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IT Visibility: Are you happy with your CMDB data?

Written by Christian Achenbach | Dec 14, 2022 1:54:34 PM

Modern IT estates are complex and multi-faceted; as is the transition process from on-prem to SaaS and other cloud services. This creates new (and compounds traditional) discovery and inventory pain points for many IT asset managers. Worst scenario can be bad or unusable data in IT repositories, such as a CMDB. Sounds familiar? Then stay tuned and read how you can make your stakeholders happy.

According to Gartner research more than 71% of organizations cite data concerns impacting their effectiveness, especially with their CMDBs. In fact, four out of ten business initiatives fail due to poor or incomplete data quality.

 

What and where are my IT assets?

This is more than a trend - it’s an issue driven by strong growth of public cloud services and more moving away from computing with on-prem corporate networks. An exponential amount of enterprise-generated data is created and processed outside of a traditional centralized data center or cloud platform while some portion of storage and compute resources move closer to the source of data, aka the edge.

Another type of assets in scope are containerized applications and environments, and concepts such as function-as-a-service & microservices. All these present a particular challenge for data discovery and the visibility of assets as often they can be very short-lived assets, but nonetheless important to a range of stakeholders.

 

Obviously, this development can be very challenging for IT asset management. And by pushing computing out to the edge - the place where the creation or transmission of data occurs – visibility and control is lost almost completely. 

 

 

 

Beyond ITAM - Your Guide to IT Visibility

The ultimate relevance of trustworthy data

New IT complexity requires the right technical framework that can discover a wide range of IT assets and, in turn, deliver good or trustworthy data. Data that is complete, current, and relevant is a priceless business decision-making commodity, as it is the foundation for proper ITSM, ITAM and ITOM processes.

Given the complexity around the IT estate, what if you…

 

  • could discover data across multiple platforms, environments, regions, on-prem, cloud services, or containers?
  • could identify assets reaching end of life or support and remove applications that have security vulnerabilities?
  • could stop paying maintenance on older software?
  • could easily understand if you’re at risk of non-compliance and respond more quickly to internally and externally audits?
  • could report on the who, when, what, why and how an IT asset has been used?
  • could increase your data quality in your asset repositories like the CMDB?

What do all these ifs have in common?

They are all based on accurate and trustworthy data. Trustworthy data is the key to your success as an IT Asset Manager. It’s the reason why you could start loving your job and can lead to a simplified job-well-done.

The golden source of truth for IT processes

When secure corporate networks were the only option, it was a far simpler task to identify every asset on the network - making even a manual discovery process possible.

This is where IT Visibility comes into play. Accurate and timely data that identifies what software is installed and/or accessed across the IT environment, as well as the kinds of data being generated or processed within, is the first step in addressing risks before they become incidents.

Software Asset Management, as a foundational part of any IT visibility program, creates a clear and comprehensive view of the current IT software estate – anywhere from data centers to public cloud to employee devices and beyond.

IT Visibility enables multiple stakeholders to work from a single golden source of truth to integrate processes and decision-making and extract maximum business value from IT assets.

ITAM professionals who have utilized an IT Visibility program have subsequently:

  • seen the visibility of their program increase
  • positively impacted the security of their organization
  • facilitated mergers and acquisitions
  • increased overall efficiency and effectiveness of their IT operations.

How and where to start the journey?

Our latest whitepaper “Beyond ITAM – Your Guide to IT Visibility”, co-written with ITAM Review, looks at what’s in scope, what data you should gather, and how you can manage and transform that data into actionable insights for technology governance teams. We examine the benefits of applying ITAM tools and methodologies to solve a management challenge in IT environments – that of visibility and transparency.

 

 

Beyond ITAM - Your Guide to IT Visibility

If you want to learn more about the benefits of SAM tools, feel free to contact us or ask for a free demo.