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Assets are to Azure Automation as running water is to a modern home. Sure, you can exist without piped running water by going to the stream or lake near your home (if you have one), manually filling buckets of water, and lugging them home over and over again. But the spillage and time lost in this process makes it not nearly as effective as turning on the faucet to access clear and safe water out of the tap. After you have water, you use it for household tasks such as washing dishes after dinner, running the clothes washer after football practice, bathing the children in the tub, and making lemonade drink mix for snack time.

Assets serve a very similar purpose in Azure Automation as the modern day public water system. Assets are reusable shared global resources that support global and common connections, credentials, variables, and schedules. These can be shared across runbooks in the same Azure Automation account, or between multiple jobs from the same runbook. They can also manage a value from the Azure Management Portal or the Windows PowerShell command line that can be shared across runbooks. Assets promote centralized management of constant values. In the Automation area of the Azure Management Portal, assets are also referred to as settings. You can create variables that can be input by the administrator of the scripts at runtime or set via code. Assets allow a simple standard mechanism for sharing of global entities between jobs, such as variables, schedules, credentials, and connections. By using assets to encapsulate connections and credentials, the login security information is much safer than being hard-coded in workflow code. Schedule assets provide a global scheduling capability.

A good example of using assets is the Connection asset. It allows you to group the connection data necessary to connect an external system into a single object so that it can be easily accessed by runbooks. It provides a template describing how a connection for a certain system should look. This allows users to use this template when defining the connection to this system. Any changes to the connection data can be made in a single place without having to replicate the change in multiple locations (variable assets, runbooks, and so on).

Assets are useful for keeping your configuration values consistent across all runbooks. Using assets simplifies runbook maintenance by storing and maintaining configuration values in a central location. You will most likely want to use assets across multiple runbooks, so allowing updates in one place ensures the changes are reflected everywhere they are used.

Source of Information : Azure Automation