In today's world, it is not possible to grow your business without investing in IT services. And if you think that IT services means just your internal computer network, you are quite mistaken.
IT services encompass your computers and other hardware, infrastructure, software, mobile devices, troubleshooting all IT related issues, people, and also everything else in between. That basically translates into your entire business ecosystem!
Thus, the larger your business (or IT) ecosystem, the more difficult it becomes to manage as well as control it. Which is where CMDB technology, or Configuration Management Database technology, can help.
What is CMDB Technology?
A CMDB is a massive database that houses all the relevant information about all the configuration items - CIs - that are used within your company's (IT) ecosystem. CIs are all the components that create your ecosystem. CIs are all your hardware, software, documents and personnel related to the IT ecosystem.
In essence, a CMDB is a map of your complete IT ecosystem, and it helps you keep track of not just the end-point CIs, but also the relationships between each of the CIs.
Why is CMDB Important?
While CMDB as a concept is decades-old, the actual importance and usage of the technology has only become more concrete in recent years. In fact, according to The Market Plan, the global CMDB software market is expected to grow exponentially in the next few years.
Here are some of the reasons why this technology is gaining ground today, and why it is becoming more and more important:
- Mapping a Mobile Business Environment
With today's business environment becoming increasingly mobile, it has been even more difficult to manage and control the IT ecosystem and all its assets. By using CMDB software to map your entire IT ecosystem, you will be able to manage all your CIs, not matter where or how far away they are.
- Managing and Controlling IT Ecosystems, No Matter What the Scale
Besides being able to track all components across distances, CMDB also tracks them no matter how many there are. To understand this better, we need to under the scales of IT services in most organizations.
Most medium sized organizations have tens of thousands of individual components, while larger organizations have millions. And when you also have to map out the relationships between each of the components, then you're looking at hundreds of thousands of data points in a medium-sized organization, and tens of millions in large organizations.
Without CMDB technology to map and manage all these components and their relationships to each other, there are system failures - which is what happens in a lot of organizations today.
- Incident Management
Which leads us to the questions of incident management. There is so much firefighting that takes place in organizations today because of a lack of foresight into the entire IT ecosystem.
Millions of dollars are wasted in first identifying, and then fixing issues that could easily have been avoided had the IT administrators had a clear line of sight.
With CMDB technology, incident management becomes much easier, since the root cause of an issue can be identified quickly and more efficiently.
In fact, by being able to see the entire ecosystem and how each component interacts with another, system administrators can actually prevent incidents before they happen, thereby saving the company a lot of money.
- Better Risk Assessment and High Security
When you have a CMDB software in place, your organization can more clearly assess the risks that your business faces due to known as well as unknown vulnerabilities in your IT ecosystem.
What this means is that your IT administrators will be able to prioritize vulnerabilities in the systems and create patches for them accordingly. This automatically increases the security levels in your systems.
- Breaking Down Barriers
When we think of IT services, we still tend to think of it as the IT troubleshooting department - a distant and isolated segment of the business that has nothing to do with our regular day to day operations.
With CMDB, these silos are removed, and people across departments, technologies and even processes can work more efficiently together. This is because when you know what technology components you have and how they fit into the bigger whole, you can manage them better.
- Increased Transparency and Visibility, Leading to Better Management of IT Assets
As an organization grows, it becomes more and more difficult to keep track of every piece of IT asset the company owns, where it is deployed or who is controlling it.
When you don't have clarity on what IT assets you have, your organization is exposed to a lot of risk. Your company's data could be stolen or used by competitors or other malicious actors without you getting to know.
With CMDB software, you will know exactly what your assets are, where they are, who is controlling them and what data they have. Therefore, you have complete transparency and visibility to your entire IT ecosystem, which in turn leads to better management of your assets.
- Centralized Database
Possibly one of the biggest advantages of using a CMDB software is that you will have all your data in one location. Data from various sources can be incorporated into your CMDB system, thereby creating a central repository of information for the company.
Challenges to Switching to CMDB
The only reason why so many organizations still think twice about using CMDB software is because of the work that goes into getting this system up and running. System administrators have to trawl through all the company's assets, and input all that data into the CMDB manually. This is a huge effort that is not just time consuming, but can also be confusing since the data will come from multiple sources.
Conclusion
The benefits of installing a CMDB system in your organization far outweigh the challenge of putting it in place. And if you are looking at having an end-to-end solution that caters to all your business needs, then you should look at software solutions offered by industry leaders such as SysAid Technologies offer.
