IT asset management in Lyon

How many machines, how old, on which system, with which licenses, and which are reaching the end of their life? These questions look basic. In practice, very few small and medium businesses in Lyon can answer them - and that is what produces emergency replacements, all in the same year, at the worst possible moment.

The inventory, the starting point

We draw up a record of what actually exists:

• Each machine: model, age, processor, memory, type of disk, system installed.
• Servers, NAS units and network equipment.
• Printers and shared peripherals.
• Installed software and the associated licenses, with their expiry dates.
• Current subscriptions: hosting, domain names, email, antivirus.
• Who uses what.

That picture is generally enough to bring two or three anomalies to light: a subscription paid for a service no longer used, a spare license, a machine nobody uses any more but which is still switched on.

Tracking how old the machines are

This is the heart of the exercise, and where the direct financial benefit lies. Hardware renewed gradually costs less and disrupts less than hardware renewed all at once.

The tracking makes it possible to answer three concrete questions: which machines will last another two years, which are worth upgrading rather than replacing - moving to an SSD and adding memory often extend a machine by several years - and which should be budgeted for next year.

La supervision

Beyond the inventory, a few points deserve continuous monitoring because they worsen silently:

• Disk health, which announces a failure several weeks ahead.
• Backup results, with an alert on failure - the most important point of all.
• Available disk space, on the machines as well as on the server.
• The state of antivirus and of updates.
• Expiry dates for licenses and subscriptions, to avoid interruptions.

Useful monitoring is not monitoring that sends a hundred alerts a week: it is monitoring where every alert calls for an action. We set the thresholds with that in mind.

Accounts and departures

A recurring finding in our audits: former colleagues' access left active. Email, file server, business software, remote access. Asset management includes handling these movements - creating properly on arrival, disabling properly on departure - with a written record. See small business IT security.

Licenses, a less trivial subject than it looks

Two opposite mistakes cost small organizations money. Paying for unused licenses - a subscription left active for an employee who has gone, software installed on machines that no longer use it. And conversely, using software without a valid license, which exposes you to a claim in an audit and blocks access to the vendor's support.

The inventory sorts out both. We regularly find immediate savings on this alone, which fund part of the follow-up.

A one-off exercise, with no obligation to continue

The inventory can be done on its own, with nothing committed afterwards. Many owners ask for it ahead of a specific decision: moving premises, several new employees arriving, a change of provider, or simply preparing next year's budget.

You leave with a usable document, whether you then set up follow-up with us, with someone else, or in-house. It is a service that stands on its own.

What you actually get out of it

An up-to-date document you can open in a budget meeting, saying how many machines to replace this year and roughly for how much. The end of emergency replacements after a breakdown. And the ability to take back control of your IT, or to hand it to someone else, without starting from scratch.

This tracking fits naturally into a maintenance contract or managed IT, but it can also be a one-off exercise, simply to know where you stand.