Improved visibility of high value IT assets has long been a goal of the information technology industry. In the past, equipment and data were locked up in the enterprise IT environments. With the advent of the internet, intranets, laptops, hand-held computers and phones, and portable storage media, high value equipment, and higher value data, are increasingly mobile. Current methods for tracking these high value assets are primarily manual and error prone. Organization have tried bar code based solutions to attempt to address this problem, but the “line-of-site” requirement of barcode and the placement and durability of the labels often make these implementations impractical.

Standards based UHF Passive RFID tags provide an attractive solution to tracking high value IT assets. On-Metal Gen2 RFID tags are available in increasing smaller footprints and price points that provide a rapid return on investment for asset tracking applications. RFID tags can also be integrated into Volume Serial (VOLSER) labels on portable storage media, providing automated inventory management of media that may contain highly sensitive customer data.

Initiatives currently underway in the information technology Asset Visibility Sector include Tracking High Value Laboratory Testing Equipment, and Tracking Tape Storage Media.