| |October 20199ENTERPRISE ASSET MANAGEMENT: DO YOU HAVE WHAT YOU NEED?2020. This will become a potential number of endpoints to over 20 billion units. Now as an organization, you may not be anywhere near that number, but you will still be held accountable for the devices inside your organization being used for business purposes. You should ask your-self, "How comfortable am I that I know what is con-necting to my environment, holding my company's data, and using authorized licenses that follow the end user legal agreement?"As more and more assets sit on a corporate set of books to be tracked and depreciated, having a strong SAM and HAM program can be a great value to insure accurate reporting and even remove old and retired equip-ment. This should be part of any life cycle style program, but in this age of getting more out of every investment, the wise manager recognizes this opportunity to improve their balance sheet.When implementing any tool or process, there are al-ways pitfalls you must be mindful to avoid. A good SAM or HAM program is only as strong as the governance it supports. Know what your objectives are going to be. Most organizations who install a SAM want to reduce the risk of being out of license compliance. A few others may be focusing on cost savings. The tool selection and its processes setup during implementation will determine how successful the program will become. Of course there is always my favorite in that if a regulatory agency comes knocking at your door, you have a set of tools which can keep you from wearing orange or bold black stripes.There are several tools available in the market for asset management. There are some designed to support cloud-based assets but most are offerings designed over genera-tions of releases rooted in on-premise asset tracking. Just because the EAM may be offered in cloud does not mean it is designed to track assets in the cloud. The opposite is just as true. You need to look closely at the architecture being offered and insure they meet your requirements in service, security, and technical performance.As a closing thought, a big challenge with many of the tools today is the lack of a master record. The lack of a master record opens the potential for duplicate records. In order to manage duplicate records, additional manual intervention will be required and at any point, data qual-ity would be the suspect. Duplicate records can lead to a potential of false compliance reporting.Every good EAM will always incorporate some basic components: acquire, assign, monitor, maintain, review, dispose, and replace. What is your EAM strategy focus and is it what you wish it to be in the coming years? Does it meet the basic needs and if so, does it meet the needs of your company over the next five years? When you can answer these questions comfortably, you will have a good program. As the number of IoT endpoints begin to appear in organizations, having a strong HAM process will provide some protection for compliance audits from software vendors
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