% of workers bypassed their employer’s cybersecurity guidance in 2022, and 74% said they would be willing to do so if it helped them “achieve a business objective.”
Unsecured or “leaky” apps can pose a major security threat, while unauthorized software usage can expose your organization to legal liabilities. Robust ITAM solutions offer auto discovery capabilities that identify all the software used in your enterprise so your IT team can monitor devices for shadow IT, restrict downloading of unauthorized apps, and automate processes to manage it all.
4. Track software contracts to ensure compliance
Software compliance is among the important IT asset management best practices, and ITAM software can help by auto-discovering all the software and SaaS cloud services in use across your organization. This way, you can maintain a unified record of all your contracts, software licenses, and automate renewals so they never expire.
A good ITAM solution will also flag use of unauthorized software or let you know when employees are using software in an unauthorized way. This information helps you avoid compliance issues, related fines, and legal trouble.
5. Regularly audit all assets
Even with ITAM software monitoring your IT assets in real-time, it’s important to routinely audit your inventory, not only to conduct a risk assessment but also to identify potential process improvements.
ITAM solutions make asset audits easy by putting all the information you need in one place. Leading solutions make it even easier by offering mature ITAM features such as advanced reporting and AI-enhanced data analytics.
ITAM software as a tool for decision-makers
IT asset management software is an important component of your company’s overall ITSM system—providing a common and consistent place to manage asset inventory and asset management lifecycle activities. This information helps decision-makers:
- Quantify the cost of underutilized hardware and software assets
- Plan for future IT capacity needs
- Control IT spending
- Support other ITSM processes
- Avoid IT asset management risks such as data breaches and noncompliance
Like the knowledge locked away in dusty books in the stacks of a library, your company can’t realize the full value of your ITAM data unless decision-makers know it’s there and can easily access the information they need.
Freshservice understands that an IT asset management system isn’t just there to help your company amass knowledge—it’s there to help you use it. The Freshservice ITAM solution not only supports the basic data and lifecycle management activities that you’d expect as part of an ITSM solution—in the out-of-the-box and easy-to-understand way that you’ve come to expect from Freshservice— but it also seeks to make your asset management data more readily available to other ITSM processes and decision-makers that need it to understand and manage risk.
In other words, Freshservice doesn’t just help you manage your assets; it helps you optimize them for modern IT operations.
