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A real-time asset inventory lets you discover, list, track, and manage your IT assets in real time. It increases asset visibility and lets you keep your inventory updated with the latest asset information. You can use this data to detect inconsistencies and security risks and resolve them to prevent delays in operations.
Now imagine you’ve no way to track assets in your network. You’ve lost your manual records and new assets are introduced in your network while existing ones are changing in terms of usage, location, data, etc.
Running your business under such conditions is like operating underwater with no map or radar and no way to find out what’s happening below the deck.
Real-time inventory is one way to solve this.
In this article, we’ll discuss what real-time inventory is, its benefits, why you need it, and how to build and secure your inventory.
Real-time asset inventory management means continuously identifying, organising, storing, documenting, tracking, and updating the assets of an organisation and their details in real time. The assets could be physical, such as computer systems, buildings, physical files, facilities, etc. Or, these could be virtual or IT assets, such as software systems, applications, cloud resources, software licenses, data stored in systems, and so on.
IT asset inventory management is about knowing and tracking assets connected to your network and their locations, current condition, usage, and other important details. To do this, organisations use real-time asset inventory systems to keep asset details updated in real time and ensure no devices or applications enter your network without proper authorisation and approvals by the IT team. This protects your organisation from shadow IT, insider threats, unauthorised asset/data access, and other cyber threats.
Maintaining asset inventory in real time gives organisations better control over their IT assets. You can add/remove assets according to usage to keep costs in check and make sure you account for all assets in your cybersecurity plan. This helps you manage security and compliance risks and makes your operations more efficient.
Let’s discuss the challenges of asset management for organisations when maintaining real-time asset inventory:
Lack of Visibility
You might have hundreds of IT assets in your on-premise and cloud environments. With no visibility and controls in place, tracking and managing each asset and its location, condition, usage, documentation, and data stored in it becomes challenging.
If you do it manually, it will consume too much effort, time, and resources. Also, you can’t rely on manual records as they could be stolen or lost due to a physical calamity, employee mistake, or by any other means. When that happens, you may lose sight of your IT assets. This is dangerous for your organisation, and even more for companies with a remote workforce. You can attract all sorts of risks, such as unauthorised access, malicious activities, data theft, and so on.
Inaccurate Data
Your inventory must have the correct data for each asset. Manual errors, such as spelling mistakes and errors in descriptions, location, or code, during data entry, will increase the difficulty in maintaining real-time asset inventory.
Apart from accuracy, asset information must also be consistent, complete, updated, relevant, valid, and timely. Not being able to maintain data quality is another reason why organisations face difficulty while managing asset inventory in real time.
For example: A software licence has expired but you don’t have a system to track it accurately in real time. This will delay your operations.
Asset Failure
You may face unexpected breakdowns with IT assets. For example, a computer system may crash all of a sudden or an application could stop responding.
But if you don’t monitor these events, you will be late in inspecting and repairing the asset. And when it does, it takes a toll on the productivity of individuals using that asset. Without a proper system, you won’t be able to record how much was invested during the repairs after a breakdown. This will add up the cost and influence your finances.
What’s even more concerning: the damage could progress with time, (in case of issues like a cyberattack), and the mitigation cost could further increase.
Improper Disposal
Accurate data about an asset’s disposal is an important part of asset inventory. It tells what assets were disposed of when and how. It helps you keep your inventory accurate and updated.
However, if you don’t document this process in a reliable system, you may lose this information. This could be a problem during audits and financial decision-making.
For example, a laptop has been decommissioned but this information is not updated in the inventory. The budget will cover the asset again, increasing unnecessary costs.
Security Risks
How can you protect your IT assets if you can’t see them?
Cyberattackers constantly look for vulnerable IT assets to exploit and enter your network. And when they are successful at it, they can gain unauthorised access to your network, steal confidential data, and damage your finances and reputation.
This tells how important managing and securing your IT assets is. It is hardly possible if you don’t have a full picture of all the IT assets in your network.
