dude, where's my asset?
tracking IT assets for fun and regulation
picture it: someone in pings you because their laptop “died” and they need a replacement today. easy enough — except nobody can tell you when it was issued, what it cost, or whether it’s still under warranty.
so you go digging through email threads and a spreadsheet, and an hour later you’re no closer. the laptop existed and yet no evidence of it to be found in this digital stack of records. we need something better, a system for tracking assets.
this is the problem asset management solves.
every device that’s issued to an employee must have an asset tracking number. from this you can track the asset from cradle to grave, and answer most questions that can arise from daily operations.
if you don’t have reliable asset management, you can’t answer questions like, “when was this smartphone bought and issued to an employee?”, “how many of a certain type of hardware do we have?”, “what assets are currently in an employees name?”, and lots of other questions that can be answered with a query to the asset management system.
this cuts down on repeat work and keeps a history of the asset.
today’s tech you can easily tag assets with a QR code that link back to an IT asset management system, making for easy asset lookups, complete with history, notes, files (order details), etc.
regulation
if there is an asset in use at your organization and can’t be identified reliably, then you can’t be sure it was procured by your organization through the proper channels. this could be something an employee brought from home, bought to use at work on their own, or put there by someone with nefarious motives. if this were limited to consumables it probably wouldn’t be an issue, but in the digital relm things are different.
frameworks like SOC 2, ISO 27001, and PCI DSS all expect you to maintain an accurate inventory of your assets — you can’t protect what you don’t know you have.
if you don’t know what is suppose to be, how can you be certain of what is? best to make the process verifiable via records.
when an auditor asks for a list of every device that touches company data, “let me check the spreadsheet” is not the answer you want to be giving. a proper asset management system turns that request into a query instead of a fire drill.
so track your assets — future-you will thank you.