Do you know what your IT assets are and what they are used for? In large or complex IT environments, it can be easy to lose track of the purpose and function of all your assets, but maintaining visibility of all your assets is vital for efficiency and productivity. IT asset visibility (knowing exactly what devices, systems, and applications are running in your environment) is a necessity, especially in today’s remote and hybrid IT environments, but can often be overlooked.
Strong IT asset visibility can help support security, IT compliance, and operational efficiency by ensuring resources are all properly utilized. With tools like Splashtop AEM (Autonomous Endpoint Management), it becomes even easier to monitor, manage, and maintain all your assets, keeping business moving smoothly.
So, what is IT asset visibility, and how can solutions like Splashtop AEM help? Let’s explore…
What is IT Asset Visibility?
IT asset visibility is the awareness of and real-time insights into your business’s connected devices, including their health, usages, configurations, and patch statuses. This includes laptops, desktops, mobile devices, servers, remote systems, and any other device used for work.
IT asset visibility is key for understanding the health and efficiency of your IT systems. If a device is encountering issues, a remote system needs to be updated, or a mobile device lacks the security patches it needs, IT teams should be able to see and address these issues immediately.
What You Should Be Able to See
IT asset visibility is designed to provide a clear, real-time look into multiple aspects of your network and technology. This includes:
Device inventory, including mobile devices, desktop computers, and laptops.
OS and app versions, to ensure each device uses the most up-to-date versions of their apps and operating systems.
Health metrics, including CPU, disk space, and memory.
Patch status and vulnerabilities, in order to ensure everything has the latest patches and that known vulnerabilities are addressed.
System alerts and failures, so that IT teams can quickly identify and address any problems that arise.
Why IT Asset Visibility is Essential for Security
With all that in mind, why is visibility in IT security so important? IT asset tracking and monitoring enable IT teams to ensure all their endpoints and systems remain up-to-date and secure, maintaining strong cybersecurity without interrupting work.
There are several reasons why endpoint visibility and asset monitoring are vital for IT security, including:
You Can’t Protect What You Can’t See
IT asset monitoring ensures you have visibility into each of your endpoints, so you can keep them safe from hackers and other bad actors. When an organization is targeted for a cyberattack, neglected or unmanaged assets are often the first things attackers exploit, but asset monitoring keeps those potential targets safe.
Supports Vulnerability Management
The last thing any IT team wants to do is to leave assets vulnerable to attack. IT asset visibility helps identify outdated or unpatched systems quickly, so IT teams can roll out updates and patches before the systems can be exploited.
Helps Enforce Security Policies
Endpoint security is an important part of most security standards and regulations. Endpoint visibility, therefore, helps maintain compliance by ensuring all assets are secure. This helps companies ensure compliance with internal, government, and industry standards or frameworks, including NIST, DORA, SOC 2, and HIPAA.
Essential for Incident Response
Without endpoint visibility, you won’t be able to react to incidents until it’s too late. Visibility in IT security helps your IT teams watch out for any potential issues or threats so they can react quickly, identify where threats are coming from and what’s impacted, and address the threat without delay.
Key Challenges in Achieving Asset Visibility
As essential as asset monitoring is, some challenges can make implementation difficult. Common obstacles include:
Dispersed Devices (Remote/Hybrid Work)
In an era of remote and hybrid work, Bring Your Own Device (BYOD), and the Internet of Things (IoT), devices are more dispersed and disconnected than ever. Monitoring endpoints outside traditional networks can be a challenge and make it hard to gain full visibility, so it’s important to use a solution that can work across distributed, remote endpoints.
Lack of Centralized Tools
When you have a wide variety of endpoints to manage, asset monitoring can be a challenge. Without a unified interface, endpoint visibility can be fragmented across multiple platforms and dashboards, making it difficult to monitor everything properly. A centralized platform is key for good visibility in IT security.
