Why is CMDB important for your business

As technology evolves, systems, services, products, and the infrastructure they run on are becoming increasingly complex. IT departments are forced to deal with the same business drivers other departments in modern organizations must: cost, efficiency, ROI, and value. In addition, the interruption or degradation of an IT service is no longer a technology problem. It is a business problem as customers both internally and externally depend increasingly on robust, reliable, and highly available technology-based products. This is where a Configuration Management Data Base (CMDB) helps.

CMDB is a repository of an organization’s physical and logical technology infrastructure, it is digital products and services delivered to end users and technical teams, and the design elements and architected structures that those services and products are built around. One of the CMDB’s functions is to act as a kind of inventory that helps answer fundamental questions business leaders ask like:
“Where is my IT infrastructure located?”
“What applications am I running in my datacenters?”
“How many servers, routers, databases, etc. do I have?”

These fundamental answers can help organizations plan projects like technology refreshes, application updates, and with cost data, determine how expensive it is for IT and the business to deliver digital solutions based on the expense of operating the items that have been inventoried.

But if it were just an inventory, organizations would just keep the data in Excel or a similar tabular format! Why a CMDB? The CMDB offers two significant benefits. First, the power to tell you what is. Often referred to as “discovery”, the CMDB has advanced complementary tooling to search out and find IT infrastructure and automatically load it into the CMDB without human intervention. It can take data from other sources as well! Thus, it can testify to what is really on your network and ensure you have it accounted for! It helps call out “shadow IT” and can confirm that what is expected to be there is what is! The second benefit that a CMDB offers – the most important really – is the ability to create relationships between the items in the inventory. In fact, without these relationships, it is hard to argue that the CMDB is not just an expensive and fancy inventory repository!

Relationships allow an organization to answer much more complex and often time-sensitive questions. For example, in incident management, how does a failure of a database on a particular server (or in the cloud as Paas/DaaS) impact any/all business services and products that I deliver to my customers? Or, in change management, if the server platform team needs to perform an emergency change to a server, what applications, services, and products will be impacted and who must be notified and aware to approve the change quickly?

In both cases, there is an urgency to ensure the correct people know as quickly as possible. Today, modern, complex, and increasingly cloud-and-microservice based systems create interdependencies that humans can no longer keep track of via tribal knowledge. Service Desks (Help Desks) cannot be expected to remember that a particular service is provided by a particular team or take precious call minutes to have to look up (or ask their colleagues!) whom to route a critical issue to. The CMDB fills a crucial information gap connecting technology teams dealing with ever-more complicated functionality and service owners and service desks operating the business-interaction layer that runs on top of IT infrastructure.

ServiceNow’s CMDB is used across the entire platform and by all products to facilitate solving business problems. Via a fully extensible model but with expansive out-of-the-box capabilities, ServiceNow’s CMDB can answer basic inventory questions equally as well as helping with challenging strategic efforts like digital transformation, managing and deploying hybrid clouds, managing, and calculating application and infrastructure ROI, and protecting and defending the enterprise from data compromise and vulnerabilities. ServiceNow’s CMDB offers a wide range of available easy-to-implement data integrations to use the organization’s other tools as source data while contributing their own mature and very capable out-of-the-box Discovery application.

With the data in a consistently stored and managed repository, additional tooling in the ServiceNow platform assists in keeping your CMDB up-to-date- accurate and complete. This data accuracy builds trust with leadership and those who use the data in daily activities to be able to make timely and accurate data-driven business and IT decisions.

For more information, speak to ServiceNow experts at Advance Solutions, a leading elite ServiceNow partner.