Written by Arvind on September 28, 2018
In modern digital businesses, technology plays a critical role in enabling competitive advantage, operational effectiveness and company success – but that also means that it is a big source of risk. As the technology dependency grows, managing that risk becomes more critical than ever. IT Asset Management (ITAM) can be an essential resource and tool in your risk management toolbox to help you understand the risk profile associated with your technology footprint and develop actionable strategies for managing and reducing risk to your business.
Types of Technology Risk
Technology risk can take many shapes and impact your organization in different ways. Understanding the major types of technology risk can help you determine your company’s risk exposure and develop effective mitigation strategies. The most common types of technology risk include:
Security Risk – data loss, malware, ransomware, unauthorized access
Financial Risk – uncontrolled IT costs, license compliance, taxation
Operational Risk – system outages, business continuity / disaster recovery, shadow IT
Many of these risks can’t be completely avoided, but that doesn’t mean you can’t take steps to limit exposure by reducing the likelihood of the risk occurring and/or the impact if it does.
How ITAM can Help with Risk Management
The key to effective risk management is informed decision making. When it comes to technology risk management, that starts with having a clear, complete and accurate understanding of the assets you have in your organization, their current configuration/status, where they are in the asset lifecycle and what they are being used for. Good News!! That sound just like the list of objectives that ITAM is intended to address. Managing the asset data is only part of the problem, the other part is getting the information into the hands (and heads) of the people tasked with making risk management decisions. The value of ITAM to Risk Management is realized when accurate asset information is consumed, not when it is produced.
ITAM Software as a Tool for Decision Makers
IT Asset Management software is an important component of your company’s overall IT Service Management system – providing a common and consistent place to manage asset records and asset management lifecycle activities. Just like the knowledge locked away in dusty books in the stacks of a library, your company can’t realize the full value of your ITAM data unless decision makers know it is there and can easily access the information they need.
At Freshservice/ITAMSoft, we understand that ITAM software isn’t just there to help your company amass knowledge, it is there to help you use it. The Freshservice ITAM solution not only supports the basic data and lifecycle management activities that you’d expect as part of an ITSM solution in the simple and easy to understand way that you’ve come to expect from Freshservice, but also seeks to make your asset management data more readily available to other ITSM processes and decision makers that need to use it to understand and manage risk.