Is 2020 the year of Configuration Management Database

The Promised Land. Are We There Yet?
Virima CMDB Can Help You Get Closer
CMDB Auto Discovery
CMDB: Dependency and Service Mapping
Start 2020 Off Strong!

The time for Configuration Management Database (CMDB) has come! A new decade is upon us, and if you are like most people in the IT industry, you’re spending some time reflecting on what has been accomplished in the past few years and thinking about what new trends and developments await in the year and decade ahead.

If you work in the IT Service Management (ITSM) space, you have a lot to look forward to. Many of the aspirations of the ITSM profession are going to be realized over the next decade – including AI-assisted incident management, companies finally getting control over their IT asset portfolio, and modern IT systems architected for 100% service availability.

ITSM professionals have been hoping and striving for these things for a long time, and soon they will be within reach. There is just one piece of the puzzle that is missing: true configuration management.

To achieve the inspirational goals of the ITSM profession over the next decade, companies need to invest now to up-level their asset and configuration management capabilities. This requires two key components: an automated CMDB capable of handling the scale and complexity of modern IT environments
Change and configuration data that is complete, accurate, and trustworthy. In the age of cloud services, mobile devices, and IoT, that means your CMDB database needs to be agile, automated and optimized for continuous change.

Is 2020 going to be the year of the CMDB?

For companies that are leaning into IT service management of the future, the answer is a resounding yes!

The Promised Land. Are We There Yet?

When it comes to your asset and configuration management capabilities, it is relatively easy to comprehend what it is you need.

A CMDB database comprising accurate and trustworthy data.
A CMDB that is built and maintained by automated discovery tools.
A configuration database that is populated with accurate, complete, and up-to-date information about your IT environment.
A robust set of integrated analytics tools that enable you to harvest actionable business insights to drive operational decisions.

If you want to leverage artificial intelligence (AI) to help you analyze incidents and changes, that’s awesome, but AI is only as good as the data available to it. If you want to take control of your IT costs through robust asset and configuration management processes, you aren’t going to be successful with manual inventories and a bunch of spreadsheets.

Say you want to design resilient services that are fault-tolerant and capable of 100% service availability. Not just the five 9’s goal of 20 years ago, you need to have a complete and accurate picture of the components and dependencies that make up your business services. Do these describe the promised land of ITSM? Are we there yet? Unfortunately, no, but we are getting closer.

Virima CMDB Can Help You Get Closer

Virima’s solutions aren’t necessarily the silver bullet to solve all your ITSM problems, but along with proper processes, they can help you move a few big steps closer towards achieving your modern ITSM vision.

Two key capabilities from Virima – automated IT Discovery and Business Service Mapping – are a deficiency of most major ITSM systems. Yes, many claim to do both, but if you look closer, the features and performance you get from other solutions are often rudimentary and extremely difficult to implement.

You don’t need a glorified spreadsheet of questionable data that produces no real value to anyone. Automating IT discovery and service mapping is what today’s ITSM users have been waiting for.

CMDB Auto Discovery

If you want to enable modern ITSM for your company, you need to look at augmenting your ITSM system with more robust tools for automating the discovery of all of the components and dependencies in your IT environments. Then, provide the capability to visualize your CMDB data in such a way that your ITSM, ITAM, IT Ops, ITSec, and DevOps teams can quickly and easily see what is going on and what needs to be done about it. These are Virima’s strengths.

With Virima’s IT Discovery tools, you can implement discovery agents and agentless collectors across your IT environment to capture all the critical pieces, parts, connections, and configurations of your IT systems – whether they are in the cloud, in data centers, at the edge, or remote over WAN/VPN.

Your services are only as strong as the weakest link in the dependency chain, and Virima ensures that nothing is overlooked. Once Virima populates your CMDB database with a complete and accurate set of change and configuration management data, you can clearly know what you have, where it is located, and what it is used for.

CMDB: Dependency and Service Mapping

When we talk about 2020 being the year of the CMDB, the most significant breakthrough isn’t going to be what goes in, but rather the business insights that you will be able to get out of your CMDB.

For all too many companies, data goes into a CMDB database, and like a black hole, it will never be seen or used again. That’s a real shame – some tremendous business insights are sitting within your configuration data just waiting to be harvested.

Virima’s dynamic visualizations and automatic business service mapping capabilities enable you to transform CMDB data from rows and columns into a visual representation of your business and IT environment.

This visualization can be enriched with change and incident management, availability, business process dependencies, performance data, and other operational data to provide your staff with the tool to turn your raw CMDB data into actionable business insights.

Virima ensures your CMDB is not just another database of asset and configuration management data but is something that is actionable and genuinely game-changing.

Start 2020 Off Strong!

Enhance your CMDB management with the capabilities you need to deliver the insights that your ITSM function needs to be productive today and, at the same time, build the foundation you will need for the next wave of modern ITSM that this new decade is shepherding in.

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!