As information technology becomes more central to business operations, IT leaders are under increasing pressure to allocate budget resources in the most effective manner possible. Digital transformation will almost inevitably require some trial and error – but that doesn’t mean you can’t reduce the number of trials and eventually eliminate errors. The best way to do this is with more effective IT asset utilization management.
Here are three ways to get the bird’s-eye view you need to make the most of your IT assets:
1. Aggregate Usage Metrics
A retailer, library or airliner can learn a lot about its investment priorities by collecting and analyzing IT usage metrics. They can determine, for instance, the frequency with which customers are using self-service kiosks, how they’re using them and how much time they’re spending during each session. By summarizing this data in graphical format, insights can be gleaned hastily and with ease. Ask and answer questions such as “do we really need this many kiosks?” or, “are certain applications being used more than others?” From here, it becomes a matter of adjusting asset investment according to utilization.
2. Track Software Compliance
Over-deployed software can easily be avoided with the right approach to IT asset utilization.
Over-deployment of software licenses can also result in heavy vendor fines, and it can also put an organization at legal and even cyber risk. Any of this can cost an organization revenue that would otherwise go back into the IT budget. Conversely, underutilized licenses are indicative of waste to the business. Organizations must therefore track software license compliance to make sure that application usage is compliant with contracts. But they must also track overall usage to make sure that they’re only paying for what they really need.
3. Analyze User Behavior
The inverse metric of software usage is user behavior. It’s not enough to know the frequency with which software is being used and how it’s being used. Administrators also need to understand who the power users are. Knowing this information can help IT administrators determine, for instance, who actually needs the most feature-rich versions of a particular application, and who can get by with a stripped-down version of the tool.
The ability to see all of this – and all of the above information as well – will provide IT administrators with a bird’s-eye view of their computing environment within a single pane of glass.
Contact Faronics today, to learn more about how the Deep Freeze Cloud platform can help your organization with it’s IT asset utilization and management.