Manual Tracking Is Unsustainable
It’s unreasonable to expect IT agents to manually track and monitor each of your endpoints in real-time, and spreadsheets and outdated systems don’t scale or update quickly enough. Manual tracking simply won’t suffice, which is why you need endpoint management tools with IT asset tracking to monitor your endpoints and send automated alerts.
How Splashtop AEM Delivers Endpoint Visibility
If you’re looking for a powerful, flexible, and affordable solution that provides IT asset visibility and monitoring, Splashtop has you covered. Splashtop AEM lets you monitor and manage every endpoint across your network, including proactive alerts and remediation, automated patch updates, 1-to-many actions, and more.
Splashtop AEM includes:
Real-Time Health and Performance Monitoring
You can automate asset monitoring to receive real-time alerts in case of suspicious activity. Splashtop AEM lets you track and instantly access CPU usage, disk space, crash logs, and more, so you can check on your endpoints’ performance at any time.
Unified Endpoint Dashboard
When you have a large, distributed environment, it can be difficult to monitor everything. Splashtop AEM makes all the devices across your organization visible from a single dashboard, empowering IT teams to monitor and manage every endpoint with ease.
OS and Application Patch Status
Keeping software and operating systems up to date is essential, but the more endpoints you have, the longer this process can take. Splashtop AEM can automate patch deployment, enabling IT teams to quickly identify systems that need updates or are out of compliance and push out patches as soon as they’re available (or at a more convenient time of their choosing).
Custom Alerting and Scripting
When an issue emerges, addressing it quickly is essential. Splashtop AEM lets you set up custom alerts, as well as script-based resolutions and smart actions to address problems automatically. You can set thresholds and automate remediation when visibility flags an issue, ensuring a quick response should anything go wrong.
Lightweight Deployment
Splashtop AEM is easy to deploy and can quickly get set up across endpoints. There’s no need for a full-blown RMM, because Splashtop AEM gives you the essential visibility in IT security you need without the bloat of a large, cumbersome system.
Real-World Applications of Asset Visibility
With all that said, the benefits of IT asset visibility can still feel more hypothetical than practical. However, there are many real-world use cases where asset monitoring can be vital.
For instance, a Managed Service Provider (MSP) may have hundreds of client endpoints across multiple regions. Solutions like Splashtop AEM provide real-time endpoint visibility for each of those clients, enabling the MSP to provide updates, maintenance, and other key services from anywhere.
Similarly, companies with remote and hybrid workforces can monitor patch compliance for all their endpoints and users. This helps IT directors ensure security compliance before an audit and to maintain security across the network.
Even outside of businesses, endpoint visibility can make a big difference. Universities with multiple labs, for example, can ensure that all of their devices are secure and running smoothly. Healthcare providers, similarly, can use endpoint management and visibility to maintain security updates, end-to-end encryption, and HIPAA compliance.
Essentially, any organization with multiple IT assets can benefit from asset monitoring and visibility in IT security. It helps ensure all your devices and patches are up-to-date (for both security and compliance purposes), improves efficiency across IT teams and organizations, and drives operational success.
Bring Visibility to Your IT Assets With Splashtop AEM
IT asset visibility is a key component of security, efficiency, and operational success. Without visibility into assets and endpoints, organizations risk leaving devices vulnerable and failing to meet their compliance regulations, as well as slowing their responsiveness.
When you want a solution that can provide visibility, insight, and management for all your endpoints, Splashtop AEM has everything you need. It brings your teams real-time visibility across endpoints without added complexity, helping to ensure efficiency and productivity throughout your business.
Splashtop AEM includes:
Detailed inventory reports on systems, hardware, and software.
Customizable policy frameworks, so you can enforce policies across your endpoints.
Proactive alerts and remediation to identify and address issues as soon as they emerge.
OS and third-party patch management, so you can keep all your devices and applications up to date.
CVE-based vulnerability insights to identify and prioritize threats in real-time.
Ready to experience Splashtop for yourself? Get started with a free trial today and gain control over your IT environment:
