Glossary / IT Asset Management
IT Asset Management
The practice of tracking every piece of hardware and software an organization owns across its full lifecycle — procurement, deployment, maintenance, and retirement — rather than relying on memory or an outdated spreadsheet.
IT asset management splits into hardware asset management (physical devices, their owner, location, and lifecycle stage) and software asset management (what's licensed, what's installed, and whether the two actually match — catching both over-licensing, which wastes money, and under-licensing, which is an audit exposure).
Asset data underpins security work that's otherwise impossible to do well — a device that isn't in inventory can't be reliably patched, monitored, or included in a vulnerability scan's scope, because nobody's tracking that it exists in the first place. That's the direct link between asset management and the shadow-IT problem: unknown assets and unmanaged assets are usually the same devices.
Asset records go stale fastest in organizations without a formal check-out/check-in discipline — a laptop reassigned between employees, or a device quietly retired without updating the record, is how an asset inventory drifts from reality within a few months of being accurate.
How Nexus handles this
Nexus's asset & device management module tracks check-out/check-in and lifecycle stage directly, so a device's current owner and status stay attached to the same record as its tickets and monitoring history instead of drifting out of sync with a separate spreadsheet.
More terms
MSP (Managed Service Provider)
A company that remotely manages a client's IT infrastructure and end-user systems on an ongoing, proactive basis — usually a flat-fee contract, not break-fix billing.
RMM (Remote Monitoring and Management)
Software that lets an MSP monitor device health and perform remote management tasks — patching, scripting, remote control — across every client site from one console.
PSA (Professional Services Automation)
Software that runs the business side of MSP operations — ticketing, SLAs, billing, contracts, and client records — the system of record most MSP work flows through.
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