Leveraging Artificial Intelligence for Real-Time ITAM
Anglepoint’s President & Chairman, Ron Brill, shared the following article in a special edition of the German Harvard Business Manager in April 2024.
ITAM today still mostly consists of point-in-time manual analysis performed on a quarterly, or even annual, basis. This is no longer sufficient to support the needs of fast-moving modern hybrid IT environments. ITAM must adapt if it wishes to remain relevant. In this vein, FinOps is setting an example that ITAM should follow. To achieve near real-time reporting and decision-making, ITAM must leverage technology, specifically Artificial Intelligence (AI).
ITAM had originally evolved to address point-in-time audit and compliance situations or contract renewals. For these purposes, a retrospective, point-in-time ITAM analysis has been acceptable, and this practice has largely remained in ITAM to this day. For example, this is reflected in the creation of Effective License Position (ELP) reports per software vendor, a key activity in ITAM. To create an ELP, ITAM transforms contracts and purchase history data into license entitlement information and similarly, transforms software deployment data into license consumption information. The ELP report then highlights over-deployments (representing a compliance issue) and under-deployments (representing shelfware and potential cost saving opportunities). Naturally, an ELP report reflects the licensing position at a specific point in time and becomes increasingly obsolete with time.
The process of creating an ELP involves significant manual work to identify and collect data from multiple stakeholders and systems, normalizing that data, and performing manual analysis by applying licensing expertise. As a result, creating a complete and accurate ELP report for a single software vendor can take several weeks or even months, and involve a significant cost. Therefore, many companies limit the production of ELPs to their key software vendors and do so on a quarterly or annual basis only.
While quarterly or annual ITAM reporting may have been good enough in the past, it is no longer sufficient. This is because of changes in technology and changes in stakeholder needs.
The use of the cloud globally roughly equals on-prem infrastructure use and continues to increase rapidly. Unlike on-prem, IT assets in the cloud are more ephemeral and are often provisioned and de-provisioned using automation, and their life may be measured in months, weeks, days, and sometimes hours and minutes. ITAM reporting must evolve to near real-time to remain relevant to the business.
Stakeholder needs have evolved as well to require more real-time information. The pace of decision-making in business has increased, necessitating timely quality information. One example is cybersecurity, where the practice of Cyber Asset Attack Surface Management (CAASM) requires complete, accurate, and timely information about all IT assets impacting the organization.
Achieving more real-time ITAM has the following overall business benefits:
- Reduce costs: More real-time information about IT assets (what assets exist, where they are, how they are configured, how much are they utilized and by whom, how much they cost, and so on) enables better-informed and timely optimization decisions to reduce the company’s spend on hardware, software, and cloud.
- Mitigate risks: Real-time ITAM also enables an improved compliance position concerning license agreements or regulatory requirements. In addition, timely ITAM information also helps improve the organization’s cybersecurity position as mentioned above, thus reducing cybersecurity risks.
- Improve operations: More real-time ITAM would also enable other IT disciplines that are dependent on ITAM information to become more effective. Examples include IT service management (such as improving the quality of CMDB information), business continuity/disaster recovery, help desk, and others.
FinOps (cloud financial management) is a related discipline to ITAM which has significantly grown in dominance over the last few years. FinOps specifically calls for near real-time dashboards reporting on cloud usage and costs. Gartner® predicts that in 3 years, more than 50% of organizations will have converged their ITAM & FinOps functions. As a result, ITAM programs will need to adapt to the pace of FinOps.
But how can ITAM evolve from periodic, manual reports to near real-time “evergreen” dashboards? The most likely answer is smart automation. ITAM tools such as Flexera and ServiceNow are getting increasingly better and would certainly be a key component to making this reality happen. It is likely that the eventual introduction of Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning (AI/ML) solutions by ITAM tool providers, including Large Language Models (LLM), would truly enable ITAM to approximate real-time.
Once AI could be trained on software licensing rules, it could ingest various sources for purchase history data (such as entitlement reports from the software vendor, purchase orders, and contracts), as those are created. Additionally, it could ingest various sources for deployment data (such as tool outputs, Active Directory and CMDB data, and others), at a higher frequency than in the past (for example, more frequent network scans or agent reporting). AI would then be able to produce license entitlement information and license consumption information and be able to reconcile these to identify over and under deployments. While it is expected that a human will need to review and validate the analysis ahead of key decisions, and to continue training and fine-tuning the AI, the hope is that AI will eventually be able to perform the majority of the analysis work. The role of the ITAM professional could then evolve from producing ELPs to doing higher-level analysis, managing internal and external stakeholders, and focusing on the implementation of recommendations to achieve cost savings.
If you would like to hear more on this topic, Anglepoint’s Chairman, Ron Brill has joined our ITAM Executive Podcast to talk about Real Time ITAM.
You may also like to read our complimentary Gartner® Report “Defining AI and Setting Realistic Expectations“