How Relationship Mapping Drives IT Asset Management Insights

Assets: The Building Blocks of IT
Information to Drive Management Insights
Connecting the Dots of CMDB

Modern companies depend on technology to enable them to compete and to function.
Effectively managing complex IT environments for business success can be challenging and cost-sensitive. IT leaders rely on information from their IT asset management system to provide a clear picture of their assets, their use, and how much it costs the organization to operate them.

The insights this information provides is essential to control costs. Also, it helps to deliver the value company leaders expect from modern IT organizations.

Assets: The Building Blocks of IT

Your company’s technology assets are the building blocks of your IT environment. From traditional devices, such as desktops, servers, and infrastructure hardware, to modern cloud services and SaaS subscriptions, the types of assets and their functions in your IT environment are very diverse.

As your company grows and leverages technology, both the number and diversity of assets will increase. Modern IT’s power lies in assembling and configuring blocks flexibly to adapt to evolving business needs. IT assets, initially acquired for one purpose, may be repurposed for new uses or as components of other services.

Information to Drive Management Insights

It’s great your company has many IT assets and building blocks at its disposal, but how effectively are you using those assets and how efficiently are you transforming them into business value? IT leaders face these questions every day.

Whether the goal is cost savings, enabling growth and business agility, or making new capabilities available to users, IT leaders are increasingly looking to the data from their IT Asset Management (ITAM) solutions to provide information and insights they need.

Asset management data consists of two key components: lists of assets with supporting attributes and relationships mapped between them. The lists of assets provide an inventory of your company’s core building blocks.

Relationship mappings depict how the individual pieces are connected to form IT solutions and services. They also depict who is using the solutions and services and for what purpose. As one might imagine, relationship mapping data is the source of most actionable insights.

Connecting the Dots of CMDB

Discovery tools do a great job of collecting the lists of assets present in your environment such as devices, network components, servers, software, etc., but these lists are of limited value without the ability to map them and maintain those mappings as the environment changes.

That is where your Configuration Management Database (CMDB) and IT Asset Management solution enters the equation. Your CMDB is the repository used to store the lists of assets as well as any identified relationship mappings.

Your IT Asset Management system provides the means to create, and modify the mappings to ensure they are relevant. Since the relationship mappings are the most critical part of asset management data, it is essential to have the right set of tools and processes for managing the relationships.

Virima’s Discovery and IT Asset Management (ITAM) solutions provide the automated capabilities to collect the available asset data and to store the data in the CMDB and a robust set of tools to manage relationship mapping.

With the availability of improved IT asset management information your leaders can trust, they will be able to harvest more actionable and higher-value insights to drive investment decisions for the organization.

To learn more, watch our latest BrightTalk ITSM Summit webinar. It explains the importance of knowing the data you have before your next major incident occurs and learning how to connect the dots to help keep issues from turning into major incidents.

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!