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What is IT asset management?
Key Takeaways: IT asset management (ITAM) tracks the lifecycle, cost, and usage of your hardware, software, and cloud assets.
What it is: Processes and tools to inventory assets from purchase through deployment, maintenance, and retirement.
Why it matters: Helps control spend, reduce security and compliance risk, and ensure the right assets are available when people need them.
How Jira Service Management helps: Connects asset records to tickets so agents see context instantly and can manage assets directly within service workflows.
IT asset management helps organizations track, manage, and optimize all the technology they own, from laptops and servers to software licenses and cloud subscriptions. When done right, it gives IT teams complete visibility into what assets exist, where they’re located, how they’re being used, and what they cost over time.
Keep reading to explore how asset management works, why it matters, and how the right tools and processes can help your team work smarter while reducing costs and risks.
Using Jira Service Management via the Service Collection, teams can optimize their IT asset management process to work smarter while reducing risks.
Understanding IT asset management (ITAM)
IT asset management (also known as ITAM) is the process of ensuring an organization’s assets are accounted for, deployed, maintained, upgraded, and disposed of when the time comes. Put simply, it’s making sure that the valuable items, tangible and intangible, in your organization are tracked and being used.
So, what’s an IT asset? Simply put, an IT asset is hardware, software systems, or information that an organization values.
IT assets have a finite period of use. To maximize the value an organization can generate from them, the IT asset lifecycle can be proactively managed. Each organization may define unique stages of that lifecycle, but they generally include planning, procurement, deployment, maintenance, and retirement. An important part of IT asset management is applying appropriate processes across all lifecycle stages to understand total cost of ownership and optimize asset use.
Types of IT assets
Organizations manage three main categories of IT assets, each requiring different tracking approaches and management strategies. The types of IT assets include:
Hardware assets: These are the physical devices and equipment that power your organization’s technology infrastructure. Examples include employee laptops, desktop computers, mobile devices, servers, networking equipment like routers and switches, printers, and data center infrastructure. Hardware asset management requires tracking, physical location details, maintenance schedules, and eventual disposal.
Software assets: This category includes all the applications, operating systems, and digital tools your organization uses. Software assets range from productivity suites and collaboration tools to specialized business applications, development platforms, and security software. Managing these assets means tracking license counts, renewal dates, version updates, and compliance requirements.
Cloud and virtual assets: Modern organizations increasingly rely on cloud-based services and virtualized infrastructure. These assets include cloud storage subscriptions, SaaS applications, virtual machines, containerized applications, and platform-as-a-service tools. Unlike traditional hardware, cloud assets scale dynamically, making asset tracking more complex but also more critical for controlling costs.
What are the benefits of IT asset management?
Implementing structured asset management processes delivers measurable improvements across the organization, from reduced costs to faster service delivery.
Provides a single source of truth
Asset management brings order to the chaos of managing IT assets and offers a single source of truth for IT teams, management, and ultimately, entire organizations. Without having to relegate time and brainpower to tracking artifacts, monitoring usage, and understanding dependencies, IT employees can focus more on what matters most to the organization.
Improves utilization and eliminates waste
Asset management keeps information up to date, so teams know when to eliminate waste and improve utilization. It saves money by helping avoid unnecessary purchases, while cutting licensing and support costs. Increased control also enforces compliance with security and legal policies, reducing risks. The positive implications on costs and productivity benefit the entire organization.
According to a Gartner 2025 report, “A hardware asset management (HAM) policy is critical to optimizing hardware usage and costs, and mitigating compliance risk.”
Enables productivity without compromising reliability
With digital transformation changing the way organizations operate, modern asset management goes far beyond tracking laptops and mice. Teams are embracing DevOps and SRE principles and need asset management processes and tools to efficiently deliver new functionality and services quickly without compromising reliability.
Supports ITSM practices
IT asset management is critical to supporting ITIL processes, including change, incident, and problem management. The IT team enables the entire organization to get more innovative and deliver value more quickly. With the right data at their fingertips, teams can move with speed and predict the impact of changes before they happen.
