How Virima and Ivanti are helping IT teams achieve ITIL compliance

Table of Contents

• Introduction to ITIL compliance
  • How ITIL compliance benefits IT service management
    • Improved IT service delivery 
    • Increased customer satisfaction
    • Reduced costs
    • Improved compliance
    • Increased agility
    • Enhanced collaboration
• Challenges in achieving ITIL compliance
  • Complex IT processes and workflows
  • Limited visibility and transparency in IT operations
  • Aligning IT services with business goals
  • Scalability and adaptability to organizational growth
• The synergy of Virima and Ivanti: A powerful combination for ITIL compliance 
  • Improved incident management 
  • Proactive problem management 
  • Streamlined change management
  • Accurate and up-to-date CMDB through automation
• Achieve IT efficiency with Virima’s ITIL-compliant ITSM platform

What does achieving ITIL compliance mean? Is it just getting more effective and efficient IT service management? Surely it’s a major outcome of it, but ITIL compliance has far-reaching benefits for organizations delivering IT services to customers and employees. 

Though you can attain ITIL compliance for IT teams by adhering to the best practices outlined in the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) framework, it’s easier said than done. 

In this article, we will explore how the integration of Virima and Ivanti is helping IT teams achieve ITIL compliance, streamlining their processes, and driving better business outcomes. But before that, we’ll take you through the benefits and challenges of ITIL compliance. 

Introduction to ITIL compliance

ITIL (Information Technology Infrastructure Library) compliance refers to an organization’s adherence to the best practices and guidelines outlined in the ITIL framework. This framework is a widely-accepted set of standards for IT service management (ITSM). It guides an organization to take a structured and consistent approach to managing its IT processes. 

The benefits? The broad gains include improved efficiency, more effective processes, and customer satisfaction. Hence for an organization delivering IT services, ITIL compliance is very crucial. 

Let’s take a detailed close look at the specific benefits that ITIL compliance brings to IT service management. 

How ITIL compliance benefits IT service management

Improved IT service delivery

ITIL compliance streamlines processes. As stated earlier, it helps organizations establish standardized procedures that lead to faster incident resolution and reliable services. For instance, a well-defined incident management workflow in an ITIL-compliant ITSM platform such as Virima would make it easy to log and route incidents. This will speed up the process and reduce system downtime or business disruption as a result.

Increased customer satisfaction

ITIL 4, the latest ITIL version, has a Service Value System as its core component. This focuses on taking a customer-centric approach while designing and delivering IT services. Which means taking proactive steps to understand customer needs and expectations from the beginning. So ITIL compliance would mean organizations would make feedback and communication as part of the workflow in various IT service management processes wherever applicable. As a result, it’ll foster better customer experience, building strong long-term relationships. 

Reduced costs

ITIL promotes resource efficiency. Optimizing IT resources leads to reduced costs and improved return on investment. For instance, by implementing a robust ITIL-compliant asset management system such as Virima ITAM, companies can avoid unnecessary hardware purchases and optimize software license usage. 

Improved compliance

Adhering to ITIL best practices such as integrating Governance, Risk, and Compliance (GRC) into the IT service management framework helps organizations meet regulatory requirements. It also ensures you maintain industry standards or better, become the torchbearer. Take for example a well-documented change management process. The documentation can help you easily demonstrate adherence to data protection regulations and reduce the risk of penalties. 

Increased agility

ITIL 4 supports the integration of agile, DevOps, and Lean practices into IT service management. The compliance of which enables organizations to adapt quickly to changing customer needs. For example, Agile practices would mean small increments of functionality and continuous improvement while working closely with customers. 

Enhanced collaboration

One of ITIL 4’s guiding principles is “collaborate and promote visibility”. So following ITIL best practices fosters collaboration and the breaking down of information silos. As a result, knowledge-sharing within IT teams enhances. Keeping in line with this benefit, knowledge sharing promotes a culture of shared responsibility. 

Further, when cross-functional communication is promoted, IT staff can work together to resolve issues faster and make better-informed decisions. All of these ultimately improve overall IT service management.

Though ITIL compliance holds a number of apparent benefits for IT teams, there are some considerable challenges. 

Challenges in achieving ITIL compliance

Achieving ITIL compliance is easier said than done, and organizations often face several challenges, including

Complex IT processes and workflows

ITIL compliance requires organizations to manage intricate processes and workflows. For example, coordinating incident, problem, and change management processes can be challenging, especially when dealing with multiple teams and stakeholders.

Limited visibility and transparency in IT operations

Gaining a clear understanding of the entire IT environment is crucial for ITIL compliance. However, organizations often struggle with limited visibility into their IT assets. As a result, managing and optimizing resources for various ITSM processes becomes difficult. Though automated asset discovery tool integration into your overall system can alleviate this issue. 