Compliance Risks
Without a proper way to monitor, track, and update licencing agreements and comply with applicable laws and regulations, you may face compliance risks.
Cyberattacks could expose the data of your business and customers. It indicates your organisation’s data protection capabilities are not enough against advanced threats. This will increase scrutiny from regulatory bodies, such as HIPAA, GDPR, SAMA, etc. and incur penalties and fines.
IT asset inventory management is about tracking and managing assets and their data. It’s done to maintain a single source of truth for all the assets, such as software, hardware, cloud resources, IoT devices, etc. connected to an organisation’s network.
On the other hand, IT asset management is an umbrella term that includes various processes, including inventory management. Organisations use IT asset management solutions to track and manage an asset’s:
Complete lifecycle - procurement, deployment, usage, maintenance, and disposal
Discovery of each asset within the network
Inventory management to list assets and their location
Financial management to track costs that come with each asset and maximise the ROI
Security and compliance management to protect assets from cyberattacks and compliance risks
| Parameter | Asset Management | Inventory Management |
| Scope | Manages the complete asset lifecycle along with their discovery, inventory, security, compliance, and finances | Manages asset inventory by tracking and controlling software and hardware stocks |
| Coverage | Broad coverage | Focused only on inventory |
| Aim | Maximise the value of assets and improve decision-making about asset planning, replacements, upgrades, and security | Maintain a single source of truth for all the assets in real time and make sure the stock is not running out or overflowing |
| Cost | Includes costs of asset procurement, storage, management, maintenance, renewals, and disposal | Includes costs of storage, management, and renewals |
Full Visibility
Using real-time inventory management software, you can visualise your entire IT assets in a single place, whether it’s on-premises or in the cloud. You can track each asset’s details, such as its location, who’s assigned to use it, the data it stores, where it’s sourced from, its license information, costs related to purchase and maintenance, when it’s decommissioned, and so on.
Also, the asset inventory software saves you from recording asset data manually which could be lost or stolen. Instead, your asset information will be stored safely in the software and is easy to access anytime and anywhere you want.
Operational Efficiency
Forget about manually documenting and tracking each IT asset, which is time and resource-consuming. Using a real-time asset inventory management solution, you can overview and track everything in an easy-to-access interface and manage your assets effortlessly.
This keeps you on top of your assets to be able to spot issues, such as asset breakdowns, expired licences, unapproved or redundant systems, and more. These real-time asset insights help you fix issues faster and avoid operational delays or downtimes. You will be able to repair assets in time, renew software licenses timely, and remove unnecessary or suspicious systems.
Security
Each asset in your network increases your attack surface. They could have security vulnerabilities, bugs, failed updates, etc. that attackers can exploit to carry out a cyberattack.
Real-time asset inventory management software works like a surveillance or CCTV system that can capture these events and let you view them. This means you can quickly monitor your assets around the clock and identify security risks and abnormal behaviours. This will help you fix security gaps while you still have time and prevent cyber threats.
Compliance
Regulations, such as GDPR, ISO 27001, etc. require you to adhere to data privacy norms. Non-compliance to these regulations could be disastrous for your organisation’s reputation and finances. You could face extensive legal proceedings and may have to pay fines.
Using a real-time inventory management solution helps you track your assets accurately and ensure their information is correct, updated, complete, and consistent. You can track compliance issues in licensing agreements, paperwork, data protection measures etc. and resolve them quickly to get audit-ready.
Improved ROI
Each asset in your network comes with a cost, whether it’s for the acquisition, management, protection, maintenance, or disposal.
An asset inventory management tool helps you maximise the ROI of each asset. It shows accurate data about the assets so you can make better decisions for their allocation and planning. You can remove assets you don’t need, improve asset utilisation, and keep costs in check.
If you are wondering how to create a real-time asset inventory, let us walk you down each step:
Discover Assets
The step is to identify all the IT assets in your cloud and on-premises network. It could be hardware, software, applications, computers, laptops, smartphones, IoT devices, servers, cloud resources, containers, data, and more.
