Tips for Proper Documentation and Managing Your IT Asset Inventory

Nowadays in the digital era, managing IT assets efficiently is a crucial challenge. Now this is not only necessary to manage the soft documents, images, and videos but also the vast amount of hardware devices. To maintain the productivity of an organization, IT asset management and documentation is very much essential. This is not only to increase productivity but also to increase IT security and compliance. In this blog, we will try to explore some useful tips and strategies to maintain proper documentation and ensure the proper tracking of an IT asset inventory.

Understanding the types of Digital Assets

To learn more about documentation tips and IT asset management, you need to know about the types of Digital Assets. Digital assets consist of a large number of files, applications, hardware devices, such as:

1. Soft Files: Word files, PDF files, PPT files, Spreadsheets, Images, videos, etc.
2. Hardware: PC, Laptop, Server, Network Devices, etc.
3. Applications: Software, Programs, Coding scripts, etc.
4. Database Files: DB files, CSV Files, etc.
5. Design Files: CAD Files, PSD Files, AI-generated files, etc.
6. Advertisement Property: Branding materials, Logos, billboards, etc.

To make the above assets organized, accessible, and secure you need to know how to manage IT assets and documents properly. Without careful IT asset management, you shouldn’t expect the value held by these types of equipment.

The Benefits and Importance of Asset Management

There are several benefits of proper IT asset management:

1. Increase Productivity: The time-consuming process of traditional IT asset management is critical which doesn’t help employees to focus on other tasks. To increase productivity, a proper IT asset and document management tool is necessary for an organization, which helps the employees to focus on more critical tasks.
2. Purchase Cost Savings: If you can maintain the digital assets of your company properly, you will be able to track all the devices that are in reserved stock and that are in use. This will help you to avoid duplicate purchases of software or any hardware devices.
3. Reduce data breaches: A properly managed inventory tracking system of digital devices helps to enhance the security of the assets. Thus we can reduce the risk of data breaches and unauthorized access by any hardware assets.
4. Ensure laws and regulations: A properly managed asset management system helps to maintain accurate records of digital assets, which ultimately leads to ensuring compliance with licensing requirements, copyright policies, and enterprise regulations.

Documentation Tips for your Digital Asset Inventory

1. Create an Inventory with relevant details: A comprehensive inventory or asset tracking of all digital assets is the first step. Develop Asset management software or create spreadsheets to gather all the details about the assets such as location, owner, usage rights, etc.
2. Develop a Structure and Categorize Assets: You can categorize digital assets by creating a logical folder structure. Try to make it as easy as possible so that users can navigate it without any difficulties. The organizational structure can be based on the asset’s type, department, project, or any other relevant criteria.
3. Tagging to track assets: To ease the searchability assign metadata tags to each asset. With proper descriptions, keywords, creation dates, and owner information you will be able to track or find your assets very quickly.
4. Maintain Versioning: The documents and the files that we maintain, need some changes very frequently, so if you implement a version control system for the assets that frequently undergo revisions. This mechanism is for preventing confusion and making sure to access the latest version of any file or directory.
5. Restrict Permissions: Based on the roles and responsibilities you should define access control for the digital assets. Any unauthorized access should not be allowed to sensitive assets. To ensure compliance with data protection regulations you should restrict the permissions.
6. Conduct Regular Audit: To identify outdated and duplicate assets you need to conduct regular audits of your inventory. This will help you to make forecasts for the next years and by purging unnecessary files or hardware devices you can free up spaces.

How to Manage Your Inventory Management System

1. Establish Centrlized Store: A centralized repository for storing all your digital assets will help you to ensure uniform access and reduce the risk of asset fragmentation. Try to establish a centralized storing system for all the hardware devices of your on-premises architecture. If you have a closed-based solution, even though try to make the storing system centralized as much as possible.
2. Functional Backup and Disaster Recovery: Try to implement the DLP(Data Loss Prevention) policies to prevent sensitive data loss. This policy will force you to implement a robust backup and disaster recovery system which will assist you in protecting data from different types of cyber attacks, and natural disasters. To ensure the backup system is functioning properly do regular scheduled backup tests.
3. Schedule Regular Maintenance: Regular maintenance such as security patch updates, software updates, and storage cleanup will help you to keep your digital inventory running smoothly. Make proper documentation of the procedures of the maintenance and assign responsibilities to relevant personnel.
4. Arrange training for the users: To effectively utilize the asset management system you should provide comprehensive training sessions to the relevant users.

To maximize the productivity of an organization it is necessary to manage the inventory of the digital assets as well as to maintain the proper documentation. This will not only impact on the productivity but also it will ensure the security against data loss. If you follow the above tips in this blog post you should be able to establish a robust asset management or an inventory tracking system. Now you need to invest time to research your existing asset management system and redeploy the asset management system following the above strategies, to gain the maximum benefits of an asset management system.