The past decade has introduced a tremendous change in the IT industry. If you were to compare your IT ecosystem today with how it was ten years ago, you would likely find it hard even to recognize that you’re looking at the same environment. The foundation of IT itself has changed beneath our feet.
Cloud services, mobile apps, Internet of things (IoT), bring your own device (BYOD), and other trends have transformed the IT landscape, bringing with them new capabilities for the business of today and new promises for your business of tomorrow.
If you are in an IT organization, the changes that are taking place right now, both in the technology itself and the business’s attitudes towards technology are exciting. These changes are also scary once you realize the impact they have on your job and the set of capabilities required to manage and maintain modern IT systems.
You will need to embrace rapid continuous change and deliver the service assurance that your users and business stakeholders demand.
The Foundations of IT
As you consider the path forward for your organization, now is a good time to inspect the foundations of your IT Service Management (ITSM) processes.
In the IT industry, foundations comprises two components – information and technology to manage that information. A complete IT Asset Inventory and accurate configuration data are the heart of what makes all your ITSM processes work. It is your information foundation.
IT Discovery tools, IT asset inventory management system, Configuration Management Database (CMDB), and ITSM platforms are the technology foundations that support all your ITSM processes.
These IT foundations are called that for a reason – they form a solid base for everything else for the infrastructure you will build on top of it.
Without a strong IT foundation of IT asset inventory and configuration management tools & data, incident managers will struggle to assess the impact of outages. Problem managers will have difficulty tracing root-cause, and your change managers are more likely to miss critical dependencies when analyzing change requests.
As the process weaknesses begin to compound, your users will see slower system performance, more outages, longer resolution times on their incidents, and slower responses from IT teams delivering new capabilities.
IT Asset Management (ITAM), technology migration, security, and compliance efforts will slow down with a lack of complete, accurate, current, and trustworthy inventory and configuration data to use in decision making.
A Strong Configuration Management Foundation is Essential
Building a strong IT asset inventory and configuration management foundation can help you chart a new course – one that leads to happy users, effective ITSM processes, and informed decision making.
Because the IT landscape is continually changing, you can’t effectively improve your information foundations without first addressing the technology components. We live in a technology-enabled world – it makes sense to use technology to help us strengthen our ITSM foundations.
IT Discovery, IT Asset Inventory Management and CMDB are tools that can help you understand what you have – even if your IT environment is constantly changing. Knowing where your blind spots are, enables you to begin to build a resilient IT organization.
IT weaknesses, whether they be in solution architecture, system performance, maintenance processes, lifecycle management, or cost control, have a significant impact on the quality of services available to users. The ability to adapt to these changing needs increases the risks IT systems pose to your organization.
If you don’t have a strong handle on your IT asset inventory, you won’t know how each device is configured and what it is being used for and how you can ensure the business needs are being met.
Enable IT Environments to Evolve Safely Through Automation
Virima provides industry-leading IT Discovery, IT asset inventory management, and CMDB capabilities that can help you strengthen your configuration management foundations.
Automated Discovery enables you to identify components as soon as they enter your IT ecosystem and understand how the component’s configuration, capabilities, and use align with the rest of your IT environment. This is particularly important for security assurance.
Over the past few years, users across the organization have been empowered to introduce new technology into the workplace – mobile devices, applications, SaaS services, etc. We also see tech-savvy users taking company provided technology and using it in ways that were not initially intended.
That may be okay, or it may open your company to increased security risks. Until you have a clear picture of what is in the environment, you can’t make an informed assessment on whether certain things pose a security, compliance, financial, or reputational risk to the company.
Discovery, IT asset inventory management, and CMDB working together provide the tools to understand what you know and where your blind-spots are. Service mapping enables you to build out the connective tissue of your organization to understand your dependencies and how the pieces of your IT puzzle fit together.
Together, these capabilities give you a solid foundation for building robust and modern ITSM processes and making informed technology decisions. Foundations are called that for a reason – they provide the platform for developing robust, resilient systems and business processes. Strengthen your IT asset inventory and configuration management foundation today – Virima can help! Contact us to learn more.
Virima features can automatically discover and map your critical IT resources and the interconnections that link them to one another, your applications and services, and your users.
Virima is here to help. To get started, contact us today to schedule a demo and explore the possibilities!
