»  Search

Innovations like service oriented architecture, or SOA, and virtualisation enable real improvements to IT performance and agility. But they also increase the complexity and frequency of change in the data centre.

In fact, according to analyst firm IDC, a typical Global 2000 IT organisation averages 500 to 600 manual configuration changes a month to its IT infrastructure.(1)

Meanwhile, laws like Sarbanes-Oxley and HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) demand that IT knows exactly which systems and applications support compliance-sensitive data and business processes, raising the bar for improved system visibility and control.

As a result, it can be more difficult than ever for IT to understand the dependencies among IT resources and how they align with the business processes they support. And the consequences for not knowing these relationships have never been higher.

Managing this complexity and aligning IT with business priorities requires a new and more sophisticated approach to linking business services with the applications and infrastructure elements that support them.

Successful business alignment, whether for optimal service or compliance demands, requires accurate views of how infrastructure hardware, applications and business processes all relate to one another. Known as service views, these visual maps represent the link between IT and the business. They are used for many things, from managing application performance to process alignment and risk mitigation.

One way to maintain accurate service views and stay operationally aligned with the business is to integrate HP Universal Configuration Management Database, or HP Universal CMDB, with IT operations management software.

HP Universal CMDB software enables IT to link business services with applications and infrastructure components, providing an automated, consistently updated map for visibility and control over the enterprise’s business services.

Integrating HP Universal CMDB with IT operations management software offers a holistic view of how IT is aligned with the business.

• Bottom up: Infrastructure teams can align with business priorities through a bottom-up view of system configurations that shows how network, server and storage components are resourced to support core business processes.
• Top down: Application teams responsible for business services can get a top-down view of application performance and availability for core processes like order processing or inventory management, and connect them to the supporting infrastructure.

An integrated view allows infrastructure and application teams to look at and share the same information. And it enables a single version of the truth, which is essential for effective planning and problem resolution.

This integration also affords the ability to automate the creation and maintenance of service views, which is critical given the amount of change occurring in the data centre. Automation eliminates a historically manual process that often relied on staff knowledge – a potentially slow and risky endeavor.

An integrated approach offers the ability to:

• Be more efficient and effective with IT management processes
• Improve availability and performance of business services
• Mitigate risk

To realise the performance and efficiency gains of emerging data centre technologies without compromising visibility and control of business services, analyst firm IDC recommends exploring the capabilities of a CMDB.

“Enterprise IT organisations should strongly consider a CMDB strategy as a foundational project that can deliver business alignment through compliance assurance, improved availability, risk reduction, tighter security and lower operations costs,” IDC suggests.(2)

Learn more about integrating HP’s Universal CMDB with IT operations software.