IT infrastructure modernization: How Virima and Ivanti accelerate the transition from legacy to advanced IT infrastructure
Outdated IT infrastructure slows teams down. Compatibility issues, rising maintenance costs, security gaps, and limited scalability make day-to-day operations harder than they need to be. If your team spends more time keeping legacy systems alive than improving service delivery, IT infrastructure modernization should be on your roadmap, especially as modernization efforts become critical to improving performance across IT operations.
We’ll break down the benefits and challenges of modernizing IT infrastructure below, then walk through how Virima and Ivanti’s unified IT platform helps your team move from legacy to modern infrastructure with less risk and fewer blind spots.
Why IT infrastructure modernization matters and what happens if you don’t
The case for modernization comes down to two things: what you gain by moving forward, and what you risk by standing still.
Efficiency gains and lower costs
IT infrastructure modernization typically means adopting cloud computing, virtualization, and automation. Recent research shows that 98% of organizations are exploring generative AI, with 39% already in production, driving demand for scalable cloud infrastructure.
A 2022 study published in SAGE Journals found that cloud computing cuts costs and improves efficiency through shared resource pools. Once those technologies land in your existing infrastructure, processes run faster, and performance improves. Outages drop, supporting stronger business continuity. Response times shrink.
Cloud integration also drives down the total cost of ownership (TCO) by making better use of the resources you already have. However, poor cost governance can backfire 46% of organizations exceeded their cloud storage budgets in 2025 due to rising costs. Maintenance costs drop with it, reducing overall operating costs across the IT environment. Legacy IT infrastructure, by contrast, demands more upkeep. Specialized skills get harder to source. Hardware support dries up. The result: more downtime and more operational risk.
Stronger security, better scalability
Modern infrastructure brings multi-factor authentication, encryption, and automated threat detection. The CIS Critical Security Controls call for deploying these safeguards to defend against common cyber threats.
Modernized infrastructure protects your data more effectively and keeps you aligned with compliance requirements.
Legacy systems lack these protections and sit more exposed to attacks. The IBM Cost of a Data Breach Report 2024 found that organisations using AI and automation in prevention workflows spent an average of $2.2 million less per breach than those that didn’t, a gap that highlights the cost of staying on outdated infrastructure. On scalability, modern infrastructure lets you scale resources based on demand. You can deploy new applications faster and adapt to shifting business needs without the bottlenecks that legacy IT infrastructure creates.
Legacy systems also struggle to integrate with AI, machine learning, and IoT, which limits your ability to keep pace with market shifts.
What is IT infrastructure modernization?
IT infrastructure modernization is the process of replacing or upgrading outdated hardware, software, and processes with current technologies like cloud platforms, automation tools, and modern management frameworks, often as part of broader modernization initiatives across the enterprise.
The goal: improve reliability, reduce cost, and make your IT environment flexible enough to support future growth and ongoing digital transformation. For IT ops teams, that translates to fewer fire drills, cleaner data, faster change management cycles, and a CMDB that reflects what’s actually deployed, not what was deployed six months ago.
Challenges your team will face during an IT infrastructure transition
Modernization pays off, but the path there comes with friction. Here are the obstacles most teams run into and what makes each one harder to ignore.
Integration and data migration
Legacy systems often run on outdated protocols or data formats that don’t play well with modern solutions. Integrating them during the IT infrastructure transition takes time and effort your team may not have budgeted for.
Data migration carries equal weight, particularly during cloud migration initiatives where large volumes of data must be transferred reliably.
Your team needs to keep data accurate, consistent, and complete throughout the move. That challenge compounds with data volume and system complexity.
Security and compliance gaps during migration
New systems may not have the same security controls as the legacy environment on day one. That opens windows where sensitive data could be exposed or accidentally corrupted. Fall short on regulatory requirements during the transition, penalties and reputational damage follow.
Build security and compliance into the migration plan from the start. Bolting them on after is how gaps become breaches.
Skill gaps and change resistance
Your team may not have every skill the transition demands, which means training, hiring, or both. Then there’s resistance. People who have worked with legacy tools for years tend to push back on new processes. Clear communication, stakeholder buy-in, and ongoing support separate a smooth rollout from a stalled one.
| How do you minimise downtime during IT infrastructure migration? Downtime during migration is the concern that keeps ops leaders up at night. The answer is phased migration backed by accurate dependency data. When you know which services depend on which assets, you can sequence move groups to avoid cascading outages. Run change impact analysis before each migration wave to spot collision risks. Keep your CMDB current so every decision runs on fresh data, not three-month-old snapshots. Test rollback procedures before go-live and schedule high-risk moves during low-traffic windows. With solid IT infrastructure discovery and mapping data, the kind Virima’s integration with Ivanti delivers into your CMDB, downtime becomes a variable you control rather than a risk you absorb. |
How Virima and Ivanti’s unified IT platform powers the IT infrastructure transition
When your organization has run on the same infrastructure for years, parts of it inevitably fall behind. That’s where a unified IT discovery and IT operations management platform earns its keep.
