The Importance of IT Foundations for a Growing Business
Table of Contents
- The Foundations of IT
- A Strong Configuration Management Foundation is Essential
- Enable IT Environments to Evolve Safely Through Automation
- Virima is here to help. To get started, contact us today to schedule a demo and explore the possibilities!
In the world of business expansion, the absence of a robust IT foundation, encompassing IT discovery and CMDB, poses critical operational challenges.
The past decade has introduced a tremendous change in the IT industry. Comparing today’s IT ecosystem with a decade ago, it’s challenging to recognize the same environment due to transformative changes. 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. Thus bringing with them new capabilities for the business of today and new promises for your business of tomorrow. These changes become daunting as you realize their impact on your job and the required capabilities for modern IT systems.
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, CMDB, and ITSM platforms are the technology foundations that support all your ITSM processes.
Also, IT foundations are named for their role as a solid base, forming the infrastructure on which everything else is built.
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 process weaknesses accumulate, users experience slower system performance, more outages, and extended incident resolution times. Additionally, IT teams respond more slowly when 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 lays the foundation for a new course. This path 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, spanning solution architecture, system performance, and maintenance processes, impact service quality. These challenges affect users across lifecycle management and cost control. 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. Also, you won’t know its purpose or how to ensure it meets business needs.
Enable IT Environments to Evolve Safely Through Automation
Virima provides industry-leading IT Discovery, IT asset inventory management, and CMDB capabilities. We can help you strengthen your configuration management foundations.
Automated Discovery enables you to identify components as soon as they enter your IT ecosystem. Also, it helps you 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.
Also Read: Virima Service Mapping
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.
