IT Service Management (ITSM) and IT Asset Management (ITAM) are necessary practices for any organization that leverages its IT tools and resources to support its company strategy.
Both ITSM and ITAM are vital in helping a company’s tactical and long-term decision-making processes. However, the purpose and consumers of these services vary. Also, the ability to enrich the data for these services can come from a range of sources.
Let’s dive into each discipline to understand the focus for each service better, the questions they strive to answer, the data that drives them, and how you can elevate their value with additional contextualized data.
What are ITSM and ITAM?
ITSM is a concept that enables an organization to deliver value via services. Essentially, ITSM defines the activities to design, build, deliver, operate, and control IT and business services offered to customers or internal users.
IT Asset Management (ITAM) is a set of practices that manages IT assets across all business units within an organization. The goal of ITAM is to manage the full life cycles of assets, including acquisition, inventory, finance, maintenance, contracts, and risk management.
ITSM is concerned with the efficiency of IT operations. Twenty-six ITSM processes based on the ITIL® Framework describe how services are planned, designed, configured, operated, and improved.
The IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) is a set of guidelines and best practices for managing IT operations and effective ITSM. Examples of questions that may be answered include:
How can I deploy new applications faster and with fewer resources?
How do we improve service support and the user experience?
What is the best way to automate routine tasks?
How can we improve efficiency and reduce support costs due to non-standard endpoint configurations?
ITAM answers some fundamental questions about inventory, entitlements, and financial planning. For example:
What assets do we own, and which employees have them?
Are we compliant with our software licenses? Are we using more software than we purchased?
Do we need to upgrade software versions?
Do we need to budget for hardware and software updates?
The data that drives ITSM and ITAM
Central to ITSM and ITAM practices are data repositories known as the Configuration Management Database (CMDB) and Asset Management Database (AMDB). Many individual records stored in these repositories are often shared between the CMDB and the AMDB, and they may be jointly stored in one database table.
A CMDB contains component information used to deliver IT services. For example, a service may be delivered using both an application and a database server. The CMDB stores the attributes of those servers, such as the manufacturer name, serial number, CPU type, operating system type, OS version, network address, and more. These attributes are known as configuration items.
The corresponding AMDB might contain the same technical attributes and have business-specific data such as acquisition cost and date, warranty details, maintenance contracts, depreciation tables, current value, and software license entitlement details.
While there is some common data between the two repositories, they are typically leveraged by different roles and teams. The data in a CMDB is leveraged by technical teams for troubleshooting, maintenance, enterprise architecture, and support. The AMDB, on the other hand, is a key resource for procurement, financial management, accounting, and legal professionals.
Gain greater insights for ITSM and ITAM
For both, the richer the data and more contextual information available, the greater the accuracy and insights. Automox can support essential ITSM and ITAM processes with our rich endpoint dataset.
One example is our work with ServiceNow to add value to their ITSM and ITAM process with the data we sync to their CMDB.
ServiceNow is the market-leading platform for digital workflows that help organizations work smarter, faster, and better. ServiceNow features extensive ITSM and ITAM capabilities that transform service delivery, increase productivity, and automate the end-to-end asset lifecycle.
Automox makes it easy to sync vital data fields directly to ServiceNow using their Service Graph Connector. Service Graph Connectors are certified, reliable, third-party data integrations that allow you to quickly and easily load large volumes of third-party data into their CMDB, ensuring data quality, timeliness, and consistency.
Using the ServiceNow Service Graph Connector for Automox, you can easily sync dozens of device data fields vital for ITSM and ITAM processes. This includes operating system versions, serial numbers, IP addresses, device status, service tags, device model, and other data points to help respond to incidents, troubleshoot endpoints, and help manage asset inventory.
Data is automatically collected by the Automox agent across all Microsoft Windows, macOS, and Linux operating systems. And you can easily set up the data sync schedule using the default daily import or create a new schedule based on your needs.
Where can ITSM and ITAM take your organization?
ITSM and ITAM can benefit your organization in so many ways. You can increase ITOps and service desk efficiencies, improve overall asset visibility, and better manage technology lifecycles. In addition, you can gain higher returns on your IT investments while lowering procurement expenses.
Automox can be a partner in your ITSM and ITAM journey. Our capabilities for powerful configuration management, automated patch management and policy enforcement, extensive software deployment, and rich dataset, all delivered via a cloud-native architecture, will enhance your ITSM and ITAM processes.
But don’t take our word for it. Sign up for a free 15-day trial and learn how to eliminate risk and automate the configuration, patching, and compliance of your Microsoft Windows, macOS, and Linux systems with one easy-to-use cloud-native platform.
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