Optimize your CMDB with application dependency mapping

With technology continuing to evolve and business demand for service continuing to increase, enterprises need to establish and maintain a Configuration Management Database (CMDB) to successfully address the complexity and become more agile. 

With continuously evolving use cases, creating a CMDB, maintaining its accuracy, leveraging it for decision-making, and developing related operational processes become difficult. In consequence, CMDB becomes ineffective in providing a comprehensive view of an enterprise’s entire infrastructure and streamlining IT operations.

These issues can be solved by integrating application dependency mapping to improve CMDB effectiveness. For a CMDB to function optimally and remain the single source of truth required for the modern enterprise, it must be highly accurate, consistent, and automatically updated. In this post, we’ll discuss how deploying the application dependency mapping layer on your CMDB would improve it for business outcomes. 

Keeping CMDB accurate and up-to-date with application dependency mapping

The rise of virtualized environments, cloud, IoT, and other dynamic entities means that hundreds of new assets and dependencies can be created every day, making it impossible to keep up manually. IT teams that have to supplement their CMDB with manual asset lists are often prone to missing critical items and mislabeling entities—making it inaccurate and consistently out-of-date. As a result, IT teams don’t trust the data or use it to make decisions, reducing the ROI of an enterprise’s CMDB investment. 

Application dependency mapping automatically identifies and maps components based on specified inputs, ensuring CMDB is accurate, consistent, and automatically updated. It helps eliminate the uncertainty about an IT asset inventory and its relationships. With an auto-updated CMDB, IT teams can quickly identify the root cause of performance issues or outages while ensuring preventive maintenance won’t negatively impact a critical application or process.

Reducing IT complexity with dynamic visualization of complex CMDB relationships

A CMDB is only effective if its stored data is comprehensive and accurate and if concerned stakeholders can easily interpret the information provided by the data. However, understanding the raw data in a CMDB can be challenging because of the large volume of data and complex dependencies. 

Application dependency mapping creates holistic infrastructure and network map views by analyzing the attributes and dependencies of configuration items (CIs) stored in a CMDB. These graphical interpretations of complex asset interdependencies and relationships enable business and IT stakeholders to successfully address IT complexity and become more agile because their systems don’t get in the way of business process change.

Addressing security vulnerabilities on a day-to-day basis

Without the proper application dependency mapping solution, IT teams rely on manual documentation and searching for the assets they own. Often, resources such as servers, network devices, and applications remain invisible in large IT enterprises long after they are no longer useful. These redundant assets increase cost and the potential surface area vulnerable to attack in the enterprise.

By enabling CMDB with application dependency mapping, enterprises can now identify the most relevant-to-you, high-impact, high-likelihood vulnerabilities that can cause potential risk to their business, workforce, and customers. Moreover, it assists IT teams with an additional layer of protection by identifying vulnerabilities and gaps in their networked infrastructure and, thus, giving them the power to remediate and mitigate new-age IT flaws on an ongoing basis.

Strengthening regulatory compliance

During an audit, an enterprise can’t be sure whether its complaint or not if the IT team doesn’t know all the assets it has. 

Application dependency mapping helps IT teams eliminate this guesswork by keeping a detailed record of the state of CIs, historical changes, and incidents. With the right information discovered and retained in CMDB, complaint audits are no longer an issue, as IT teams can efficiently track their legal, contractual, and regulatory obligations.

Take GDPR for example. Under this regulatory compliance, businesses are directed to securely store European user information in data centers present in the EEA and a handful of other countries. Application dependency mapping helps you zone in on data storage areas and quickly check that they meet the GDPR requirements without any violation.  

Cloud migration and cloud cost optimization

Organizations are increasingly moving towards multi-cloud and hybrid cloud environments. Application dependency mapping particularly helps you with cloud CMDB. This combination affords your team to perform necessary and routine checks after cloud migration for performance issues and data accessibility. 

In addition, cloud environments are expensive to maintain and control, especially if you are operating with a pay-as-you-go model, where the cost is proportional to resource allocation. In this case, you need to know which assets utilize the most resources so you can optimize your cloud infrastructure. Application dependency mapping coupled with CMDB is your best bet to visualize the same.

Lowering overall IT investment by streamlining operations

Integrating application dependency mapping with CMDB enables IT teams with end-to-end visibility in their IT environment. It provides insights into the team’s hardware and software usage, enabling stakeholders with better decision-making based on actual operational needs. These insights help enterprises prevent unnecessary purchases or determine which assets can be decommissioned.

Tackle your CMDB challenges with Virima’s Business Service and application dependency mapping

The need for a single source of truth across the complex, hybrid IT estate has never been greater. While being the foundation of the IT landscape, scattered IT solutions and applications are now getting replaced with closely integrated solutions that help streamline business operations by creating a single system of record. 

With today’s complexity of infrastructures on the enterprise level, IT enterprises are relying on a CMDB to consolidate information about their IT estate and an application dependency mapping solution to achieve the visibility corporate IT teams needs for a complete, accurate, and up-to-date map of the IT infrastructure with all its components and relations. 

By adding a layer of application dependency mapping on CMDB, IT teams are entrusted to untangle the multitude of infrastructure interdependencies. It helps analyze, map, and document complete IT infrastructure to ensure comprehensive visibility and transparency. 

With Virima’s Business Service and application dependency mapping tool integrated to your CMDB, your IT team can justify the investment of time and resources needed to achieve a fully-mapped CMDB. With intelligent algorithms, ViVID Service Mapping can help you:

• Reduce manual work of maintaining, integrating and deducing insights from the CMDB. 
• Accelerate IT operations, improve system performance, and reduce costs.
• Mitigate potential risks of poorly managed systems.
• Improve the quality of your CMDB by automating manual tasks such as updating configurations or service packs at once.
• Reduce the risk of change by identifying what could be impacted during change windows or if something could go wrong due to the change.
• Identify root causes of service interruptions by assessing the “What changed?” scenario. 
• Address risk-based prioritization of the vulnerabilities inherent in your digital systems.

Want to know more about Virima’s Business Service and application dependency mapping and Virima? Schedule a demo today!