IT discovery and visualization across your hybrid environment
The first step in any IT infrastructure transition is knowing exactly what you have, especially in hybrid cloud environments where assets span both on-premises and cloud platforms.
Virima’s discovery integration with Ivanti feeds detailed asset and configuration data into the Ivanti CMDB, giving your team a thorough, accurate picture of the current environment. That discovery extends to cloud environments, too. Virima integrates with AWS and Microsoft Azure to import cloud resources directly into the CMDB, so assets migrated to the cloud don’t disappear from your inventory the moment they leave the data center.
Virima-powered Ivanti Neurons for service mapping then turns that discovery data into visual maps of your IT landscape. The integration between Virima and the Ivanti CMDB is configured entirely through the Virima and Ivanti UIs — no custom code required. Your team maps Virima’s 100+ discovery blueprints to Ivanti CMDB objects, selects which properties to sync, and sets asset-specific correlators to prevent duplicates. From there, you can:
- Pinpoint legacy systems, outdated software versions, and components due for replacement
- See where legacy assets create risk across the broader infrastructure
- Identify which components are critical and need to be migrated first
- Define move groups based on discovered dependencies and keep related assets together during transitions
Virima’s discovery scans hundreds of hardware and software configuration attributes per asset, giving your CMDB the depth and accuracy needed to drive migration decisions with confidence. That level of detail is what separates a CMDB that actually works from one that collects dust.
How do change management and IT infrastructure modernization work together
Ivanti Neurons for ITSM handles the change management workflow. What makes that workflow sharper is Virima-powered Ivanti Neurons for service mapping andViVID™ maps.
- Before the change, ViVID maps show the impact of a proposed legacy asset change before anyone executes it. You can identify move groups, verify dependencies between related assets, surface the stakeholders tied to each critical asset, and plan migration waves that minimize service disruption. Those same dependency maps also help you build rollback strategies; if a migration step fails, you already know which interdependent services need to revert together.
- During the change, ViVID overlays pending and recently completed changes on the service map. Your team spots overlapping or conflicting changes backed by near-real-time data and approves changes with full visibility instead of guesswork.
- ViVID maps also overlay known vulnerabilities from the NIST National Vulnerability Database (NVD), which Virima integrates at no additional cost. During a migration, this means your team can see which assets in a move group carry unpatched CVEs and factor that into the migration sequence, addressing security gaps before they carry over to the new environment.
- After the change, Virima’s recurring scheduled scans keep the Ivanti CMDB current. Your team can use Virima Discovery to confirm configurations before and after executing each change. If the migration introduced configuration drift or unexpected modifications, the scan flags them so your CMDB reflects what’s actually running—not what was planned. Need faster confirmation? Virima also lets your team trigger an instant rescan on any migrated asset to verify its current state without waiting for the next scheduled scan cycle.
To keep this process hands-free, Virima supports granular business automation rules that control which discovered assets and updates get promoted to the Ivanti CMDB automatically, with no manual review required for routine configuration changes. And because Virima rescans the environment on the recurring schedule you set, your CMDB stays ready for the next migration cycle, too.
| What is the role of service mapping in infrastructure transitions? Service mapping connects individual assets to the business services they support. During a migration, that visibility is the difference between a planned cutover and an unexpected outage.When you can see which applications depend on a server slated for decommissioning and trace the upstream and downstream relationships that connect it to other services, you can plan around those dependencies instead of discovering them at 2 AM. Virima-powered service mapping surfaces these relationships through dependency and relationship discovery, so your ops team works from live data rather than tribal knowledge or stale spreadsheets. And because every ViVID map integrates with Ivanti Neurons for ITSM, the same dependency data that informs your migration plan also feeds your incident and problem management workflows after go-live. |
Stronger IT asset management throughout the migration
A unified ITAM platform is essential during IT infrastructure modernization. You need to inventory and categorize every asset, then track each one from procurement through decommissioning.
Virima’s discovery integration strengthens Ivanti’s IT asset management capabilities so your team can:
Keep discovery-driven records current as assets change hands or configurations shift—no manual updates required for changes that Virima’s scans detect. Track each asset through configurable lifecycle stages (requested, ordered, development, production, decommissioned) so nothing gets lost mid-migration. Build an audit trail backed by a full version history of every CI update, supporting compliance reviews and post-migration validation
Achieving IT infrastructure modernization with unified discovery, mapping, and asset intelligence
The Virima and Ivanti unified platform helps your team move from legacy to modern infrastructure by closing visibility gaps and cutting migration risk. Virima’s hybrid discovery and service mapping capabilities, bundled into Ivanti Neurons for Service Mapping, deliver an accurate, dynamic picture of your current IT environment and where it’s heading.
Identify the legacy assets that need replacing, define move groups for transitioning services, and use ViVID™ impact analysis with Ivanti Neurons for ITSM to plan every migration wave with full dependency context instead of assumptions.
Book a demo to see how Virima’s discovery, ViVID™ service mapping, and Ivanti Neurons for ITSM work together to take the guesswork out of your next infrastructure migration.
