Why your business requires a modern CMDB?
Table of Contents
- What is a modern CMDB?
- Why do you need a modern CMDB?
- Elements of a modern CMDB
- How does a cloud-based CMDB work?
- Choose Virima CMDB to stay relevant in a dynamic world
The configuration management database (CMDB) has been a central part of IT service management for decades. The CMDB is crucial to your business because it provides a single source of truth for all your IT assets, services, relationships and configurations.
It ensures that everyone in your organization can see what’s happening with your IT environment at any given time. Also, it ensures that everyone can trust the information they’re seeing.
The constant change in your organization’s IT environment means that you need to be able to monitor its state in real time. Also, see what changes have been made. The only way to do this is with a CMDB that gives you a real-time view of all your IT assets, their relationships with each other, and their relationships with other business processes.
Optimize your CMDB with application dependency mapping
What is a modern CMDB?
If you’re like most companies, you’ve been trying to keep your CMDB relevant for years. While it’s easy to understand the importance of keeping your CMDB up-to-date, it’s not always easy to find the time and resources needed to make it happen.
But let’s face it: if you’re going to survive in today’s fast-moving business environment, you need a modern CMDB. And the good news is that there are ways to make this happen. Even if you don’t have a team of dedicated IT professionals at your disposal.
The concept of the Configuration Management Database (CMDB) is not new. It dates back to the 1980s, when IT environments were much less dynamic and volatile than they are today.
Today everything moves much faster. The installation of a virtual server takes a matter of minutes. When containers appear and disappear again within seconds, keeping the CMDB relevant can quickly become a real challenge.
To cope with this problem, you need to solve it in two ways: firstly, by automating as many processes as possible so they can be done quickly. Secondly, by providing your employees with tools that make them more productive when working with IT systems.
A modern CMDB will have the following characteristics:
- It supports all types of technology (not just hardware). This includes software, firmware, and other items like documents or contracts that may be associated with an asset.
- It’s integrated with other systems. This allows users to access information from one place without having to go through multiple interfaces or applications when making changes or performing other tasks related to managing their IT infrastructure.
- It allows you to track all your assets and their relationships in one place. You’ll have a clear view of everything that’s happening across your assets and infrastructure. Also, you’ll be able to quickly find answers when something goes wrong.
Read more: How to understand dependencies between configuration items (CIs)?
Why do you need a modern CMDB?
A modern CMDB is a key component of an IT management program. It provides a single source of truth for IT assets. Ultimately, which enables you to track the status of your IT assets and manage them efficiently. A modern CMDB also enables you to manage your IT assets effectively. It does by helping you identify missing or obsolete components, monitor service levels and make informed decisions about where best to invest in new technology.
An important aspect of your software lifecycle
The CMDB is a crucial part of the software lifecycle. It’s the foundation for all other processes and decisions. It’s what allows you to understand what your environment looks like, what its components are, and how they interact with each other. Without this information, you can’t make informed decisions about which changes need to be made. Especially to improve the system or optimize it for future projects.
But as we’ve seen in recent years, the CMDB has been evolving rapidly—and this evolution only underscores its importance. For example, shift-left testing is a new approach to software development that focuses on doing testing earlier and earlier during the lifecycle. The goal of this methodology is to reduce risk by identifying potential problems before they occur. This requires accurate information about your environment so that you can verify that software changes are compatible with existing applications and infrastructure.
High-speed change management
High-speed change management is another example of an evolutionary process that relies on very fast automated changes in your environment. But it only makes adjustments after verifying that those changes won’t interfere with existing systems or cause problems for users (again, requiring accurate information).
Enhancing operational efficiency
A well-defined CMDB will help you improve operational efficiency by ensuring that all information relating to hardware and software is stored in one place so it can be accessed at any time without having to search multiple systems or databases manually. It saves valuable time during investigations into problems with applications or other issues related specifically with the technology environment within an organization (e.g., lack of security).
Choose a CMDB with automated discovery: Here’s why
Elements of a modern CMDB
A modern CMDB is a database that stores information about IT assets, software licenses and configurations across your IT environment, both on-premise and cloud. It’s used to manage the configuration of an organization’s systems, infrastructure, applications and services. The goal is to maintain visibility into all facets of your IT environment so you can make better decisions about how it should be managed.
A CMDB can be used for many things:
- To record hardware details such as serial numbers or asset tags (UUIDs). This will help you track down specific devices if they’re lost or stolen.