You can use automated tools to identify your IT assets as the manual process is way longer and exhausting. An advanced tool will scan your complete network to find assets from each corner.
Next, list and document each asset with its accurate details, such as location, allocated user, department, procurement and disposal cost, and more.
Categorise Your Assets
After you know what assets to manage and protect, categorise them to make the process easier. You can do it with the following categories:
Physical assets: computers, mobile devices, IoT devices, sensors, and other systems you can touch physically
Digital assets: applications, cloud services, databases, cloud containers, data stored in systems, and other assets you can’t physically touch
Shadow IT: applications, tools, and devices employees use without your IT team’s approval
Department: Type of assets used in different departments
Criticality: Classify assets based on how important they are for your organisation’s operations or the sensitivity of the data they store
Secure Your Asset Inventory
Once you have listed your assets, you will need to set up a way to be able to track and manage your assets in real time. As we have previously discussed, manual record tracking won’t be enough as they can easily be misplaced or lost and take quite a while.
Use advanced tools, such as unified asset management (UAM) and inventory tracking solutions to automate the process of managing and tracking your assets. The tool will provide a unified view of all your IT assets and their data, so you can track them easily in real time. It will help you detect issues, such as outdated data, inconsistencies, license expires, etc. and fix them quickly. You can also find security and compliance risks and resolve them to restore operations.
You can also integrate your asset inventory with:
Security information and event management (SIEM) to detect and analyse threats in real-time
Security orchestration, automation, and response (SOAR) to respond to security incidents automatically and save time
Establish Asset Lifecycle Management Policies
Assets, too, come with a lifespan. For example, your computer may break down at any time or stop working after a period. It’s important to manage their lifespan to safely commission/decommission new assets, control their usage, and protect them from threats.
To do this effortlessly, you need to define a solid asset lifecycle management policy. It should cover the rules for each stage of the asset lifecycle from its acquisition and usage to maintenance and disposal.
Monitor Continuously
A lot happens with an asset; its user could change, it could expire, vulnerabilities could develop in it, its usage changes based on operations, and so on.
This is why you should monitor each of your assets. Again manual monitoring is not a good option anymore as you must have plenty of IT assets to manage and secure. Use automated IT asset management solutions to monitor all your assets continuously to spot outdated or incorrect data, renew licences, manage their usage, security and compliance risks, and more. This way, you can resolve these issues and manage them in real time.
Maintaining a real-time IT asset inventory helps you track and manage your assets, detect and resolve issues, and protect assets from threats.
The unified asset management (UEM) solution by Microminder CS eases the complexity for organisations while managing their assets. It offers an integrated inventory management solution to identify and classify your IT assets. It helps you keep an up-to-date inventory and protect your organisation from shadow IT, insider threats, and other threats.
Here’s what we offer in our UEM:
Automated asset discovery and classification across on-prem, cloud, and hybrid environments
Asset lifecycle management, from commission and running to decommission
Advanced security risk and vulnerability management with penetrating testing and vulnerability assessments
Incident response plan and mitigation strategies
Automated asset policy management for usage, access controls, and security
Reports and auditing to stay compliant with laws and regulations, such as HIPAA, SAMA, UK GDPR, PCI DSS, ISO 27001, NIST, and more
Continuous monitoring of assets to detect inconsistencies and anomalies
Schedule a call to manage your assets in real time
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What is real-time inventory?
Real-time inventory is listing, managing, and tracking stocks or IT assets in real time using automated tools. These tools could be asset inventory software or asset management software.Can I use Excel for inventory management?
Yes, you can use Excel to manage your asset inventory. However, creating a plain Excel file is not enough if you want your data to be updated in real time. For this, you will need to use the function RealTimeData (RTD). Using automated asset inventory systems to streamline asset management in real time is a better option as you will get other capabilities, such as classification, security, and reporting.What are the types of inventory?
IT asset inventory could be of different types: physical assets, digital assets, on-prem assets, cloud assets, and hybrid assets.