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10/06/2026 9:10 pm
TL;DR: IT asset management software is increasingly presented as a single source of truth for asset visibility, lifecycle tracking, and audit preparation, but the source article also shows why identity and entitlement context now matter alongside inventory control, according to Zluri. The real governance gap is that assets can be tracked without proving who or what can still use them, which makes the case for identity-centric controls stronger.
NHIMG editorial — based on content published by Zluri: IT Teams Top 20 IT Asset Management Software - 2026
By the numbers:
- Organisations that describe themselves as confident in their AI deployment actually experience a 72% security incident rate, compared to 33% for those who remain cautious.
- 72% of organisations have experienced or suspect they have experienced a breach of non-human identities , 46% confirmed, 26% suspected.
- Only 44% of organisations have implemented any policies to manage their AI agents, despite 92% agreeing that governing AI agents is critical to enterprise security.
Questions worth separating out
Q: How should security teams connect IT asset management with identity governance?
A: Security teams should connect IT asset management with identity governance by linking each asset to its owner, access grants, and retirement status.
Q: Why do asset inventories often miss the real access risk?
A: Asset inventories often miss real access risk because they describe what exists, not what can still authenticate to it.
Q: What breaks when access lifecycle and asset lifecycle are not aligned?
A: When access lifecycle and asset lifecycle are not aligned, organisations keep valid identities attached to retired assets and lose the ability to prove who still has authority.
Practitioner guidance
- Correlate assets to identities Link every managed asset to a human owner, a non-human executor, and the entitlement set that can act on it.
- Make decommissioning revoke access Require retirement workflows to trigger deprovisioning, secret revocation, and certificate expiry checks before the asset is marked closed in the register.
- Track orphaned access as an operational risk Report on assets that have no current owner, no active business purpose, or unresolved access links.
What's in the full article
Zluri's full article covers the operational detail this post intentionally leaves for the source:
- Side-by-side descriptions of the 20 ITAM platforms and the specific capabilities each one claims to cover.
- Feature-level detail on asset discovery, software licence tracking, hardware lifecycle management, and audit workflows.
- Vendor-by-vendor notes on how each tool handles reporting, compliance support, and lifecycle administration.
- The article’s own categorisation of tools for teams that need a short-listing starting point rather than a control framework.
👉 Read Zluri’s top 20 IT asset management software review for 2026 →
IT asset management software and identity governance: where’s the gap?
Explore further
10/06/2026 9:59 pm
Asset management has become an identity problem in disguise. The article treats inventory accuracy as the primary outcome, but modern estates fail when ownership, access, and usage are not bound to the same record. A device, app, or cloud resource that is accurately counted but incorrectly governed still creates security exposure. Practitioners should treat asset visibility as a prerequisite, not a control outcome.
A few things that frame the scale:
- 72% of organisations have experienced or suspect they have experienced a breach of non-human identities, according to 2024 ESG Report: Managing Non-Human Identities.
- Enterprises that have experienced a compromised NHI averaged 2.7 separate incidents in the past 12 months, according to the 2024 ESG Report: Managing Non-Human Identities.
A question worth separating out:
Q: How do organisations reduce audit risk in IT asset management programmes?
A: Organisations reduce audit risk by maintaining a single evidence chain that ties asset ownership, access reviews, revocation events, and retirement dates together. Auditors care less about the size of the inventory than whether the organisation can prove access was reviewed and removed on time. If the evidence is fragmented, the control is harder to defend.
👉 Read our full editorial: IT asset management software is converging with identity governance