Aligning IT services with business goals

One key aspect of ITIL compliance is to ensure that IT services support the organization’s strategic objectives. Ensuring this can be challenging, as it demands constant communication and collaboration between IT and business stakeholders which may be lacking. 

Scalability and adaptability to organizational growth

As organizations grow, their IT services must be able to scale and adapt accordingly. However, anticipating future needs and implementing scalable solutions can be difficult.

In Spite of these challenges, Virima and Ivanti partnerships offer a few effective ways ITIL compliance can be achieved in an organization. 

The synergy of Virima and Ivanti: A powerful combination for ITIL compliance

Improved incident management

The step one towards improved incident management is a clear understanding of relationships between IT assets and services. For Ivanti Neurons for ITSM customers, a clear picture is provided by the Virima and Ivanti integration. 

Here’s how: Ivanti Neurons for service mapping software is nothing but an Ivanti-branded and supported Virima service dependency and relationship mapping feature.

It provides automatically generated dependency maps from discovery data. And these maps present insights into network topologies, infrastructure relationships, and application dependencies. So after opening the incident, IT teams get to quickly identify the impacted devices on the map. Along with that, they get to see how other services got impacted which caused the service disruptions.

All of these lead to the efficient resolution of incidents, reduced downtime, and improved service quality. This quick resolution of incidents aligns with ITIL 4 by restoring service operations as quickly as possible. 

In this regard, Virima ITSM customers can achieve better ITIL compliance by automating categorization, routing, and resolutions.

Proactive problem management

While incident management restores service disruptions, problem management seeks to resolve the underlying cause of those service disruptions. According to ITIL® 4,  the primary purpose of problem management is to prevent incidents from happening. And in this regard, the most important thing is identifying trends and underlying problems by analyzing data. This requires a single view of data from CMDB; while you’ve to ensure the completeness and correctness of the data. 

As the Ivanti CMDB is completely configured with Virima Discovery and service mapping, you’ll always get up-to-date and accurate configuration details. On top of this, you get the option to choose which Virima discovered updates or assets to move to Ivanti CMDB. So you’re always in control of the CI details you feed to the CMDB. However, the best thing is that you can automate the update process by applying business automation rules.  

Now you can work on this complete and current Ivanti CMDB and historical data (from incidents, and changes) to identify trends and potential fixes to prevent incidents from happening in the first place. Data analytics tools or AI can be used for this. While you can deploy IT automation to deal with the potential fixes. 

Streamlined change management

ITIL 4 compliant change management asks for decentralization of change approval. Now Ivanti Neurons for ITSM customers get a service map that overlays the pending and recently completed changes as well as open and recently closed incidents. And because of such overlying, they’re able to quickly understand the relationship between configuration items and devices at the current state. 

So the impact assessment time of normal changes can speed up. Even the need for CAB approval can be avoided as IT teams can easily understand potential change collisions. As a result, they will be empowered to better manage IT changes. 

Accurate and up-to-date CMDB through automation

According to ITIL 4, CMDB “stores configuration records throughout their lifecycle”; though every CMDB does that the spin is how accurate, and current it is, and how easily it can be done. 

Ivanti CMDB acts as a central repository for information about Configuration Items (CIs), and their inter-relationships in an Ivanti environment. This configuration data can include the history of changes to each item, and attributes-like importance, owner, type, and classes as well as the interdependencies between them. 

Whereas the Virima Discovery integration keeps all this data accurate and current with discovered assets and updates. What’s more, is that you’re allowed to manually view all updates and assets in Virima’s filterable list and select items to copy to the Ivanti CMDB. Alternatively, you set up automation rules to update the discovered items in the CMDB and keep it current with a hands-free approach. 

Achieve IT efficiency with Virima’s ITIL-compliant ITSM platform

So it’s clear how Virima and Ivanti’s partnership through Ivanti Neurons Service Mapping software helps Ivanti Neurons for ITSM customers achieve ITIL compliance in most ITSM processes– such as incident management, problem management, and change management. In this regard, both data center/cloud discovery with 140 plus extendable probes and ViVID™ (Virima Visual Impact Display) maps play an instrumental role. 

Just like Ivanti, Virima’s exclusive auto-discovery and ViVID™ service maps can help your IT teams achieve ITIL compliance in other platforms such as ServiceNow, Cherwell, JIRA, and others. 

However, it’s important to note that you can achieve ITIL compliance only with Virima’s ITSM platform. It comes with PinkVerified ITIL-compliant processes for every ITSM task– such as Incident, Change, Problem, Knowledge management, and others. So as a standalone ITSM suite, Virima can be a good choice to deliver IT services in an ITIL-compliant way. 

To get started with Virima, contact us today!

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