Hardware Audit – Pc Audit Made Simple

As an IT Manager, you should always be prepared for an IT audit request. By being prepared for any kind of hardware auditing request, you are in a stronger negotiation position with manufacturers – when the threat of an IT audit is no longer menacing. Moreover, IT departments are frequently required to reconcile their physical inventory with an electronic inventory to meet various regulatory and financial requirements. This can be cumbersome, unless you have implemented an IT Asset Management tool that allows you to manage and audit your entire computer inventory easily.

Beyond the complexities of hardware audits, software asset management introduces even greater challenges — for example, auditing a hardware device for the software it contains, and the complexity of software recognition – mapping the many files found to licensed applications and units in the accounting system.

To perform an hardware audit you need to create a detailed computer inventory of all computer assets in your network, including a total hardware audit of PCs, servers, laptops, printers and other types of hardware devices. The network inventory also covers network printers, switches and other devices. Once you created a baseline, you need to have the tools and processes in place to update the inventory with any changes to your assets so it remains accurate and valuable. By automating the process, you will quickly see how it is a much more efficient and thorough process than the all-to-familiar headache of a manual hardware audit.

What properties do I need to audit?

You should keep track of the key hardware properties including RAM , Processors, Video and monitors, Sound cards, Local Drives, Network shares, PC shares, Printers, Modems and more. In addition, you need to keep track of all the software titles installed on each PC on your network. Audit events should keep track of any software that is installed and removed from your computers, user login events and changes to your hardware configuration (for example, when memory is added or disks are removed).

There are tools in the market that makes your audit job much easier by automating the audit process and keeping track of changes to your assets.

SAManage is a leading provider of on-demand IT Asset Management services that makes it easy to audit your hardware and control your IT Assets. SAManage is a SaaS based system. You can finally forget about managing network audit software and start doing your auditing and discovery the on-demand way. SAManage can be easily deployed across multiple locations within minutes and provide visibility into complex IT infrastructures to ensure optimized IT asset utilization.

Visit http://www.samanage.com and sign up for a free account today.