Effective IT asset management can bring significant benefits for your business, including cost control, reducing compliance risks and increasing agility. But what should you do first? We believe API integrations are a good place to start.
IT asset management can be a boring, repetitive and error-prone job that IT teams would love to automate completely. But if people are to be involved – which they are for now – than IT experts need a clear compliance process and a centralised tool for asset administration.
This is often easier said than done! IT asset management typically encompasses a lot of information from multiple sources in various unconnected systems. This fragmentation increases the risk of duplicated and inconsistent data, and makes it difficult to track device information.
The practical solution to all this? IT integration.
The benefit of system integrations
Your central IT asset management system should be integrated with other applications to reduce risks and yield business benefits that include:
1. Better business processes: Automating data transfers avoids wasting resources on data aggregation and process monitoring. You can expect higher efficiency from the more accurate performance and timely responses of automated tasks.
2. Improved data quality and visibility: Automated synchronisations ensure data quality by eliminating the risk of human error. The real-time visibility of integrated data is essential for making informed decisions. When all device information is easily accessible in a single place, your IT team can provide better service responses to end-users and implement more informed replacement plans.
3. Time and cost savings: Instead of updating multiple systems, device information is only updated in one place and then synced to the others. This results in a significant decrease in operational costs and time, allowing resources to be redeployed to more innovative activities that contribute to business growth.
Connect easily with APIs
Knowing these drivers for integrations, your next question may be how to best integrate your different systems.
A common answer for organisations is to connect applications using their Application Programming Interfaces, or APIs. An API is simply a set of rules that enables access to the features or data of a system. It acts as a software intermediary that allows two systems to talk to each other.
API integrations are the building blocks for a modern application ecosystem, and have become a necessity for many businesses to streamline operations. Hence, it is important for you to seek out applications – including IT asset management systems – that are equipped with easily-integrated APIs.
Responding to this need, we offer our customers the 3ConnectIT API to help connect asset information and automate IT administration processes.
