IT Asset Manager Job Description: Roles & Responsibilities

Whether you're aspiring to become an IT Asset Manager or simply aiming to gain a deeper understanding of this critical role, you're in the right place. This comprehensive guide will provide valuable insights into the IT asset manager job description and what it takes to effectively manage an organization's IT assets.

Before we discuss the IT asset manager job description, first, it's essential to understand what IT asset management is. This will help you better understand what all IT tasks and actions need to be managed and performed by an IT asset manager.

What is IT Asset Management?

IT asset management (ITAM) is the end-to-end process of monitoring and managing an organization's IT assets to ensure they are used, maintained, upgraded, and eventually disposed of properly at the end of its life cycle. Furthermore, IT asset management relies on financial, contractual, and inventory insights to track and make informed decisions about IT assets.

The primary goal is to ensure that IT assets are used most effectively and efficiently possible. This also further helps optimize SaaS costs by reducing the overall number of assets in use and making assets last longer, thus preventing expensive upgrades.

Note: A critical aspect of ITAM is understanding the total cost of ownership (cost of owning these assets) and finding ways to optimize asset use.

Now that you have an overview of IT asset management, let’s understand who an IT specialist or, to be more precise, who is an IT asset manager is.

Who is an IT Asset Manager?

The IT Asset Manager, often known as the IT Asset Management Specialist, are the ones who are responsible for managing all hardware and software resources within their organization. Additionally, they design, develop, and implement an effective asset management strategy.

Now that you have a brief idea about the IT asset manager job description, let’s see what all activities are involved in the IT asset management process, which will further help you understand what core IT tasks need to be managed by an IT asset manager in an organization.

Key Activities Involved in the Asset Management Process

Listed below are some of the core activities included in the IT asset management process that an IT manager needs to oversee:

• Asset Discovery: It is the process of identifying all the IT assets that exist within the organization, including SaaS apps, devices (computer, laptop), servers, and other resources. The main purpose of asset discovery is to gain visibility into your inventory of company assets, which is crucial for security, compliance, and efficient IT asset management. It helps you understand what data they hold, where it's located, and whether it's properly maintained and secured.
• Monitoring Hardware And Software: Firstly, you need to decide the metrics you want to track for your assets. Some of the most used software and hardware asset management metrics include:
  • Underused/Overused Software Licenses
  • Number of IT assets
  • Expired Warranties
  • Cost of Maintaining an IT Asset
  • Licensed vs. unlicensed software

Then, you can thoroughly monitor these key metrics to improve the asset's management process effectively. Also, these metrics further allow you to forecast equipment downtime and repairs.

Note: You can maintain records of these metrics to adjust each asset's maintenance duration.

• Managing Asset Lifecycle: It refers to the process of managing an asset from the moment it is acquired or deployed within an organization until its eventual disposal or retirement.
  Managing the asset lifecycle is crucial to ensure their assets are used efficiently and effectively. It further helps make informed decisions about when to retire or replace assets, upgrade as per the requirements, and manage the overall lifecycle costs of the assets. Also, it plays a pivotal part in maintaining security and compliance, particularly when it comes to retiring or disposing of IT assets that may contain sensitive data.
• Keeping Track of IT Assets Usage: It is the process of tracing how users are using the IT assets (SaaS apps, data, and systems), which users are using them, and for what purpose.
  ‍The goal of tracking IT asset usage is to understand whether any assets are underutilized or overutilized. This information can be valuable for optimizing IT resources, making informed decisions about upgrades or replacements, and ensuring that IT assets are aligned with the organization's needs and goals.
  Also, it helps detect any unauthorized or risky usage patterns, ensuring that IT assets are used to maintain data security and comply with relevant regulations and policies.
• Manage software licenses and warranties: It refers to the process of managing software licenses: how many licenses are currently being used, which are not in use, how many licenses need to be reallocated, how many new licenses for that particular application need to be purchased, and more.
  Further, this process also includes keeping track of and managing the warranties, when the warranties will expire, what kind of supports or updates are included in the warranty, and more records for the legal agreements (licenses) and support agreements (warranties) associated with the software used within an organization.
  This process of managing licenses and warranties helps identify which licenses are not being used effectively so that you can re-assign those licenses to other departments or be reimbursed to prevent unnecessary SaaS wastage. And by keeping track of warranties, you won't miss out on renewal dates and save yourself from paying late fines.
  These are all the tasks that business managers need to manage to streamline the IT asset management process effectively and efficiently. But how can you become better at your work as an IT asset manager? To learn the tips and tricks, read on.

