How well do you know modern ITAM?

Take a quick break from those spreadsheets and take this quiz.

Do you have the chops to correctly answer these questions about modern IT asset management, ITAM? Find answers, and links to two Gorilla Guides that may interest you, at bottom.

QUESTION 1: What's the average yearly difference between asset compliance costs and non-compliance costs?

1. $500,000
2. $2 million
3. $7 million
4. $10 million

QUESTION 2: What percentage of office workers create at least one software account that their IT department doesn't know about?

1. 8%
2. 19%
3. 32%
4. 64%

QUESTION 3: Besides the individual software providers, what global organization protects intellectual property from software piracy?

1. Business Software Alliance
2. Conseil des Licences Logicielles
3. Software User Police
4. Committee for Proper Asset Usage

QUESTION 4: What three business practices are ITAM built around?

1. Contractual, ROI, Passwords
2. Contractual, Discovery, Financial
3. Users, ROI, versioning
4. Discovery, Financial, Passwords

QUESTION 5: In the ITAM world, automation and orchestration are the same thing.

1. True
2. False

QUESTION 6: What are the stages of the IT asset lifecycle?

1. Query, Deploy, Service, Manage, Retire
2. Request, Deploy, Service,
3. Request, Fulfill, Deploy, Reconcile, Service, Retire

No matter how you score, you can always learn more.

These two Gorilla Guides offer intermediate level information, best practices, and insights on IT asset management – for software and hardware. Check ‘em out.

The Gorilla Guide eBook to Optimizing ITAM for Success

The Gorilla Guide eBook to Elevating ITAM with Workflow

ANSWERS

Q1: B - $10 million

Compliance costs, or those relating to maintaining or meeting compliance standards, cost around $5.47 million for a company, while non-compliance costs -- including fines, business disruption, and losses in productivity and revenue -- cost around $14.82 million.”—CIO Dive, survey of functional IT leaders

Q2: D - 64%

A recent 1Password survey of 2,119 U.S. adults who work in an office with an IT department revealed that in the past 12 months 64% had created at least one account that their IT department “doesn’t know about.” 52% reported creating between two and five accounts that their IT department doesn’t know about. For 16%, the tally exceeded five accounts.

What's in your network? Shadow IT and shadow IoT challenge technology sensibilities

Q3: A - Business Software Alliance

Business Software Alliance has made it their business to ensure organizations around the globe do not utilize counterfeit software as well as other explicit and implicit agreements. Moreover, they can inspect most any organization to conduct court-approved audits. Fines and penalties for non-compliance can be enormous and painful, sometimes running into the millions of dollars.

Q4: B - Contractual, Discovery, Financial

• Contractual. ITAM seeks to accommodate and represent all the various contracts for licenses, hardware maintenance, leases, and services that an organization might undertake, in a coherent and consistent way.
• Discovery and inventory. ITAM sniffs out, discovers, and compiles as complete a list as possible of what IT assets it sees in use on an organization’s networks (as well as IT assets that are not on the network and are not assigned to a user—such as new and spare equipment), along with who’s using them, for what purpose, for how long, and so forth.
• Financial. ITAM tracks all the financial activities associated with an organization’s IT assets, including their costs of acquisition, licensing, upgrades, maintenance, disposal, and more.

Q5: False

Automation generally refers to eliminating a manual process in a single task, such as creating a new user account, whereas orchestration refers to optimally arranging a series of automated tasks in a workflow, such as a new hire workflow.

Q6: C - Request, Fulfill, Deploy, Reconcile, Service, Retire

Request: A native ITAM solution can help automate the entire onboarding process for new equipment.

Fulfill: ITAM ensures that the right equipment, cloud, hardware and software is purchased (or provisioned) for the employee or datacenter workloads.

Deploy: Operations and HR provide the accounts or equipment with proper orchestration with the ITAM system.

Reconcile: Proactively managing software audits and true-up costs, while reducing potential legal costs associated with licensing noncompliance.

Service: ITAM helps you manage any regular or preventive maintenance that may be required on software, hardware or clouds.

Retire: Integrated ITAM and HR processes help to ensure IT assets and user accounts are properly decommissioned and returned for end users or datacenters.