The impact of IT Visibility Business Service Mapping on IT governance and risk management
Table of Contents
- IT Visibility: The challenges and the need for Business Service Mapping
- Understanding Business Service Mapping and IT visibility
- The Impact of IT visibility Business Service Mapping on IT Governance
- The Impact of IT visibility Business Service Mapping on Risk Management
- Achieving enhanced IT governance and risk management with IT visibility Business Service Mapping
In recent years, IT departments have been increasingly challenged to ensure that IT resources and services align with business objectives. This has led to the adoption of various governance, risk management, and compliance (GRC) frameworks. The goal is to improve efficiency, manage risk, and ensure regulatory compliance. One key aspect of these frameworks is IT Visibility. It’s important to understand critical dependencies and connections between IT services, components, and underlying infrastructure. Having poor IT visibility can lead to vulnerabilities and risks. According to Forbes statistics, 20.4% of all discovered vulnerabilities across web applications and network infrastructure were either high-risk or critical-risk.
To achieve greater IT visibility and amplify the impact of GRC efforts, organizations can employ Business Service Mapping (BSM). BSM is a powerful tool that aids in tracing dependencies and relationships between website, backend, and IT ecosystem components.
For example, imagine your business provides an online shopping service. BSM can help you trace the critical dependencies and relationships between the website user interface, the backend server, the payment processing system, and other components in your IT ecosystem. With this visibility, you can make data-driven decisions about how to optimize resources, improve user experience, and mitigate risks.
Likewise, the application of BSM in IT governance and risk management can bring significant benefits. Understanding business services-IT visibility helps organizations make data-driven decisions, minimize risks, and optimize resource allocation. In this blog post, you’ll explore IT Visibility Business Service Mapping’s impact on IT governance and risk management effectiveness.
So, let’s get started!
IT Visibility: The challenges and the need for Business Service Mapping
To understand the value of Business Service Mapping, it is essential to appreciate the challenges that IT departments face when trying to gain a clear and comprehensive view of their infrastructure:
Complexity
Modern IT environments continue to grow in complexity as businesses adopt new technologies and services. Keeping track of these rapidly changing infrastructures can be an overwhelming task. Additionally, this lack of visibility can result in blind spots and gaps in the organization’s awareness. This can potentially lead to undetected issues, security vulnerabilities, or performance bottlenecks.
Dynamic dependencies
As organizations become more agile and deploy services across various platforms, dependencies between IT components continuously change. Understanding these dependencies is critical to manage risk and provide efficient IT services. In other words, having a clear understanding of how different components rely on each other is crucial.
Impact on business services
IT issues or outages can directly impact critical business services. Without proper visibility, it becomes challenging to identify the root cause of problems. This can result in longer resolution times and increased downtime. Consequently, having a comprehensive view of the IT environment helps in identifying and resolving problems quickly.
Business continuity and risk management
Inadequate IT visibility can pose significant risks to business continuity. Understanding the dependencies and vulnerabilities in the IT infrastructure is essential for effective risk management and disaster recovery planning. With a clear view of the IT environment, organizations can proactively manage risks and ensure uninterrupted operations.
Compliance and regulatory requirements
Many industries have specific compliance and regulatory requirements related to IT infrastructure and data security. Without clear visibility into IT systems, ensuring compliance becomes more challenging. This can result in penalties or legal consequences. Thus, having a clear and integrated view of the IT environment is crucial for meeting compliance and regulatory requirements.
Organizations must possess a comprehensive, integrated perspective of their IT environment to surmount these challenges. This perspective should encompass not only individual components but also their interdependencies. This is where Business Service Mapping comes in.
Understanding Business Service Mapping and IT visibility
BSM involves creating a map of IT components such as hardware, software, applications, and networks that are supporting a business service. Firstly, this process helps organizations identify, categorize, and visualize their IT assets, dependencies, and relationships between IT components and services. BSM relies on Configuration Management Databases and IT asset management tools, like Virima and ServiceNow®, for data gathering, analytics, etc.
Increased IT visibility, enabled by BSM, strengthens IT governance and risk management by allowing organizations to:
- Understand the IT infrastructure and its relationships with business services
- Identify risks and areas of improvement in the IT environment
- Make informed decisions regarding IT investments and resource allocation
- Measure the impact of IT changes on business services
- Ensure compliance with internal and external requirements
The Impact of IT visibility Business Service Mapping on IT Governance
Effective IT governance forms the backbone of organizations’ daily operations, innovation, and growth prospects. Therefore, IT visibility business service mapping has become an essential aspect of IT governance, providing organizations with more insight and control over their IT environment. This section discusses the impact of IT visibility and business service mapping on IT governance in detail.
Streamlined ITAM: Automation enhances efficiency
IT Asset Management (ITAM) is crucial for IT Governance. ITAM solutions track assets, manage changes, reduce risks, optimize operations, and ensure compliance. Virima’s ITAM solution provides a comprehensive inventory of physical, virtual, and cloud-based IT assets. It also tracks asset lifecycle, ownership, location, and maintenance data.
IT administrators gain insights into complex infrastructure through visual representations, aiding better governance aligned with objectives. Consequently, this insight allows IT administrators to develop better IT governance practices in line with business objectives. Business service mapping identifies risks, enhances resilience, ensures compliance, and informs asset management decisions.
