Standards & Best Practices
IT Asset Management – the Foundation for your business in the Digital age
The importance of getting in control of your IT Assets has never been bigger than now! In this digital age, IT Assets becomes more of a Business Asset than “just” an Accounting Asset and the importance of getting in control of these Assets are increasingly becomming critical for the business.
Over the last few years control of the software lifecycle, more precisely SAM, has been an area of focus because of increased audit activities from the software vendors. But as Operational Technology (OT) and IoT finds it way to all corners of the organizations ITAM becomes “a need to have” discipline rather than a “nice to have” discipline in support of the business in many areas.
ITAMOrg addresses the challenges of controlling the IT Asset from 4 different perspectives; Software, Hardware, Cloud & Services and People & Information (privacy, data, access control).
As much as these areas are tightly integrated and interdependent there’s a need to have these perspectives in mind also, but at the same time make sure that the requirements from the business and other stakeholders are met as a top priority. ITAM supports multiple areas as the basic foundation and enabler for them. Areas such as IT Security, IT Service Management, Finance/Procurement etc. are dependent on strong ITAM Governance and the people in the organization need to understand these fundamental dependencies. This picture on “Career paths” explains in a simple way how ITIL and ITAM is a basic requirement to support some of the key functions in an organization;
Best Practices – IT Service Management, ITIL* & ITIL 4*
ITAMOrg wants to promote IT Asset Management as a discipline in it’s own right and as part of a wider competency framework. IT Service Management (ITSM) is a closely tied best practice area and the ITAMOrg philosophy is to build on the most widespread process framework in the world and take advantage of the industry wide adoption of it. The latest release of the ITIL* framework – ITIL 4* includes now for the first time an “ITAM practice”. ITAMOrg supports and is engaged in the development of this practice. The ITAM practice is one of the 34 practices in ITIL 4 and ITAM workloads and processes are set to work across the practice landscape, the service value chain and the guiding principles. The 2020 update of the ITAMOrg Software Asset Management Specialist course supports ITIL 4.
IT Asset Management & Cybersecurity
Today cybersecurity is one of the most significant risks to businesses operating in the digital age. In order to address these challenges controls needs to be in place for policies, organization and the IT Assets in the organization. Actually the top 3 CIS controls refers to the IT Assets in the organization;
1. Inventory & Control of Hardware Assets
2. Inventory & Control of Software Assets
3. Continous Vulnerability Management
International Standardisation Organization – ISO
ITAM is the foundation to enable mature governance disciplines and risk assessment in many areas, including Cybersecurity, IT Service, Procurement & Supply Chain. Much effort is made, also within ISO, to tie disciplines and secure business benefits across silos and diverse units in the organizations. The illustration below shows how different ISO standards tie into the ITAM landscape.
ITAMOrg supports the development and promotion of standards in general, and as a liason C member of the Working Group 21 that is responsible for development of the ITAM standard ISO 19770. The WG is maintaining an informational site on ITAM standards development here>> and updates on published standards can be achieved from the ISO site>>>
The 19770-8 standard was released in January 2020 and provides guidelines and templates for mapping of ISO standards and industry best practice standards like ITIL. ITAMOrg is currently develloping a mapping of ITIL 4 and ISO 19770-1:2017.
All ITAMOrg training courses are develloped with the aim to support ITSM and IT security standards and best practices incl. also the ISO 27002 updated standard for IT Security. ITAMOrg training courses covers all aspects of the IT Asset lifecycles – from planning and procurement to decomissioning, re-use or disposal.
ITIL® – “ITIL 4® is a (registered) Trade Mark of AXELOS Limited. All rights reserved.”
If you wish to check out the latest development on ISO standards a good source of information is to make a search for “ISO” on the ITAM Channel.
You may also enjoy the ressources you can access via the links below:
