Like virtually every other function within the modern enterprise, IT asset management is powered by data. Specifically, IT asset management teams need data about which endpoints, applications, services, and other assets they are responsible for supporting.

A common problem, however, is that there is no single source of truth for that data. Different teams tend to maintain different asset inventories, making it challenging to gain an accurate, across-the-board picture of which IT resources the business needs to monitor, update, and secure. Instead, it’s stuck with a siloed view, leading to oversights and increasing the risks of performance and security problems involving assets that are not properly managed because they’re not effectively tracked.

To improve IT service management, IT departments must break down data silos and gain unified insight into their inventories of assets. This article explains how they can do so, and why this is such an important challenge to tackle.

Data Silos and Their Impact on Modern IT Operations

The reason why IT teams often struggle to gain unified visibility into their asset inventories is simple enough: Different teams maintain different bodies of data about which assets exist, and those data sources typically don’t integrate with each other by default.

For example, your information systems management team might have one list of endpoints and applications it supports. The IT service management (ITSM) has another. Your purchasing office may have its own set of data too.

If you choose which assets to manage based on just one set of data, you’re very likely to end up overlooking some devices or applications. Data from the purchasing office may not cover devices that users bring into the network on their own, for example, as opposed to company-procured devices. Or, the ITSM department’s asset inventory may exclude assets that aren’t relevant for ITSM, even though they matter for systems management.

Plus, even in cases where different data sources are relatively consistent, the oversights may still prove very significant. For instance, if only five percent of devices are missing from your inventory but you have 20,000 devices in your environment, that’s a lot of devices that you are not properly tracking.

Breaking Down Data Silos

To achieve across-the-board visibility into the endpoints and other assets that the IT department needs to manage, businesses must bring their disparate IT asset inventories together.

You can do this manually, but a more efficient (and less error-prone) approach is to integrate the data programmatically. This entails pulling data from disparate inventories into a central IT asset management tool that comprehensively tracks all of your endpoints, applications, and other resources.

Integrating data sources is just the first step. If you truly want to maximize visibility and actionability, you should also ensure that your asset data is normalized and contextualized so that IT personnel can interpret it quickly and easily. 

For example, you don’t want your asset inventory simply to include a list of servers and PCs. It should also provide details about which operating systems and versions, applications, and so on are active on each device. Just as important, it should tell you at a glance how each device’s user permissions are configured, whether any software or firmware is out-of-date, which changes users have made to the device since it was deployed, and similar insights.

This context is critical because when a problem arises – when an employee can’t launch a critical application, for example, or when a software vendor announces a security vulnerability in one of its products – you don’t want your IT team to have to waste time collecting the information necessary to respond to the issue quickly. You want them to have instant access to the details they need to resolve problems.

Conclusion: Maximizing IT Visibility

In short, effective IT asset management starts with breaking down data silos to create a unified view of the resources that IT departments are responsible for managing. From there, businesses must also ensure that they implement the asset data normalization and contextualization necessary to drive actionability for IT staff.

This is what a unified approach to IT operations looks like – and achieving this type of outcome through efficient data integration is going to become increasingly important as the asset data that IT teams have to contend with continues to grow in scope and complexity.