We recently had a meeting between our data-center operations folks and our bean-counters. The long and the short of it was, for companies where they have SOX compliance to deal with, etc., etc., how granular are other people getting on their asset tracking.
For example,... - When you upgrade a server from 16GB to 32GB, does accounting get notified that the valuation of the server has changed for depreciation purposes? When you swap out the 146G hard drives for 300G hard drives, is there any accounting controls you enforce for that type of action? - Is there anyone who is ACTUALLY tracking their hard drives and individual DIMMs through their enterprise, even if they were bought separately later as an upgrade to an existing piece of hardware? - What do you do when you take that 16GB out of the server above and toss it on a shelf as being obsolete? Does accounting ever know? or care? - Do you bother to tell accounting when $VENDOR comes out and swaps out a motherboard, changing the serial number of the hardware in the process? (and yes, for some vendors, a replacement motherboard DOES change the serial number). If you don't, doesn't that really hamper the ability to audit the asset tracking when asset ID # N used to belong to S/N XXXXXXX and now belongs to S/N YYYYYYY? - Do you tell accounting when you ship hardware from one colo facility to another? We're trying to define our policies and controls in this area, and it seems far-too-easy to get lost in the weeds of "what someone MIGHT have wanted you to do", when there's probably some, much easier, "what most people are doing" types of practices. Any thoughts, comments, suggestions, from folks who've been down this road before? Cheers, D _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
