All our advice to choose your ITAM
First of all, let's remember that an ITAM (IT Asset Management) is a tool for managing IT assets.
Your company has many IT devices: computers, smartphones, printers, routers, etc.
It can be difficult to have a global vision of this computer park, if one does not have a solution dedicated to this task.
An ITAM will help you, that's its raison d'être! Its mission is to :
- track your machine inventory ,
- measure the usage of your users,
- manage user access and authorizations,
- Monitor software license compliance ,
- to manage the acquisition and resale of equipment.
In short, it takes care of many useful missions.
Reminder of the key benefits of an ITAM
What are the main benefits for your company to use an ITAM?
First of all, this tool facilitates the loan and return of computer equipment within your team. This is particularly interesting in the case of offboarding employees.
You can also more easily make the most of your hardware inventory, thus avoiding having to buy new hardware unnecessarily, or even resell hardware that you no longer need. The result is simple: you save money.
Thanks to the use of an ITAM, you also benefit from an overall view of your IT assets, which simplifies management and makes your decisions faster and more relevant. For example, you can rationalize the software and applications used by your teams.
You also benefit from increased security of your IT assets by identifying potential security vulnerabilities more quickly.
Finally, an ITAM makes it possible to maintenance of your IT equipment easier, and even automate it (as proposed by the Rzilient solution), resulting in improved productivity for your teams.
Criteria to consider when choosing an ITAM
Here are the 6 main criteria to consider when making your ITAM purchase decision.
1- Important features
The first criterion is the functionalities offered by the tool.
It seems imperative to us that your ITAM offers, at least, the following functionalities:
- Management of the stock and the material inventory,
- Software license and contract management,
- update management,
- monitoring of vulnerabilities,
- compliance monitoring,
- reports and analyses.
Rzilient fulfills all of these features, and we go even further!
2- Quality and availability of customer support
Nothing is more frustrating (and penalizing for your professional activity) than to find yourself facing a computer bug in your ITAM tool.
But add to that an unreachable customer support, and you might regret your choice!
The availability on the one hand, and then the level of quality and efficiency of the customer support of the ITAM editor you are considering, are therefore important considerations to take into account.
3- Security and confidentiality
Cybersecurity has been a key issue for companies in recent years.
Another topic to keep in mind is that of personal data protection, which has become enormously important since the advent of the European RGPD directive in 2018.
With this in mind, we recommend that you ensure that you choose an ITAM tool that has a high level of data security, as well as compliance with current data privacy regulations.
4- Ease of integration and interoperability
ITAM is not the only IT tool your company uses, far from it.
It must be able to integrate quickly and easily (without requiring days of work from your IT team) with your existing software infrastructure.
Ask for a list of software integrations, as well as interoperability with operating systems and other software suites used by your company.
5- Collaboration
An efficient ITAM must facilitate collaboration between your teams.
Make sure that the tool you select has user management modules and an advanced rights management system.
6- The CTA
What is the TAC? It is the Total Cost of Acquisition.
The initial purchase price (or the price of monthly licenses) usually covers only part of the real cost of a software.
You often have to add maintenance operations, unexpected options, purchase of new versions...
We advise you to take a close look at the details of the price list proposed by the editor of your ITAM solution, as well as the possibilities of upgrading the solution according to the number of users, the actual usage, etc.
An ITAM is included in Rzilient!
IT resource management is very effective in saving you time and money.
But some solutions on the market are expensive or overpriced. Use our list of criteria presented in this article to effectively evaluate the best tool for your business!
Mathieu Maréchal