xAssets Blog
Strategic thinking and insights related to asset management and discovery technologies
Includes a series on IT and fixed asset management best practices

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Security in xAssets Asset Management Systems
We understand the significance of securing your information and ensuring compliance with industry standards. We try to do everything in our power to minimize risk and protect your data, knowing that any security breach, downtime, or data loss could have a significant impact on your business and ours.
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December 2023
VMWare no longer available under Perpetual Licensing
Broadcom recently acquired VMWare and has now stopped offering all Perpetual license sales of VMWare products. Current perpetual license holdings can continue on support or benefit from lower transitional pricing for the subscription model
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December 2023
Get More Value From Your IT Asset Data
Organizations are amassing vast amounts of information, projected to grow from 33 zettabytes in 2018 to a staggering 175 zettabytes by 2025, according to the Internation Data Corporation. This surge is propelled by factors like the Internet of Things, the emergence of artificial intelligence, and the widespread adoption of data-driven decision-making.
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October 2023
Tips for Managing IT Assets on a Budget
Managing IT assets has become more crucial than ever, and the end goal is to maximize efficiency, profitability and compliance, and minimize risk. This article lists some ways to make the most of your IT budget, enhance productivity,and maintain a healthy and efficient IT environment.
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June 2023
Optimal Strategies for Asset Accounting and Depreciation Calculation
Proper management of fixed assets is critical to any business that aims to maintain accurate financial records and maximize its profits. Asset accounting involves maintaining a record of fixed assets owned by a company and calculating their depreciation over time. Depreciation is the gradual decrease in the value of an asset over its useful life, and it is essential to account for it properly to ensure accurate financial reporting.
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May 2023
Tracking Dell Docking Stations with xAssets ITAM
xAssets Network Discovery now includes the ability to discover Dell Docking Stations. These are loaded into the Asset Inventory / CMDB as child assets of the PC(s) they are associated with. Data discovered for these devices includes Make, Model, Serial Number and Service Tag, Installation Date, Motherboard Version, and monitor resolution.
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April 2023
Tracking Dell and Lenovo Warranty Information with xAssets ITAM
xAssets IT Asset Management Software allows effortless tracking of your warranties in real-time, with built-in warranty tracking integrations enabling key warranty details to be shown on asset records within the CMDB.
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March 2023
Best Practices in Barcoding Fixed Assets - Updated for 2023
Fixed assets are a critical component of any organization, and most businesses would benefit from a comprehensive system for managing their fixed assets. Tracking using the xAssets asset management system allows fixed assets such as equipment and tools to be located in seconds, reducing costs and speeding up maintenance tasks.
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February 2023
Best Practices in Software Asset Management - Updated for 2023
Of all corporate assets, software may be the most complicated to manage. It is intangible, expensive, licensed not owned, and must be regularly maintained. It is also often rendered obsolete by the manufacturer. At a time when the operation of most production assets, information technology assets and communications assets relies on software, having a robust software asset management (SAM) program is not a luxury, it is a necessity.
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December 2022
Best Practices in IT Asset Management - Updated for 2023
The key to successful IT Asset Management is having total visibility of assets, services, contracts, subscriptions, expenditure, processes and people. Once you have this, you can then develop processes that make managing your ITAM much easier.
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October 2022
Extracting real value from SCCM and Intune with ITAM tools
SCCM and Intune have rich data sets but lack reporting tools needed to report on assets. xAssets IT Asset Management includes SCCM and Intune connectors to provide a full-lifecycle ITAM solution.
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October 2022
Understanding the DHS Binding Operational Directive 23-01
On October 2, 2022 The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) published Binding Operational Directive 23-01 requiring all federal agencies to take the specific steps to improve their asset visibility and vulnerability detection capabilities. Agencies have six months to comply.
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October 2022
Supercharge your JIRA installation with an IT asset management toolset
Automatically adding asset data directly to tickets reduces call time and speeds resolution. Using the xAssets IT asset management JIRA integration, you can configure your installation to display the data your technicians need - at a glance. Our deep discovery technology instantly provides crucial information such as hardware, software, classification, ownership, and location data.
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August 2022
Add value to Microsoft Endpoint Manager / Intune with an IT Asset Management toolset
Systems management tools play a key role in maintaining the overall IT infrastructure. As part of that function, systems management tools must be able to discover and identify devices on the network and have some “awareness” of the software already installed. Many have reporting capabilities built in, which lead some IT managers to rely on the systems management tool for hardware and software discovery and inventory.
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March 2022
Fixed Asset Management Best Practices - Inventory and Costs
This article describes how to apply best practices to inventory management, asset related expenditure and depreciation. Fixed or capital assets, like anything else owned by the corporation, must be properly managed to derive the maximum financial benefit from those assets. In many cases a corporation’s fixed assets constitute a large part of its balance sheet assets and are major contributing factors to revenue, production, and productivity. It is imperative that management knows the location, value, life cycle status and final disposition of those assets. A robust fixed asset management solution is a key resource in providing this critical information.
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May 2021
Automated Fixed Asset Management - A key component of capital spending policy
Defining fixed asset policies and procedures, and formalizing them in a corporate document, is critical to effective fixed asset management. Those policies and procedures need to be implemented and acted upon in a consistent manner. However, without a consistent method of managing those assets, determining their value, location and lifecycle status, the policy and procedures become less effective.
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March 2021
Automating ITAM in SMBs
Every organization has a wide variety of data sources that contribute to its IT asset inventory. These can include: manually prepared spreadsheets, purchasing records, Microsoft System Center, Active Directory, cloud providers such as Amazon AWS, Google Cloud and Azure and internal systems and cloud applications. The problem arises when these data sources cannot be consolidated or reconciled. Each source contains some ITAM information, but none provide a complete record for each asset. Many SMBs are faced with this scenario ,where they have ample ITAM data, but no actionable ITAM information.
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Febuary 2021
Using ITAM Solutions to Make Informed IT Budget Decisions

