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FinOps IT Asset Management: A Strategic Approach

Azure Cost Management

6 Mins Read | Last modified on February 12th, 2025

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FinOps IT Asset Management(ITAM) is one of the modern trends in the IT field, which is gaining increasing popularity among organizations in order to manage their financial processes and technological tools. When the FinOps term appeared simultaneously with the ITAM term, it became clear that their integration would offer the following advantages: better control of costs, optimized resource management, and legal compliance.

ITAM and FinOps

IT Asset Management (ITAM) therefore deals with the management of assets in an organization from the time they are acquired up to the point when they are no longer useful. In contrast, FinOps is a cloud financial management technique that focuses on IT, finance, and business execution for a better cloud spend.

They both have efficiency as their end goal; however their disciplines vary. ITAM focuses on the tracking and governing of physical and virtual assets on premises besides in the cloud while FinOps is a cloud cost optimization practice which encourages cross-functional approaches. These, in combination, constitute a sound approach to contemporary technological management.

ITAM alone focuses on different asset types, and FinOps, on the other hand, is a relatively fresh concept offering similar and overlapping services but in a different context.

Key Differences and Complementary Capabilities between ITAM and FinOps

I think the biggest difference is that one is more general than the other. ITAM by conventional or customary definition predominantly pertains to the management of assets, such as hardware, software, and on-premise facilities. While the concept of Cloud Cost Guard aims at stable costs in exchange for fixed resources, FinOps deals with changeable cloud environments where the costs may vary.

However, it should be noted that these disciplines are interrelated. ITAM is the first step offering necessary data and governance, while FinOps overlays current usage and teamwork to address costs before they become issues. The combination of these two concepts in FinOps IT Asset Management means that organizations are able to handle not only the physical assets which are static in nature but also other resources which are dynamic in nature.

The Evolution of IT Asset Management

FinOps IT Asset Management has matured from simply identifying the ownership, situation and location of an asset to going beyond and covering cloud resources. Cloud has also brought some new challenges, like how to operate on short-lived resources and how to control what goes on in a. This is because modern ITAM now dovetails with FinOps to corral these complications while distributed world with the approach of FinOps IT Asset Management.

This evolution is depicting the actual need of the dynamic and integrated management practices of Information Technology, and it’s the reason why FinOps IT Asset Management should be considered.

Integrating FinOps with IT Asset Management

When applied together in FinOps IT Asset Management, FinOps and ITAM help an organization have a strategic focus on the amount and usage of IT money and services. Key strategies for FinOps IT Asset Management include:

  • Creating shared enterprise inventory of IT assets including both classic IT assets and cloud resources.
  • Establishing techniques for real-time organization of costs for managing finances with lesser risks.
  • Forming ITAM working teams across the organization in an endeavor to support ITAM governance for FinOps IT Asset Management.
  • This integration results in cost transparency and operational flexibility that can help an organization to better connect its IT spends with its business objectives. With FinOps IT Asset Management, it becomes possible to see how firms can arrive at a better balancing of the technological disciplines contained within this set of references, as a way of creating a better economic end product.

Best Practices for Effective FinOps IT Asset Management

To maximize the benefits of FinOps IT Asset Management, organizations should:

  • Keep detailed records of specific assets including current information.
  • Develop analytical models that would help in identifying cost trends and factors that, control the cost.
  • Semi-automate asset tracking and cost allocation.
  • Encourage cooperation between IT, finance and operations.
  • In so doing, businesses can achieve efficient, intelligent and effective use and spending on IT, with strong compliance and governance systems in place. They also guarantee that various departments, particularly IT and finance, do not work at cross-purposes to organizational strategic goals.

Read more: Top Azure FinOps Best Practices You Need to Know

Challenges in FinOps IT Asset Management

Despite its advantages, FinOps IT Asset Management presents challenges, such as:

  • Managing presence within complex cloud computing systems.
  • Lack of communication between the IT and finance departments.
  • Challenges and ways of mitigating compliance problems in multi-cloud environments.
  • To overcome these challenges it is necessary to use highly developed instruments and to pay attention to the issues connected with collaboration and share of the information. The above challenges can also be well addressed by the involvement of the teams in continuous training within FinOps IT Asset Management.

How Turbo360 Helps in IT Asset Management?

Turbo360 Azure Cost Analyzer allows organizations to add further value to their FinOps IT Asset Management practices with:

  • Unified Observability: Cover everything that teams want to watch from a single console. The capability improves visibility in how asset performance and utilization influences asset allocation and lifecycle management.
  • Distributed Tracing: Included with Turbo360, which lets organizations track the performance of their applications over many services. This is helpful in identifying bottlenecks and inefficiencies that exist in the usage of the asset, because as we all know, we need to have an optimized IT environment.
  • Enhanced productivity for developers: By standardizing operations and opaquing up the documentation, Turbo360 increases developer productivity. Particularly useful for ITAM, it frees teams up from wrangling with operational quirks to concentrate on strategic projects.
  • Structured Documentation: It’s not just operational teams that can use the platform. Management can also leverage the technical documentation the platform produces. This structured documentation is important to an accurate IT asset inventory and for compliance to organizational policies and standards.

Thus, by using Turbo360, the exchange between ITAM and FinOps processes in FinOps IT Asset Management is possible for achieving optimized costs and outstanding operations.

Check out Turbo360 with a 15-day free trial!

Conclusion

FinOps IT Asset Management is the new revolution to optimize IT Asset Management & FinOps. To date, such disciplines would prove critical for organizations to analyze modern technological environments to enable performance and cost optimality using FinOps IT Asset Management. With this integration, we make IT management reach a whole new level of awareness for costs.

Related reading

This article was originally published on Jan 27, 2025. It was most recently updated on Feb 12, 2025.

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