Q&A with Lansweeper’s Partner Alliance Manager, Cassandra Lloyd
Every IT leader knows that full visibility over all networked IT assets – from servers to endpoint devices, OT, IoT and more – is critical to mitigating risks and controlling costs. And most IT organizations look to the CMDB data manager for the data they need.
But for your CMDB data manager to be useful, the data it holds must be accurate – and therein lies the rub. Manual updates are slow and resource-intensive, and you never really know if the data is accurate or complete. Spreadsheets can have errors and typically obsolete as soon as they’re filled in. If you can’t trust the quality of the data in your CMDB, you can’t rely on it to help you manage essential IT services effectively.
Lansweeper provides a solution to this dilemma. By integrating Lansweeper with your CMDB, you can be certain your data’s always up to date and complete. Lansweeper automatically scans your network and auto-populates your CMDB with the most current IT asset data, making manual updates and spreadsheets things of the past. Read more about this in our blog on the value of automatically updating your CMDB.
We recently spoke with Cassandra Lloyd, Partner Alliance Manager at Lansweeper, about how the integration works, and what benefits it delivers to IT organizations:
By creating a single source of truth for all your IT asset data, Lansweeper eliminates one of the biggest hurdles in IT asset management – knowing your IT – as well as time-consuming, manual processes, like updating spreadsheets.
Cassandra Lloyd – Lansweeper Partner Alliance Manager
Q. How does Lansweeper collect IT asset data?
Lloyd: Lansweeper instantly detects assets the moment devices connect to the network, enabling complete coverage and eliminating blind spots across your IT environment. The platform’s AI-powered Credential-free Device Recognition – or CDR for short – is a fingerprinting technology that recognizes and identifies all connected IT assets and records a variety of very detailed data about each asset in a central repository. It’s an agentless scanning solution, which means you don’t have to install any software on your devices for Lansweeper to discover them. By creating a single source of truth for all your IT asset data, Lansweeper eliminates one of the biggest hurdles in IT asset management – knowing your IT – as well as time-consuming, manual processes, like updating spreadsheets.
Q. What kind of information does Lansweeper gather about IT assets?
Lloyd: Lansweeper finds all connected devices and gathers important data such as hardware specs, installed software, user details and much more. It can integrate this data with information from other platforms, such as your CMDB data manager, to enhance the effectiveness of downstream applications that depend on that information.
Q. Why is this approach better than the traditional way of maintaining a CMDB?
Lloyd: Simply put, because it’s automated. Without an automated way of maintaining real-time IT asset data, organizations face high manual labor costs and less-than-optimal performance. They risk downtime and security breaches because they lack visibility and intelligence about the infrastructure. Many functions across the business rely on the information stored in the CMDB being current – everything from IT services, cybersecurity and operations management – but if the data isn’t continually and automatically refreshed, it becomes outdated rapidly. New assets join the network all the time, and configurations change – and that information is essential to decision-making across all functions. Lansweeper’s ability to auto-populate the CMDB makes outdated data a non-issue.
Q. How does the integration with ServiceNow work?
Lloyd: Our integration with ServiceNow Service Graph orchestrates data sharing and workflows that are driven by a single source of truth for enterprise IT asset data, using the ServiceNow CMDB. Having your ServiceNow CMDB automatically updated by Lansweeper means you always have access to the most up-to-date IT asset data and can use it to tackle nearly any IT scenario, respond faster to incidents, manage vulnerabilities and updates efficiently, and support all your business-related tasks, without ever having to worry that your data is inaccurate.
Q. How does the integration help IT teams resolve service desk issues faster?
Lloyd: IT service management is more efficient when the CIs in your CMDB is complete and accurate because you’re armed with all the right information to take immediate action. It’s easier to track issues and understand what business services are impacted and plan accordingly.
Q. Does the integration assist with identifying vulnerabilities and resolving security incidents?
Lloyd: Yes! With your CMDB serving as a single source of truth, security management teams have all the information they need to mitigate risk. They can leverage the CMDB to map threats and vulnerabilities to business services along with IT infrastructure. When a security incident occurs, the affected assets can be matched against the CMDB to determine priority based on how critical the asset is to your business.
The CMDB also enables the security management team to proactively manage vulnerabilities within the IT environment by identifying firmware, operating systems, and software versions installed on CIs, as well as current patch levels.
Q. What about compliance?
Lloyd: Companies take audits very seriously and need to make sure they’re completed in the most accurate and efficient manner possible. A complete, up-to-date CMDB data manager can save organizations significant time and effort in terms of compliance audits, certifications, investigations and the like. With Lansweeper constantly feeding accurate data into the CMDB, compliance teams can be confident they have all the right evidence of compliance heading into an audit.
Q. How can people reading this blog post learn more about Lansweeper integrations?
Lloyd: Lansweeper is actively expanding its partner ecosystem, to enable organizations to extend the capabilities of the Lansweeper platform. Anyone interested in learning more about our integrations can visit our Integrations page.
Interested in putting a Lansweeper integration to work for your organization? Read up on our ServiceNow integration, or learn more about the building an accurate CMDB.