Tech/Basics/Systems Policy
Introduction
Within any organization there are systems or devices. Today those systems are physical or virtual computer hardware running locally or remotely providing networking, compute, and or storage. When discussing the life-cycle of these systems a policy becomes important. As a guide some topics that are important will be shared here to enable the development of a policy.
Accounting First
In the interest of fixing a long standing issue. I have found that approaching equipment from an accounting view helps capture the valuable attributes. A device was purchased for a reason with funds from a budget and it should be used for X number of months/days. In accounting assets should also be removed from the books completely. While the device might have useful life left the controlled lifespan of devices in the infrastructure becomes very handy. Virtual providers are very much the same. A virtual cloud provider should have a set budget limit to contain resources.
Checklist
- Asset tracking entry in Accounting Software
- Vendor, Purchase Date, Warranty/Contract, Retire Date(depreciate), Budget Source, Price, Description
- Documentation that translates Asset data to linkable info like UUID (MAC)
- Vendor support info
- Features or options
- Sub-assets (HDDs)
- Photos
- Recovery Plan
Practice
For team members that have limited experience it can be fun to write some ***what if*** statements around what could go wrong.
- The device is forgotten and causes an outage during a UPS test.
Notes
- Document sites/locations where physical assets might exist.
- Include remote workers homes
- Document the physical assets
- Enable Add/Edit/Remove of physical assets
- Document Services
- SaaS services
- Cloud Compute services
- Cloud Storage
- Document Link (ISP) Services