As businesses move toward data-driven decision-making, clarity and visibility into the IT estate are essential to view, understand, and manage the full scope of hybrid IT infrastructure. To achieve better IT visibility across the organization, focus on three IT asset lifecycle management best practices writes Kevin Miller, senior manager, product marketing, Flexera.
Writer and teacher Seth Godin recently blogged about five questionOpens a new window s that can help improve any project. The first one, in particular, caught my eye. “What’s the hard part? Which part of your work, if it suddenly got much better, would have the biggest impact on the outcome you seek?,†he wrote.
Today, many businesses are moving toward data-driven decision-making. But when it comes to getting clarity into the IT estate and how it can support strategic initiatives, something gets in the way and becomes the hard part: the inability to view, understand, and manage the full scope of hybrid IT infrastructure to effectively articulate and reach your chosen business goals.
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Why Data Sharing Matters
To maintain a competitive edge in the uniquely challenging market conditions that emerged in the wake of COVID-19, enterprises need to optimize their technology investments and manage their IT asset lifecycle effectively. They must understand what’s operating in their IT estate and the impact that all of those components may have on the organization’s digital transformation initiatives. Clear visibility into and cross-team sharing of data about IT assets are essential.
On some fronts, that kind of sharing is going well. The Flexera 2021 State of IT Visibility ReportOpens a new window found that the majority (78.8%) of respondents stated that the relationship between IT asset management (ITAM) and security operations (SecOps) teams are either moderately- or over-communicative about vulnerability and risk mitigation initiatives. This type of data sharing can help guard against the rapid growth of security exposures within the technology industry.
Sharing like this isn’t yet the default across all IT-related areas. Silos still exist, presenting challenges and opportunities for improvement. The foundation for many IT business initiatives — inventory data — is shared at only low rates between cloud management, enterprise architecture (EA), and IT financial management (ITFM) teams, for example.
When it comes to the insight that IT teams have into their environments, it’s frequently limited to the on-premises space, where 73.9% of respondents have clear visibility into on-premises hardware, and 68.3% have clarity into their on-premises software. Visibility into other parts of the hybrid estate drops significantly, with only 45.9% having visibility into cloud instances, 40.9% having visibility into SaaS, and 36.9% having visibility into cloud license posture. Simply put: managing an estate that you can’t see is incredibly hard.
Standing in the Way of Achieving Shared Outcomes
IT decision-making hinges on a range of business and organizational challenges. Top among them: not enough good-quality data about software assets.
Data about IT assets is needed to address a variety of concerns. What are the vulnerabilities? Where is there sprawl with too many versions of software or models of hardware? How complicated is lifecycle management for end-of-life and end-of-support (EOL/EOS)? Where is there sprawl in categories and/or products?
Organizations require clear and comprehensive insights into their technology (including on-premises hardware and software, SaaS, and cloud usage) to not only maintain control, governance, compliance, and security of those assets but to make data-driven, cost-effective decisions based on those IT assets. Achieving this is possible, in part, through the normalization of data; in this process, asset inventory data is confirmed to be correct, then consolidated to eliminate superfluous or duplicate information. While many (70.6%) organizations are using tools to help improve their data, they’re normalizing a relatively low amount of data, with 37.3% of respondents indicating that they have 50% or less of their data normalized. Additionally, 18.9% of respondents don’t normalize their data or don’t know if they have a normalization effort in place.
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Make the Hard Part Better
Too often, IT management strategy is fragmented, making it hard to get the data required for strategic planning, such as data about software obsolescence and vulnerability management. Complicating the issue: the slow speed of making and implementing decisions, getting the buy-in of executives and various business units, and the possible overwhelm presented by too many decisions that need to be made.
But it doesn’t need to be so hard. To more efficiently move toward the goals of better IT visibility across your organization, focus on three best practices of IT asset lifecycle management:
- Gather and maintain detailed info about your technology assets. When it’s time to upgrade or replace software or hardware assets, record the versions, releases, and models that your organization is deploying. This firm footing allows you to pinpoint areas where attention is required or present occasions for consolidation; it can also help highlight discontinued lines, latest versions, and upgrade paths.
- Know when the end of life or support is near for the products in your IT environment. EOL/EOS software asset lifecycle information is complicated. Software vendors often bury the information in a cumbersome support policy planted deep within their website or may not even publish it. But gathering comprehensive EOL and EOS dates for each product in your ecosystem (across utility categories and including all manufacturers) can help you streamline management of those products, mitigate associated risks across categories, including operating systems, productivity, and IT management. Knowing where you have the most EOL/EOS software or if a particular vendor has products reaching EOL/EOS in a particular month, for example, can help pinpoint which updates should be prioritized.
- Have a unified, cross-enterprise strategy for EOL/EOS data. It is possible that EOL/EOS data is managed by multiple groups and therefore is siloed across an organization, even though that info has an organization-wide impact. It may have ramifications for the entire business, including compliance, production, security, and support teams. A unified lifecycle management strategy can minimize siloed efforts and augment visibility enterprise-wide. This process should involve collaboration across finance, IT management, IT support, procurement, security and other departments. A configuration management database (CMDB) or another central data repository with consolidated, normalized inventory data can help get the correct data to the correct people.
Improved clarity into your estate may be the way to get rid of the hard part of IT decisions…and support your digital transformation initiatives.