Subsequently, the team can prioritize the IT assets that directly support critical business services, streamline support processes, and allocate resources accordingly. The detailed asset information provided by business service mapping improves lifecycle management.
Efficient IT Asset Discovery: Deeper insights
Business service mapping-driven IT visibility plays a crucial role in IT asset discovery, allowing IT organizations to effectively manage their assets. The assets constantly are in a state of flux, making it challenging to have accurate and up-to-date insight into their location, version, and usage history. Therefore, Virima’s IT asset discovery solution addresses this challenge by providing comprehensive visibility and control over the IT asset landscape.
Automatic and comprehensive asset discovery forms the backbone of effective asset management practices and IT governance. It helps organizations have a clear understanding of their IT assets, and streamline and strengthen governance practices.
The one key aspect of IT governance in relation to asset discovery is maintaining accurate records of software licenses. As a result, organizations can accurately track software deployments and ensure compliance with licensing agreements. Consequently, this helps mitigate the risks of non-compliance and potential legal issues.
Additionally, automatic asset discovery supports IT governance practices around risk management and security. Therefore, by having visibility into all assets, IT teams can assess vulnerabilities and implement security measures effectively.
The Impact of IT visibility Business Service Mapping on Risk Management
Risk Management involves identifying, analyzing, and mitigating risks that may impact the business’s objectives. The objectives also include the stability and reliability of IT services. IT visibility BSM can enhance Risk Management efforts by the following techniques:
Risk management with ITSM Integration to Business Service Mapping
ViVID™Service Mapping goes beyond mapping application dependencies by integrating with popular ITSM platforms like ServiceNow®, Ivanti, Cherwell, and Jira. This allows organizations to overlay ITSM data onto service maps, creating a holistic view of incidents, changes, or ITSM-related information. Specifically, they can see which assets have open incidents or recently completed changes, helping them quickly identify the root causes of service disruptions.
Businesses can anticipate incident impact on major applications or services especially those that have yet to be reported as risks. By understanding these potential risks beforehand, organizations can take proactive measures to minimize their impact.
Additionally, ViVID™ Service Mapping identifies the necessary stakeholders, enabling businesses to avoid change collisions or expedite changes during planned downtime. Ultimately, this level of visibility and proactive risk management contributes to smoother IT operations with minimum potential for service disruptions.
Streamlined incident response and recovery
IT visibility and ViVID™ service mapping enable organizations to trace incidents back to their source whether it’s a hardware failure, software misconfiguration, or an external attack. Identifying the cause of an incident is crucial in IT risk mitigation, and it helps businesses understand whether they need to take preventive measures to avoid future incidents.
In addition, visualizing service-infrastructure dependencies enables IT teams to identify components requiring attention and focus on resolving issues. This efficient and streamlined incident response and recovery process results in reduced downtime, improved customer satisfaction and minimized financial losses.
Enhancing IT visibility and service mapping can give organizations a competitive advantage and improve their service-level agreements. Thus businesses can proactively address potential risks, and take preventive measures to avoid future incidents. As a result, this minimizes the possibility of sudden interruption to critical services resulting in financial losses or reputation damage.
Impact analysis for Change Management
Change is inevitable in IT operations; however, poorly managed changes can introduce risks and disrupt critical business services. Nonetheless, IT visibility and business service mapping enable organizations to perform impact analysis for change management, thereby minimizing the chances of introducing unexpected issues.
By visualizing the dependencies between applications, services, and the underlying infrastructure, organizations can assess the potential impact of a proposed change. In utilizing Virima’s ViVID™ Service Mapping, organizations can identify how a proposed change may impact the IT environment. Moreover, businesses can pinpoint any potential conflicts, bottlenecks, or dependencies affected by the change, allowing IT teams to make informed decisions on risk mitigation.
Additionally, Virima Discovery provides organizations with an up-to-date inventory of their IT environment, including a detailed analysis of hardware and software configurations. This accurate assessment of asset dependency relationships helps businesses identify at-risk areas. By effectively identifying these areas, organizations can plan and execute a change management process that minimizes the risk of disruptions to critical business services.
Overall, by providing a comprehensive understanding of an organization’s IT environment and dependencies, Virima’s IT visibility and Business Service Mapping solutions ensure that businesses can plan, test, and implement changes in a controlled manner. Consequently, this minimizes the possibility of unexpected consequences, disruption to critical services, and potential financial losses.
Achieving enhanced IT governance and risk management with IT visibility Business Service Mapping
The growing complexity of IT environments has made it increasingly critical for organizations to enhance their IT visibility, governance, and risk management. In contrast, Business Service Mapping is a powerful tool that helps organizations achieve a clear and integrated view of their IT environment. Moreover, it significantly impacts IT service delivery, decision-making, and IT risk mitigation efforts.
By adopting Business Service Mapping as a part of their IT Governance and Risk Management framework, organizations can significantly improve their ability to manage their IT infrastructure more effectively. Furthermore, they can ensure that IT resources and services align with the organization’s strategic objectives.
Are you ready to benefit from Virima’s IT visibility? Specifically, our Business Service Mapping solution? If so, contact us today for a demo and learn more about how our solutions can benefit your organization.
