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Effective management of assets

The true value of business assets is determined by the purchase price of the assets plus the continual cost of maintaining and supporting them over their life cycle. For most business assets, this can be a substantial cost, usually paid out of the capital expenditure budget.

Few people realise that the cost of managing assets throughout their life cycle is often more than the initial purchase price, and then there is the never-ending task of administering them.

Stanley Security Solutions, an EOH company, is known for offering an alternative to the capital expenditure required to buy and maintain assets for business use through its Asset Rental Programme. This option allows businesses to pay a set monthly fee for the assets they need, which includes the maintenance and support over their full life cycles.

“The rental programme allows companies to pay for their assets as an operational expense, easing the financial burden over the period of the lease,” explains Riaan Stander, Technology Rentals Sales Lead for Stanley Security Solutions. “Customers can also include the services of Stanley’s 24-hour monitoring centre to ensure their secur-ity setup is constantly monitored.

“To complement this programme, we recommend customers also include an asset management component in the lease agreement that will remove the management burden from administrators, while ensuring assets are maintained and run at their full capacity.”

The service offered by Stanley applies to both physical assets as well as digital assets. Moreover, Stanley’s asset management service can be integrated with its security service, such as access control and remote surveillance to prevent theft and malicious damage to company property.

From the physical perspective, Stanley enables clients to know what they have, where it is and who is using it, while maintaining a regular maintenance schedule to keep breakdowns and support calls to a minimum. For more valuable items, Stander says RFID tags can be attached to assets to prevent them from being removed from the premises by unauthorised people.

By incorporating Stanley’s access control service, RFID readers can detect any movement of these tagged assets as they go through a door or out of the corporate parking lot, with the appropriate people being notified as soon as any suspicious activity is noticed.

This service is provided by Stanley’s 24-hour control room operators. As soon as an alarm is raised, the operator can quickly and accurately determine what the problem is, whether unauthorised access, movement of an asset or a perimeter alarm being triggered, and alert the appropriate authorities.

On the digital side, Stander says Stanley can automate and simplify the management of almost any digital asset. Not only will the service provider be able to say where IT equipment is and who is using it, the management service will even keep an eye on the components inside the device.

For example, when Stanley monitors business computers, the electronics within the computer, such as hard drives and memory are logged. All the software on the computer is also logged, including whether there is a valid licence for each application.

With this information, companies can keep close tabs on their digital assets to ensure their software is legal and that thieves are not helping themselves to the electronic components inside the systems. Reports are generated to provide the company with a full list of its IT assets, without the business having to spend time and money on the task of administering them. Should something change, such as when a hard drive is swapped out for an older one, the appropriate people will be notified so that action can be taken.

Just as renting corporate equipment takes the burden of ownership and maintenance from companies, Stanley Security Solutions’ asset management service removes the burden of managing and administering corporate assets from the company. This allows the business to focus on making full use of its assets instead of diverting resources to things such as maintenance, support and auditing.

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