Businesses of all sizes pay a heavy price when they lose track of data assets
Enterprise IT teams are asked to manage a daily deluge of data. Maintaining the uptime of business critical applications and secure customer data is a full time job, so employees are more likely than ever to take offline assets for granted. Unfortunately, doing so exposes organizations to excessive, avoidable risk. Offline assets must be accounted for via a comprehensive, transparent process or else businesses remain vulnerable. Developing a full-fledged offline asset strategy is bound to put even more pressure on enterprise IT teams. In this way, companies in need of a new offline asset management strategies are required to solve two problems at once.
This conundrum speaks to the value of deploying a tool designed to help organizations streamline their asset management process. Taking a closer look at possible breakdowns in offline asset management also reveals all the ways a comprehensive offline storage solution can help companies make offline storage more secure, reliable and efficient. These insights also emphasize why organizations are in dire need of a software platform that gets their capabilities up to speed.
Undeveloped and generic workflows slow down asset management
One of the most important advantages of adopting an offline asset management platform is the ability to standardize the company’s offline IT asset workflow across the entire organization. This is an important tool to have considering how often custom workflows evolve behind the scenes to manage resources like tape storage. A unified approach helps to accelerate the collection of IT assets from multiple sources, guarantees that employees across the business are accountable to the same policies and ensures that a substantial paper trail is established as soon as IT resources move offline.
Successful offline storage starts with detailed documentation
Improvements to documentation generation is an important step in making sure offline IT assets are in the right place at the right time. The days of doing reports, status checks and location tracking by hand are long gone. Companies that insist on solving this problem the old-fashioned way merely increase their exposure to problems associated with lost, stolen or compromised offline IT assets.
High-performance asset management platforms like AssetAware are designed to eliminate this busy work from your company’s process completely. Automating document generation within the company’s offline asset storage workflows ensures that the process remains transparent and accountable without putting extra pressure on employees to squeeze extra tasks into their work day. A standardized process for documentation is also a big help when dealing with visits from auditors.
Barcode scanning and activity reporting eases compliance woes
Companies in dire need of an updated offline asset management strategy must do more than streamline storage. They must also pay careful attention to the process of moving offline IT equipment from one location to another. This movement may be for the sake of retrieving a piece of archived data or involve the transportation of assets from one office to another. Either way, real-time tracking capabilities must be put into place to ensure that the company always has a clear picture of where assets are currently located. After all, the cost of lost data is considerable. According to eWeek, data loss contributed toward to $1.7 billion in extra costs in 2014 alone.
Barcode scanning is one of the most effective strategies a company can deploy in this regard, and one that is supported by robust asset management platforms like AssetAware. This simple approach to digitizing the storage and check out of offline IT assets has plenty of value for organizations if paired with a reliable software that’s easy for employees to use. This comfortable learning curve is especially vital when preparing employees for the company’s next audit.
Destruction events must produce certification
Because permanently deleting stored data is so difficult, companies that manage data, online and offline, must develop strict policies to ensure that data is properly removed and destroyed. Organizations have even more to worry about when they are put in charge of deleting customer data.
Proof of destruction must be generated upon completion of these jobs lest companies become exposed to numerous forms of litigation. The Herald & Review noted that it’s not uncommon for this type of data loss scenario to sink a company within several months. Thankfully, modern asset management solutions with documentation support can easily generate certificates of destruction as well.