- To record software license details such as version number, vendor name/ID number, expiration date etc. This will allow you to get better pricing when renewing your licenses because vendors often offer discounts based on their knowledge of how many licenses are currently in use within an organization. This also means less work for them since there won’t be any surprises when renewing contracts.
The world is changing fast, and the IT department needs to keep up. That’s why companies are increasingly turning to a modern CMDB that can integrate with other systems in order to provide greater visibility into their infrastructure.
But what constitutes a modern CMDB? And why is it crucial for your business?
Look at the elements that make up a good CMDB.
1. Selective storage
The first is selective storage. It’s all about being selective about what you store in your CMDB. you need to think carefully about what to store and what not to store in the CMDB. Only the assets on which a concrete service depends should have a place in the CMDB. To be able to make this decision, you need to know what kinds of services your customers use and what they expect from them.
2. Data access security
Another important aspect is data access security: who can see what data and how they can use it. It’s not just about access privileges. It is also about protecting sensitive data from unauthorized access by using encryption techniques such as public key infrastructure (PKI). Another security measure is role-based authorization: different users should have different levels of access depending on their roles within an organization.
3. Ability to integrate with other platforms
The problem with older versions of CMDBs is that they were standalone solutions that did not integrate with other systems or provide any kind of analytics. Today’s modern tools can do both: they allow you to integrate with other platforms and offer data analysis capabilities so you can make informed decisions based on real-time data about your business operations.
4. Automation
A modern CMDB requires automation. Automation helps you maintain an up-to-date overview of changes in your environment without requiring manual updates or extensive work by IT staff.
5. Data quality control
Before entering any kind of data into the CMDB, you need to check its accuracy and completeness. You should also ensure that all changes are made correctly—not only in terms of structure but also content and that they reflect reality accurately at any given moment.
6. Efficient query language
To find information quickly, it’s important to know what kind of information you want as well as how to ask for it. But this can be hard if your CMDB doesn’t support a good query language.
7. Fast data processing and data retrieval
You don’t want to spend hours waiting for results from your CMDB when searching for a particular asset or connection between two assets — especially if those assets are constantly changing.
How does a cloud-based CMDB work?
Cloud-based CMDBs are hosted in the cloud, which means they’re accessed through a web browser and can be accessed from anywhere. This makes them easy to use and highly accessible. Additionally, they can scale as your company grows or shrinks (you’ll need less space on your hard drive if you don’t have as many employees), which is important for any business with fluctuating staffing levels.
The security measures used by cloud-based CMDBs make them more secure than local solutions because they don’t store data on individual PCs or laptops. Everything is stored centrally in one place that only authorized users have access to (i.e., IT staff).
This also helps prevent accidental deletion of important information. It ensures there’s always an up-to-date copy of each object stored somewhere else in case something happens locally with one computer. It ensures that other systems are not affected where other users already have access rights set up correctly for their role within the organization’s hierarchy structure.
A modern CMDB is essential for your business as it enables you to manage IT assets efficiently and effectively.
A modern CMDB can help you manage IT assets efficiently and effectively, which will result in increased efficiency and improved service quality. This helps reduce costs while improving customer satisfaction at the same time.
Choose Virima CMDB to stay relevant in a dynamic world
A modern CMDB is essential for your business as it enables you to manage IT assets efficiently and effectively. It also saves time and money by helping you avoid mistakes like duplicate purchases or unnecessary upgrades.
It’s not enough to simply store data—you need to be able to access that information quickly and easily in order to make decisions that will help your business succeed.
You want your CMDB to be flexible so that you can customize it for your specific needs. You also want it to be user-friendly so that non-technical employees can use it without difficulty. And finally, you need an experienced vendor who understands what makes a modern CMDB great so that they can work with you every step of the way toward creating a system that meets all of these requirements.
Virima offers you all of these features in its visual CMDB product. The Virima CMDB is designed under the ITILⓇ framework but also offers many options for automation and flexible configuration management processes.
Virima CMDB is the leading choice for organizations who want a modern CMDB solution that is flexible, scalable and easy to use. Our machine-learned relationship and interdependency maps are presented in the Virima Visual Impact Display (ViVID).
ViVID not only provides a clear visual representation of every asset’s relationships, but when linked to Virima ITSM or supported 3rd party platforms and NIST’s National Vulnerability Database (NVD), Virima CMDB becomes your go-to place for change planning, incident response and vulnerability remediation prioritization.
Learn more about Virima CMDB by scheduling a demo with our team today!