What Makes A Successful Asset Manager?

To become better at managing IT assets, it is essential to diligently fulfill the following responsibilities associated with the role of an IT asset manager.

1. Communicate And Set Asset Purchasing Policies

Within many organizations, most employees lack clarity regarding asset purchasing policies, and some may not even understand what qualifies as an asset. So, if you take up the job of an asset manager, you need to start communicating clearly and effectively to understand what all comes under the organization's assets that need to be managed and how they need to be managed (based on critical data stored within these assets).

And once you have a clear understanding, you can set asset purchasing policies and involve the financial and procurement team as well. Since they will be the ones to provide you insights about the SaaS budget, which applications need to be purchased from which vendors, and most importantly, cost reports of the purchased assets.  

Also, as an IT manager, you need to have complete visibility into which of your employees are using all IT assets (apps, data, systems). So that, at the time of app renewals, you can be prepared to justify the necessity of renewing a specific app and determine how it contributes to daily operations.

2. Enforce The Asset Purchasing Policies

Once you have created the asset purchasing policies, it’s time you enforce them. You need to ensure that everyone (employees and teams) follows the guidelines and standard processes when it comes to making payments and registering for any SaaS applications.

But, there are applications that are available for free, so before employees and teams sign up for them, you need to ensure that they inform you well in advance, as these applications may be too risky to deploy. However, employees and teams still might sign up for such apps unintentionally, so to detect these users, you can conduct periodic audits and generate reports.

With the help of these curated reports, you can detect these users and also see if everyone is adhering to the policies or not, and if required, take immediate actions to restrict that users from accessing any such applications.    

3. Discover And Evaluate Potential Risk

You can only be able to detect risk if you know what is in your SaaS ecosystem. So, it is crucial to gain complete visibility into your SaaS landscape; with the help of this visibility, you can identify and evaluate potential threats such as data breaches, hacks, phishing, and many more. This will help you protect your organization’s critical IT assets from such security threats.

Furthermore, to know the potential impact associated with these risks, you need to find out answers to these questions:

• What were the underlying causes (identifying the source of vulnerability)?
• Which assets are most susceptible to being affected?
• Assessing the severity of the impact.

4. Take Actions To Mitigate Risks

Once you have a clear understanding of your risks, you can proceed with remedial actions such as allowing your asset management team to restrict users from accessing critical apps, eliminating high-risk score applications, opting for firewalls, outsourcing experts to help you mitigate the high-security risks, and more. However, it's important to understand that no system is completely immune to risks, so you need to continuously monitor and look through real-time reports and make strategic decisions to reduce surface attack or risk exposure.

5. Document The Entire Process

Now that you have everything under control, you need to prove that to the business leader. The reports your asset management team created will be your justification that IT assets are being well-managed across the company.

Remember, these reports shouldn't be static spreadsheet reports. Instead, they should be in one single place, accessible to all stakeholders, from a single screen and dashboard.

6. Share Important Metrics With Your Teams

When you are assigned the job role of an IT asset manager, you are the leader. Getting your team to work together is in your hands. So, to work in harmony towards the same direction or goal, you need to exchange views and communicate with each other.

For example, you need to share the key metrics on a timely basis with your asset management team to show how they are managing the organization’s IT assets; this will help them focus on areas that require improvement.

Such as, you can share how many hours have been saved through strict adherence to the IT asset management policies. This will be helpful for your team, as they can continue working towards enforcing and monitoring the asset management policies. By doing so, you can effectively streamline the IT asset management process.