By democratizing access to insights, the organization gains a competitive edge, delivering value more quickly. Any organization trying to keep up with the pace of modern innovation needs to get strategic about controlling, tracking, and mastering IT data.
What does the IT asset management process look like?
The IT asset management lifecycle is continuous and ongoing. You don’t do it once and expect it to be finished. ITAM is a process teams execute regularly as assets, goals, and tools change.
Inventory assets: The first step in the IT asset management process is to create a detailed inventory of all IT assets. Your inventory includes what assets you have, where they are located when they were purchased, and for how much.
Calculate lifecycle costs: The second step is to calculate lifecycle costs for all assets in your inventory. During an asset’s average life, there are many opportunities for additional costs, such as maintenance, capital, and disposal costs. Calculating lifecycle costs makes your asset inventory accurate and actionable.
Monitor your IT assets: Your goal here is to continuously monitor IT assets through their lifecycle keeping a close eye on things like contract, license, and warranty expiration. Tracking also helps you stay ahead of the fourth step, maintenance.
Maintain your IT assets: Maintenance includes repair, upgrades, and replacements. All maintenance activities should be tracked in an ITAM tool so that the data can be used to understand the asset's overall performance.
Conduct financial planning: The fifth and final step is to plan your finances. With an accurate picture of your IT assets, their lifecycle stage, and their costs, you can effectively plan for the future. One goal of financial planning is to determine the budget needed to maintain or improve the “levels of service” your team provides for your most important assets. An asset that was successfully managed with a high level of service, like a service desk and dedicated team, will need that level of service going forward. Assets that underperformed may need a higher level of service in the future, which will cost more.
What are the key features of IT asset management software?
The right asset management software turns manual tracking into automated workflows, saving time and improving accuracy. Key features to look for in an IT asset management software are:
Centralized asset data repository: Good asset management software provides a single database for all asset information. This eliminates scattered spreadsheets and disconnected systems, giving everyone access to the same reliable data about what assets exist, who's using them, and what state they're in.
Automated discovery and tracking: Manual asset inventories can become outdated when new devices join the network and old ones retire. Automated discovery tools continuously scan your network to identify new assets, track changes, and keep your inventory current without constant manual updates.
License management and compliance: Software licenses are high-cost, high-risk if managed poorly. Asset management software tracks license counts, monitors usage against entitlements, flags compliance issues, and alerts teams before renewals come due. This prevents both over-licensing, which wastes money, and under-licensing, which creates legal exposure.
Integration with ITSM software: The best asset management tools don't operate in isolation. They connect with service desk platforms, change management systems, and IT operations tools to provide context for incidents, changes, and requests. When a server goes down, integrated systems immediately show what services depend on it and who's affected.
Reporting and analytics: Understanding asset trends requires good reporting capabilities. Asset management software should generate reports on asset utilization, lifecycle status, cost analysis, and compliance metrics. These insights help IT leaders make informed decisions about purchases, retirements, and budget planning.
Workflow automation: Manual processes slow teams down and introduce errors. Look for software that automates common workflows, such as onboarding new assets, processing requests, scheduling maintenance, and triggering alerts when warranties or licenses expire.
When choosing asset management software, consider your organization's size, complexity, and existing tool ecosystem. Small teams might need straightforward tracking with basic reporting, while enterprises require sophisticated discovery, complex integrations, and advanced analytics. Following IT asset management best practices helps ensure you select and implement tools that actually fit your needs.
Centralize and automate your IT asset management process
Jira Service Management brings asset management directly into your ITSM software platform, connecting asset data with service desk tickets, change requests, and incident records. The centralized tracking system lets teams monitor any type of asset through customizable workflows while maintaining visibility into relationships between assets, services, and users.
Built-in automation handles routine tasks like assigning assets during onboarding, triggering maintenance workflows, and sending alerts before warranties or licenses expire. Reporting capabilities provide real-time insights into asset costs, utilization, and lifecycle status. That information helps IT leaders make informed budget and optimization decisions without switching between multiple tools.