Importance of IT asset management and monitoring stressed following survey

Systems integrator Kovarus said that a survey it had commissioned of chief information officers, IT directors and IT managers in North America had shown that many businesses may not be appropriately budgeting for IT because 40% of IT respondents "were not aware of their IT assets". 

"This in effect means that a sizeable part of the operating budget managed by IT is not accounted for correctly," Kovarus said. "These expenses become a fuzzy ‘allocated cost’ to business units without the ability for IT to demonstrate accounting transparency and therefore inflating unit costs for some business units. As IT starts to act like and compete with service providers, it is imperative that costs and assets are understood and managed differently." 

"Using asset management to discover and manage the commissioning/decommissioning practices is critical to remediate this situation. Without this, the future of configuration, capacity, investment and chargeback management practices will be in vain," it said. 

Almost two-thirds of respondents to Kovarus' survey said that they do not have the "time, practices or tools" to monitor how their IT assets are being used or how they are performing. Kovarus warned that this failure of monitoring meant that businesses would be reactive to problems that occur, such as when "resources are exhausted and applications fail". 

"The premise for effective virtualisation relies on multi-tenant economies of scale – but without effective capacity management, collective capacity needs cannot be determined," Kovarus said. "It is possible that the environment is often over configured by a factor of 15. Capacity planning is a fundamental basis to achieve these results and to prepare for a more fluid and dynamic environment. With performance management techniques, users receive the results they expect and IT can manage to business policy (such as SLAs [service-level agreements])." 

Kovarus also said that businesses that have defined IT standards and do not operate with a "mish mash of technology" benefit from reduced risks and costs.