Current and accurate information is critical. One information tool at most CIOs disposals is a robust IT Asset Management (ITAM) toolset. Using the reports on the inventory, configuration of the physical assets, software licensing and utilization and cloud assets, IT management can identify under-utilized, obsolete and excess IT assets. This information coupled with data on maintenance costs for both hardware and software spending, can provide a roadmap for spending cuts that will have minimal impact on operations.

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December 2020
Selecting the Right ITAM Tool
The economic value of a comprehensive IT asset management (ITAM) solution is well documented. “Comprehensive” means that the solution includes Hardware discovery and inventory capabilities, a software asset management (SAM) component, a configuration management database (CMDB), a disposal and end-of-life component and a robust and configurable reporting system. IT managers have a number of options when choosing an ITAM vendor, and there are several steps IT management can take to arrive at a shortlist and select the right solution for the organization.
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September 2020
Fixed Asset Management Best Practices
Companies need to maintain accurate records regarding their fixed assets. However, it is critical not only to maintain those records, but also to do it in a way that can be used throughout the organization, is updated in a timely manner and can be customized to meet the specific needs of various departments. Creating this comprehensive collection of information on the entire fixed asset inventory involves establishing and maintaining a comprehensive, automated and customizable fixed asset management (FAM) solution. However, as with most business practices knowing what processes are needed and putting them into practice are two different things. Use these key best practices to optimize your FAM implementation and operation.
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March 2020
Implementation of xAssets ITAM Solutions into High Security Environments
High security environments such as Government, Defense and Public Sectors have additional complexity in an increasingly complex and regulated environment. With laws, certifications, compliance, security, encryption, zero downtime and disaster recovery requirements, an ITAM solution needs to be highly configurable to meet strategic requirements.
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January 2020
Key Features of xAssets Hosted Services
A lot of companies offer their products in some kind of hosted form these days, some even have a non browser based product which you pay for annually to download, like office. These products are not inherently designed for the cloud and become a management nightmare for system administrators because they have to install those products on every client endpoint and then manage and troubleshoot them. It is much easier to manage products which are browser based and therefore can be used from any client PC or device without being installed on that device.
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December 2019
Managing Cloud IT Assets with xAssets
Managing IT assets, both hardware and software, that are "behind-the-firewall" is a mature business and has been an established practice for over twenty years. There are numerous tool sets available that enable IT managers to discover, inventory, evaluate and reconcile hardware and software assets. But, what about cloud assets? Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) assets need to be counted and reconciled. Server and storage use needs to be managed to match existing needs. As Kim Crawley of AlienVault (now an AT&T company) wrote in an article entitled Reviewing Best Practices for IT Asset Management in the Cloud, "With the implementation of cloud networks, these IT assets become cloud assets too..." But making sure your cloud-hosted assets function well and maintain security is its own area of knowledge: cloud asset management. There are challenges involved in cloud asset management which differ from managing assets on your own infrastructure. For instance, developers and administrators often don’t use the security tools that their cloud providers offer them. Also, visibility into your assets can be more difficult in the cloud."
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November 2019
Optimizing ITAM with SCCM and xAssets
System Center represents a great strategic decision for taking control of your IT infrastructure. The software requires a substantial investment of time and money but for large environments the returns are substantial and worthwhile. A few years ago a paper was published suggesting that an organization running 50,000 clients could save 5,500 man hours per year and $290,000 USD plus some additional one-time savings. However a small additional investment in a full lifecycle ITAM tool can give you a much bigger additional return by giving you visibility and organisational control over those assets through functions that are not available in System Center.
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October 2019
xAssets Awarded USAFE Warrior Preparation Center IT Asset Management Contract
xAssets, via its government partner McCauley Brown (an Alion company,) was awarded a contract to implement its IT Asset Management software solution for use at the United States Air Force in Europe (USAFE) Warrior Preparation Center (WPC) located at Ramstein Air Force Base in Germany.
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May 2019
xAssets Announces US Air Force Security Certification
The US Air Force (USAF) recently certified xAssets IT asset management (ITAM) and fixed asset management (FAM) software tools for use in Non-Secure Internet Protocol Router Network (NIPRNET) and Secure Internet Protocol Router Network (SIPRNET) environments. These two networked environments comprise much of the data necessary to keep the USAF up and running and help keep the nation secure. Following a lengthy vetting process led by USAF IT security experts at the Air Force Network Integration Center (AFNIC), the xAssets software was proven to operate securely on these critical information networks. Beginning in April 2018, xAssets Version 7.2 can be rapidly deployed on SIPRNET and NIPRNET to fulfil complex requirements or very large database implementations requiring an asset-centric solution.
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April 2018

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