Hardware Asset Management Guides
Topic-focused deep dives covering the questions that come up after the basics. Each guide stands on its own and links to related material across the site.
Last reviewed on 2026-04-27
Strategy & Business Case
HAM ROI & Cost Justification
Quantify the business value of HAM — warranty recovery, ghost-asset prevention, procurement savings, license reclamation — and turn it into the business case that gets funded.
Read the ROI guide →Hardware Depreciation & Capital Accounting
How HAM data feeds the capital asset register: capitalization thresholds, useful life, straight-line vs accelerated methods, mid-life events, and disposal accounting.
Read the depreciation guide →Ghost Assets
Identify, recover, and prevent the untracked hardware that drains budgets, fails audits, and creates security risk.
Read the ghost assets guide →Process & Methodology
HAM Implementation Plan
What a hardware asset management plan contains, and the five phases that turn it into a running register: planning, baseline inventory, deployment, data quality, and operation.
Read the implementation guide →Request & Procurement Process
The request status workflow, who authorises what, the six stages of procurement, and how returned hardware comes back into stock instead of being bought twice.
Read the procurement guide →Asset Audit Methodology
How to actually run a hardware asset audit: sample sizing, field procedure, outcome classification, and the report that holds up under external review.
Read the audit guide →Asset Data Model
The fields, naming conventions, classification taxonomy, and lifecycle status state machine that everything else builds on.
Read the data model guide →Hardware Onboarding & Offboarding
The IT-side procedure for joiners and leavers — including contractors, leaves of absence, role changes, and the unplanned-departure variant.
Read the onboarding guide →HAM for Remote & Distributed Teams
Track, deploy, support, and recover IT assets across home offices and distributed workforces — with the privacy and security controls remote work demands.
Read the remote work guide →HAM for Disaster Recovery
How accurate asset data accelerates recovery from outages, ransomware, and physical incidents — and what to capture in HAM before you need it.
Read the DR guide →By Asset Class
Network Equipment
Switches, routers, access points, firewalls, UPS, and KVM — the rack-resident gear that lives longer than your laptops and decommissions through configuration wipe rather than drive sanitization.
Read the network guide →Servers & Datacenter
Rack and elevation tracking, hypervisor host-to-VM mapping, supply-chain serial integrity, and per-component disposal records for chassis with many drives.
Read the datacenter guide →Mobile Devices
Phones and tablets through MDM, IMEI and eSIM tracking, the BYOD-vs-corporate split, and the lost-or-stolen response procedure on a one-hour clock.
Read the mobile guide →Boundaries & Comparisons
HAM vs SAM
Hardware vs software asset management — distinct disciplines that overlap at the device, with different stakeholders, lifecycles, and compliance pressures.
Read HAM vs SAM →HAM vs CMDB
Where hardware asset management meets ITIL configuration management: same devices, different questions, and how to integrate the two without doubling the data-entry workload.
Read HAM vs CMDB →Compliance
HAM Compliance Requirements
How HAM controls support SOX, GDPR, HIPAA, ISO 27001, PCI DSS, and NIST frameworks — with the specific evidence external auditors look for.
Read the compliance guide →Where to Start
If this is your first visit, the complete HAM guide on the home page is the orientation; the lifecycle guide covers the five stages every asset moves through; and the best-practices guide covers the controls that keep data quality high enough for everything else to work.