| | October 20198hen different people are approached about thoughts on Enterprise Asset Management (EAM), the responses can certainly have a wide range of reactions. There are those who see it as a financial tool while others may see it as an integral component of their life cycle management program. Then there is my favorite, "Keeps me from going to jail" response, as it is a view of compliance. Regardless of your perspective, having an EAM is becoming a vital necessity as the number of devices is accelerating in our growing digital world.An EAM can span across several plat-forms and serve a number of different pur-poses. The organizational goal of a success-ful EAM strategy will dictate the type of EAM tool set you will want to acquire. It is important to qualify the difference and need to understand the approaches to hard-ware and software asset management. It is common for an organization to rely on its financial division to man-age the hardware assets as part of the company's balance sheet. However, a number of important assets may not be covered under the capital polices, but will require track-ing, monitoring and life cycle management. For example, the price of desktop computing has dropped significantly over the past several years. Consequently, a device may no longer be considered capital. However, there may be reasons such as regulatory requirements, the device must be monitored for encryption and tracked for its appropri-ate use and disposal.Some organizations found themselves at the bad end of a software license issue and started their strategy with a Software Asset Management (SAM) tool on premise. Such tools allow you to manage licenses purchased and distributed within the organization. As a part of the tool, some have a scanning function, which can be a great assistance with annual true-up licensing that might need to occur. Yet most of these types of tools provide little value when it comes to tracking the utiliza-tion of cloud-based services. With software-as-a-service (SaaS) technology and more vendors offering cloud services, the ability to insure proper tracking of your software assets is growing more complex and requires a different set of tools and potentially skill sets in your organization.A slightly more sophisticated SAM tool may be able to track the actual assignment of the license but most rely on the existence of a strong hardware asset management (HAM) tool to provide the assignments. The aggregate of this information can then be compared to the SAM data to provide a compliance report. As the number of Internet of Things (IoT) endpoints begin to appear in or-ganizations, having a strong HAM process will provide some protection for compliance audits from software vendors. According to Gartner, they are projecting the IoT to have an annual growth rate of 33 percent through By Lynn Gibson, CTO, CHRISTUS HealthENTERPRISE ASSET MANAGEMENT: DO YOU HAVE WHAT YOU NEED?Lynn Gibson,CTOW IN MY OPINION
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