But, managing and supervising these IT asset management processes manually can be time-intensive and susceptible to errors. So what you, as an IT manager, can do to eliminate these manual processes is to opt for an intelligent automated SaaS management platform like Zluri. Why Zluri? How does it streamline the IT asset management process? Here’s a quick read-through.

Zluri: Your Ultimate Solution To Effectively Manage Your Organization’s IT Assets

Zluri is an advanced SaaS management platform (SMP) that automates and simplifies IT asset management tasks, such as gathering detailed insights into SaaS apps, monitoring app usage, documenting, licenses management, and more. By automating these time-consuming tasks, your IT team can save their productive time and efforts, allowing them to focus on other core areas.

Not only that, it will further help in reducing errors that occur due to manually managing these IT asset management tasks. This way, your team can safeguard the organization’s crucial IT assets (apps, data, and systems) from security breaches and cyberattacks. To help you understand better what all Zluri is capable of, we’ve compiled a list of benefits:

1. Provides Your IT Team With Complete Visibility Into the Organization’s SaaS Apps

Zluri uses 9 different discovery methods: MDMs, IDPs & SSO, direct integration with apps, finance & expense management systems, CASBs, HRMS, directories, desktop agents (optional), and browser extension (optional), to gather all the SaaS app's insights. These include how many applications are there in the organizations, which all users have access to those apps, which are critical applications, their compliance data, and more. With these extensive data points, your IT team can effectively manage the applications. For instance, they can easily identify duplicate and redundant applications, assess security risks posed by certain apps, track application expiration dates, and much more.

Zluri’s nine discovery methods

2. Categorize All The SaaS Apps Present In The Organization’s SaaS Stack  

Zluri further categorizes all the applications into different groups, such as:

• Managed Applications: These are SaaS apps officially approved by your IT teams.
• Unmanaged Applications: Refers to SaaS apps not approved by your IT team.
• Needs Review: SaaS apps that are yet to be reviewed by your IT teams.
• Restricted Applications: SaaS apps that are restricted to use in the organization.

• Critical Applications: These are SaaS apps with high risk and threat scores.

This helps your IT team to restrict your employees from accessing SaaS apps that are not approved by your teams. By doing so, they can prevent potential security breaches and secure critical data from getting compromised.

3. Enables Your IT Team To Effectively Manage Licenses

Zluri offers insights into software license utilization rates, indicating the percentage of unused licenses compared to the total licenses held. With the help of this data, your team can cross-verify with you and decide which licenses to continue with and which ones need to be eliminated. Also, your IT team can identify how many more licenses are required for a particular application, which licenses need to be re-allocated/reassigned, and more. This will help your IT team optimize the licenses in the best possible way and reduce unnecessary SaaS expenses.

4. Notifies Your IT Team About Upcoming Renewals

Zluri provides a renewal calendar that notifies your IT team about upcoming renewals so that they can be well prepared in advance for which app to continue with, which ones to suspend, or which app license needs to be upgraded to a new plan or downgrade to a normal plan.  

With Zluri by default, you get alerts for contracts, 30, 15, and one day in advance and for payment, you get seven days and 1-day prior alerts. Also, your team can set custom alerts, which help them prioritize high-value contracts.

5. Generates Curated Reports

Zluri enables your IT team to perform thorough audits and generate precise reports on applications and their usage. These reports further help them effectively monitor each application, allowing them to track activities and detect any instances of users accessing critical applications. In response, your team can take proactive measures, such as restricting user access or suspending user accounts, to prevent security breaches.

6. Preparing Organizations for Compliance Audits

Zluri plays a pivotal role in preparing organizations for compliance audits. It provides your IT team with detailed compliance-related data for each application, enabling your team to present auditors with a comprehensive repository of compliance data during the audit.

Now that you know how Zluri helps your IT team streamline the software asset management process, why not take the next step and book a demo? Experience firsthand how this single solution can be a game-changer in efficiently managing your assets.

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Also Read: To know about ITAM in detail, go through IT Asset Management (ITAM) - The Ultimate Guide - Zluri

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