Hardware Asset Management
The hardware asset management term means that a company should be aware of it's hardware computer assets: computers, peripheral devices, network equipment and so on it owns and effectivelly manage them in the company's everyday life. Knowing that will help the company efficiently react to any changes required. For example, if the company's corporate network starts slowing down, the IT team members should find the bottleneck and make a decision how to fix it rather than simply replacing the network elements with the faster ones.
The key to hardware aset management is the hardware invemtory. The network administrator should not only know the principal scheme of his network, but also know which devices serve what subnets, and know the characteristics of those devices. It is very hard or impossible to know all devices characteristics if your network consists of hundreds of computers; in this case the network administrator use specialized software packages that inventory the network and provide the network administrator with the detailed report on what his/her network consists of.
We can recommend you a tol of this kind - Asset Tracker for Networks. This software scans the network and enumerates all computers and devices connected to it, recording hardware and software characteristics of each individual device in a centralized database. Please use the link below to download a free trial version of the software you can use to evaluate it.
Next article: Hardware Configuration