Table of Contents
- CMDB: A detailed overview
- The faster you make changes and learn from them, the more profitable you will be!
- That’s where CMDB comes in – by enabling change management in a smart, controlled manner.
- So, how exactly does CMDB help in change management?
- A CMDB enables fast change management with minimal disruption
- Carry out effective change management with Virima CMDB
When you’re an IT professional, there’s nothing more frustrating than having to deal with change management. Enter CMDB. A CMDB helps you with change management effectively and quickly.
Configuration Management Database (CMDB) is one of the most important concepts for any organization with a robust IT environment to effectively deal with change management.
It’s essentially an information system containing all of your organization’s important data, which can serve as a user-friendly interface to the whole of your IT landscape.
A CMDB provides information on:
- Data on hardware, software and services run your entire operation
- How they’re related
- What licenses each component requires
- Who uses them on which systems, and so on.
This allows you to make critical decisions about IT investments and operations.
With a CMDB, you have complete visibility into all aspects of your infrastructure: hardware assets, software licenses and applications running on them (including operating systems), as well as networks and services they communicate through (e.g., firewalls). This provides the framework for effective management of change across all systems from a single source—so it’s easier for you to stay connected with the key components of your organization’s digital footprint.
Because the CMDB plays such an important role in helping with change management, it is imperative to understand it in detail.
CMDB: A detailed overview
It contains an organization’s important data of both software and hardware components. These can be accessed by the IT department for making changes and updates to their systems as needed.
You can think of a CMDB as a repository that houses all the information about your services. It’s where you store data about your applications, hardware, and people.
If we were talking about just hardware or software components then this part would be simple enough but adding human beings into the mix makes things really complicated!
A CMDB can serve as a user-friendly interface to the whole of your IT landscape. It gives you access to the data you need to know what hardware, software and services run your entire operation – so you can map dependencies among those elements.
The CMDB allows you to view, collect and maintain essential information about your company’s IT assets, applications and services in one place. In addition, by identifying dependencies among these elements, it helps you manage change throughout your entire operation.
For instance, Virima CMDB software sits on a model that tracks relationships between hardware, applications and service. This helps you understand what changes impact what components, and who needs to approve it. With a comprehensive set of features and flexible tooling, Virima lets you make changes to your systems with confidence that they’ll have the least impact possible. When it comes to evaluating change management software, Virima sets the bar for flexibility, breadth of features, ease of use and outstanding value.
The faster you make changes and learn from them, the more profitable you will be!
As a business grows and teams change, the IT environment can become increasingly complex. This makes it harder to manage the relationships between components of your system—and costs your organization time and money.
That’s where CMDB comes in – by enabling change management in a smart, controlled manner.
To manage change effectively, you need the right tools. That’s where CMDB comes in – by enabling change in a very smart, controlled manner.
A CMDB is essentially a central repository of information about your IT environment. It helps you manage change, as well as all the risks associated with it:
A single source of truth
The CMDB provides a single source of truth for all IT assets and their relationships—which means no more silos.
This single view of your IT assets allows you to see
- What has changed over time,
- Who has access to what data,
- Whether any unused licenses are still valid.
It gives everyone involved with managing your company’s infrastructure and applications visibility into what they’re responsible for so they can take action quickly when something needs attention or maintenance work arises unexpectedly (and if they don’t know how to do it themselves).
Managing dependencies
The CMDB enables consistent tracking across all departments so there are no surprises during installation or deployment projects; everyone knows exactly what components need access to each other prior to beginning setup (and then again after everything is up-and-running). Plus, if one component stops working due its dependencies having been broken somewhere along the line during installation/deployment then that could lead down another rabbit hole causing even more problems than originally expected!
So, how exactly does CMDB help in change management?
There are many benefits to CMDB.
- It helps with change management by giving you a single, easy-to-access source of information.
- It helps with change management by showing you the dependencies between elements (for example: application A requires software B). This can be an important asset for IT professionals who work on maintaining or implementing new systems in their organization.
- It also shows who owns each element and what state it’s currently in (for example: application A is in production but needs more RAM to run efficiently). This gives IT professionals insight into what areas require their attention most urgently when planning changes such as upgrades or maintenance.
- Finally, it shows which elements need changes together. For example: applications A & B must run on servers 1 and 2 respectively.
- This allows for coordinated updates that prevent downtime during peak hours when critical services are in use throughout the day/night cycle.
Having everything laid out in this way means you can’t forget about something. This allows for much better planning for upcoming changes – which means fewer outages!
This means that you can’t forget about something, and it also means that you’re in control of what changes are being made. With better planning, your company will have fewer outages and more productive employees who aren’t constantly struggling to get their work done.
A CMDB enables fast change management with minimal disruption
When you have a centralized CMDB and can see everything about your IT landscape, it becomes much easier for you to make changes.
The CMDB allows you to easily understand:
- How all of the systems are connected,
- What impact any one change could have on others, and
- What would be best for each system and more.
With this knowledge in hand, it’s easy to plan ahead for upcoming changes. It is also easy to make them in such a way that minimizes disruption or even eliminates it entirely.
For example:
A new version of an application has been deployed throughout the company with great success. However, there are some issues with some users who rely heavily on features removed from this version. You could create a new release specific just for these users if they’re willing to accept additional risk with older technology. Additionally, this will allow them access while minimizing disruption across other departments where everything is working perfectly fine as-is!
Virima CMDB gives you the tools you need to make sure nothing falls through the cracks by integrating our CMDB platform with other ITIL processes like SACM, Release and Request Fulfillment, and Change Management.
Our tight integration with other ITIL processes means that when you’re making a change or updating your inventory, we automatically discover your configuration changes and ensure critical relationships and dependencies are not overlooked. That means you don’t have to worry about missing something important. You can make fast changes without having to worry about missing out on anything important!
With our
- automatic discovery of configuration changes,
- one-click CMDB updates,
- customizable reports and dashboards,
- integrated project management capabilities,
- change/outage calendar and
- SLA requirements tracking features,
it’s easy for us to say that Virima CMDB helps you make changes fast with minimal disruption.
Carry out effective change management with Virima CMDB
The way we see it, change is inevitable. But it gets a little easier to manage change when it happens when you have reliable tools at your perusal.
It’s a lot of work to keep track of changes in your infrastructure. That’s why we built our software to be flexible and customizable. This is so you can set up change management processes that make sense for your organization.
Virima is ITILv4 (2011) certified, which means it has the features you need to automate, enforce, and log your changes. With native integration with other ITIL processes such as Request Fulfillment, Problem, Release, Configuration Management, and more, Virima provides the necessary features to drive proper change management adoption.
The added benefit is the running of discovery scans after the completed changes. This ensures they were done as approved, properly documented, and are reflected in the CMDB.
To know more about Virima CMDB, request a demo today!
