I’ve spent a solid number of years working as a Configuration Manager, or in other parts of my career helping Configuration Managers grapple with the problem of improving the accuracy and uptake of their organisation’s CMDB (the former normally leading to the latter).
A Configuration Manager, in the context of the ITSM/ITIL space, is the person responsible for the completeness and correctness of the organisation’s Configuration Management Database (or CMDB). It’s also a really tough role.
The role of Configuration Manager is fundamental to an organization’s IT health, and can underpin and support improvements in a huge variety of processes and workflows across ITSM, ESM, ITOM, ITAM, SAM, SecOps, Infrastructure Ops and more. To be successful, the Configuration Manager needs data about a diverse range of asset types across the organization. Their ability to obtain such data is typically limited to what’s already available, or how well individual operations teams manually maintain their view of the IT assets under their management.
A Configuration Manager can also deliver significant benefits to Governance, Risk and Compliance (GRC) processes. However, because GRC is often not the domain of the ITSM/ITIL folks who are typically responsible for the implementation ServiceNow into an organization, it is often relegated to the back burner when planning a ServiceNow implementation – despite being critical to a wide variety of risk identification and risk management/mitigation strategies, as well as having executive sponsorship.
So what can an organization do to support the Configuration Manager to not only increase the efficiency of key process areas but also reduce audit and non-compliance risk?
Enrich Your CMDB with Automated IT Asset Discovery
By feeding complete and accurate IT and OT asset data into your CMDB platform can have a positive impact on a vast array of IT processes, delivering signficant improvements to an organisation.
For GRC workflows in particular, an accurate CMDB affords the opportunity to accurately depict environment classification of assets. The ability to to identify, classify and prioritize production assets and differentiate them from non-production assets used for sandbox, development, test, QA, training and so on helps teams home in on risk assessment and mitigation for business-critical processes and systems.
The business value of maintaining a single and accurate source of truth for the most critical assets in any organitions cannot be overstated; yet this is only possible with CMDB automation. Yet for too long, organisations have faced significant technical and investment challenges taking it on. It’s time to stop delaying your efforts and start delivering comprehensive support to the Configuration Manager.
It’s time to solve CMDB automation!
CI Synchronizer + Lansweeper = CMDB Automation
Lansweeper continually scans your network and consolidates all IT asset data into a single source of truth that becomes a baseline for IT security. Its Asset Radar and Credential-free Device Recognition technology work together to detect and recognize every asset – even rogue devices that only touch your network briefly or operate behind the firewall – eliminating blind spots across your IT environment.
Lansweeper integrates seamlessly with CI Syncronizer (Enterprise Edition), powered by Syncfish, to auto-populate ServiceNow CMDB, so you always have the most current and complete set of IT asset data on-hand. CI Synchronizer maps more than 30 Lansweeper asset types to CMDB CI classes out-of-the-box, as well as over 15 sets of CI-related lists derived from Lansweeper data. It also derives more than 80 possible CI-to-CI relationships, automatically. Up and running in under 90 minutes, the integrated solution enables teams to:
- Eliminate the need to manually enter any data
- Enrich your CMDB with granular information
- Resolve issues faster
Book a demo to see how to finally solve the CMDB automation challenge and optimize your ServiceNow investment.
