Distributed workforces have made IT inventory management more complex than ever. Without accurate, real-time visibility into your hardware, software, and configurations, you face compliance risks, rising costs, and security vulnerabilities. Outdated asset lists can lead to wasted resources, forgotten devices, and security risks from leaving devices vulnerable and unpatched.
The consequences of this can go beyond just one or two devices. It can put a business’s network at risk, lead to a company failing to meet its IT compliance requirements, and worse.
With that in mind, it’s time to examine inventory management, best practices for managing your inventory with a remote and distributed workforce, and how Splashtop AEM (Autonomous Endpoint Management) simplifies inventory management for remote and hybrid teams.
Best Practices for Inventory Management in a Distributed Workforce
Given the importance of inventory management, knowing the tips and tricks to manage your inventory properly can be helpful. Here are some best practices for inventory management:
1. Centralize Device & Software Tracking
If you use disparate tools for tracking your devices and software, you’ll lose time keeping track of each of the different lists. Siloed spreadsheets and disconnected tools can make it easy to lose track of everything you’re tracking, and can be a hassle to search through.
Instead, invest in a centralized solution that covers all your endpoints and software. Splashtop AEM, for instance, includes a real-time inventory dashboard that covers all your endpoints, keeping all the information you need in one place.
2. Automate Asset Discovery & Updates
Manually entering each of your assets and endpoints can be time-consuming and prone to human error. Rather than periodically auditing your assets, it’s far more efficient to use a solution that continuously scans your network to track your endpoints.
For example, Splashtop AEM automatically refreshes inventory data whenever new devices connect. This helps ensure your inventory is accurate up to the moment while reducing admin time that would otherwise be spent on manual audits and logs.
3. Organize Assets with Tags & Groups
Simply listing all of your assets isn’t enough – organizing them is equally important. You’ll want to use tags and sort your assets into logical groups, such as by department, region, or role. From there, you can also apply policies and filters by group, which can simplify and improve patching and remediation by making it easy to identify and prioritize endpoints.
4. Link Inventory to Security Actions
When you have a proper inventory of your assets and endpoints, managing them becomes significantly easier. Connecting asset data to patch management and configuration control software enables you to support your remote devices painlessly by pushing out patches and policies across disparate endpoints.
Splashtop AEM, for instance, can be used to manage multiple endpoints from a single place. This allows users to deploy updates, enforce settings, and even uninstall risky or suspicious software from the inventory view, thus simplifying management.
5. Retire & Reclaim Resources
Inventory management doesn’t just let you see the assets you have; it also helps you identify which ones you forgot or no longer need. Proper inventory management can identify unused licenses, outdated hardware, or devices that have been sitting idle, so you can either utilize or remove them.
This helps reduce costs by eliminating unnecessary assets and improves your cybersecurity posture by removing outdated endpoints that could create vulnerabilities.
Splashtop AEM in Action
If you want a powerful solution that provides not only inventory reporting but also asset management to help you support, update, and protect your endpoints, Splashtop AEM has everything you need.
Splashtop AEM makes it easy to monitor, manage, and streamline tasks across your endpoints, even in remote environments. With it, you can automatically detect and push patches for your operating systems and third-party software via automated updates linked to your inventory data, or customize and enforce policies across endpoints.
Should Splashtop AEM detect any vulnerable or misconfigured endpoints, it can automatically push out automated fixes via smart actions, providing policy-based remediation. Plus, Splashtop AEM uses real-time CVE data to identify and prioritize threats, so you can respond to potential problems quickly.
All of this can be done from a unified, centralized dashboard, giving you full visibility into your assets and the power to support your endpoints from anywhere.
Getting Started with Better Inventory Management
Splashtop AEM brings you powerful, efficient, and user-friendly inventory management for your distributed workforce. Whether you need to manage endpoints across multiple offices, remote employees, or a BYOD workforce, Splashtop AEM gives you the tools to support each device, complete with detailed inventory reporting and proactive alerts.
Splashtop AEM is easy to set up and deploy, so you can connect your endpoints in minutes. There’s no need for a separate asset management tool, as it supports everything from a single dashboard. Splashtop AEM gives IT teams the tools and technology they need to monitor endpoints, proactively address issues, and reduce their workloads, including:
Automated patching for OS, third-party, and custom apps.
AI-powered CVE-based vulnerability insights.
Customizable policy framework.
Hardware and software inventory tracking across all endpoints
Alerts and remediation to automatically resolve issues before they become problems.
See Every Device. Control Every Device.
Take control of your distributed workforce with Splashtop AEM. Start your free trial today.
