Corporate strategies have changed significantly in the past few years. Cloud and hosting/co-location services growth has been substantial because the newer generation applications are written with the flexibility to move assets where it makes good business sense thus eliminating capital expenditures in areas that do not provide a financial return. Today, many companies are putting their assets in the hands of those whose business is running data centers. This enables them to invest in areas that return dividends to their business. Applications of today are written to be resilient and don’t have the constraints of the legacy applications that used to require operations to be retained in house.
There has long been a conflict with allowing assets out of our physical control so as to protect the integrity of the assets and electronic information. Compliance is driving the need for more control and oversight of corporate assets and while we are moving further away from the traditional control of assets we have better tools that enable us to manage these more effectively and efficiently than ever before, even if they are not physically located where we can touch them.
All of this is made easier with tools that automate the asset management process and allow the consumer to have full access to their assets with real time updates and graphics. Immediate access to all pertinent asset information is now readily available from anywhere in the world. Co-location companies are leveraging newer tools that enables their customers an additional level of security that exceeds what customers had even when the assets were in their own data centers.
Now asset management can be automated, thus eliminating the need to have valuable resources spending an inordinate amount of time doing audit related activities. It’s a win/win for everybody involved!
