The configuration management database (CMDB) has been heralded as IT’s reference data source to mapping how technology delivers business value. However, capturing relationships between the IT infrastructure and business applications often remains elusive. By incorporating application mapping techniques, a company can decipher which business applications and data are on each server. Such knowledge permits servers to be prioritized and differentiated in their treatment, investment, support, and priority for uptime, upgrades, patching, and security protection.
Mapping these server and application relationships enables IT to manage technology in line with business needs. The benefits span:
- ITSM—Performing proactive and reactive impact analysis in incident, problem, and change
- ITFM—Calculating total cost of ownership per business application
- Business continuity and disaster recovery (DR) —Validating that the application architecture matches the desired DR rating
- Technology lifecycle management—Prioritizing patching and hardware refreshes by impact or risk
- Software asset management—Aligning software licenses with servers whether or not they are serving a production role.
Explore in this paper approaches to inventorying, populating relationships, and provisioning integration, particularly with the help of ServiceNow or similar tools.
Gain business benefits from knowing the relationship between your technology infrastructure and business applications
