Configuration Management - Why is it Needed?

IT is under enormous pressure to minimize the cost and risk of supporting mission-critical business applications. As a result, IT management and automation initiatives such as Business Service Management (BSM), data center automation (DCA), configuration and change management, resource consolidation and ITIL have become top priority for IT operations managers.

The following quotes from leading research houses provide an insight into the need for companies to institute processes that manage their IT environments in an effective manner.

“Most Global 2000 companies support a significant number of custom applications in addition to packaged applications. It has become evident that companies can no longer manage servers and applications with scripting and manual processes. They need an automated mechanism to manage the application consistency and compliance. They need tools that can automate tasks and provide such functions as configuration compliance, drift avoidance, and rules-based change management.” —Ronni Colville, Analyst, Gartner

“Mapping the complex and increasingly dynamic relationships between applications and the relevant infrastructure components is a difficult, yet crucial task.  Successfully automated execution of this task will yield better execution of many development and operational processes.” — Meta Group

nLayers InSight Federated CMDB

A configuration management database (CMDB) strategy is central to the IT Service Management framework implementation, as described in the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL®) documents. ITIL outlines two main areas of this framework: service support to enable effective delivery of IT Services and service delivery, which outline the management of these services. Projects require this CI (configuration item) data in order to begin to take advantage of these best practice frameworks, hence the CMDB.

By adopting a CMDB approach, IT organizations can leverage data repositories throughout their environment through integration and utilization of open interfaces to share data. However, this is just a portion of the information needed and does not begin to give the organization the continuous application infrastructure data required to effectively build out their overall best practice strategies.

Resonance provides a proof of concept program for nLayers Insight. Click for details and/or to arrange a CMDB Proof of Concept.