ITAM vs SAM: What's The Difference?
In the last several years, IT asset management (ITAM) has become an increasingly vital topic—a way for companies to know, assess, and manage all the assets they own and use. Asset management can be a complicated topic: it is one of both depth and breadth, so subsets have emerged, including hardware asset management and software asset management (SAM). In this article, we will explore how SAM differentiates from ITAM and why it is a distinct discipline.
Let’s begin with defining the terms ITAM and SAM. Since IT service management (ITSM) frameworks are adopted in various organizational and technology context, several definitions exist across businesses and governing institutions. Consider the widely-accepted definitions by ITIL® and Gartner:
This graphic shows ITAM as an overarching discipline, with some subsets including SAM, hardware asset management (HAM), and the platforms that manage these processes.
Asset management helps organizations manage the cost, risks, and opportunities of complex technology systems—by first establishing a ‘single source of truth’ amidst significant IT complexities such as on-prem and cloud software, rapid growth of IoT and BYOD, and seemingly never-ending audits, both internal and external. All this to say: IT assets have never been so complex, varied, or numerous. Any lack of visibility or control into your infrastructure is a sure-fire way to stop your digital transformation before it starts.
Even companies who excel at ITIL implementation are often lagging in their ITAM efforts. Many frameworks didn’t recognize the importance until recently: asset management wasn’t included until ITILv3, and COBIT 5, released in 2012, also focuses significantly on asset management. This ITAM lag may also be explained by increasingly complex configurations, which leave companies at odds on how to manage these multiplying assets.
No matter why you’re behind on your ITAM, you’ll want to prioritize this effort. Benefits of ITAM include:
In this era of DevOps, software assets present new requirements and challenges, especially when IT must rapidly provision a range of new solutions while keeping track of licensing, updates, and cost controls. As a result, the separate function of SAM has emerged within ITAM to deal specifically with software assets.
At a high level, SAM is an inventory management of software assets. Activities within a SAM framework include the accurate discovery, tracking, and management of licenses, costs, and risks associated with software assets. A good SAM function will align with ITIL or other ITSM processes in order to ensure effective IT service experience for end-users aligned with organizational goals.
Software assets are vastly different from hardware technologies. These characteristics define how software solutions are provisioned, utilized, and retired. IT teams can use SAM successfully to set realistic expectations, identify an asset management roadmap, and perform due diligence in these categories:
Maturity assessment is key to evaluating present functional capabilities of the organization, before investing in appropriate tools. The next step will be to establish a process with respect to the data available regarding software asset deployment, utilization, and other stages of the asset lifecycle. Finally, continuous process improvement must be realized through monitoring and lifecycle assessment.
As the above ITAM graphic illustrates, SAM independently addresses the management of software assets. For effective and holistic ITAM, however, integration with hardware asset management activities is critical. The disciplines overlap due to the inherent dependencies between hardware and software.
For example, the operating system and software solutions must be managed with respect to the hardware of laptops and workstations. The firmware on network infrastructure, such as routers and switches, must be updated and configured based on limitations and performance of the underlying hardware.
More importantly, technology requirements associated with hardware assets are now being addressed as software services. Organizations employ cloud infrastructure resources instead of deploying the hardware on-premise. The hardware, platform, and software operated in such environments are managed collectively. Even though the same SAM and ITAM solution may not suffice in managing all of these assets, organizations are increasingly opting for unified tools instead of stand-alone solutions to manage ITAM, SAM, cloud application management (CAM) and HAM activities separately.
ITAM and ITSM processes are tightly connected. Organizations need to make informed decisions about their IT assets in satisfying service management principles. Information related to asset compliance, risk and cost can be useful in satisfying the service management related to software performance and end-user experience. Other ITSM processes such as management of configuration items, security, service capacity and risk are also closely related with ITAM, and the SAM component is increasingly emerging as a focal point for these activities.
For top-of-the-line ITAM software, consider BMC Helix Discovery. Our cloud-native discovery and mapping solution offers the visibility companies need for effective and successful IT asset and software management. With out-of-the-box patterns, continuous updates, and discovery-as-code, your company can secure what you have, detect vulnerabilities, and see a full ROI within a year. Learn more on our BMC Helix Discovery datasheet.
