Scritto da Ivana Basaric
If you consider your asset management as lost as Atlantis island, here’s a new solution that you are surely going to like and will find on our MyElmec portal. Aiming to set aside old-fashioned Excel files and cumbersome, difficult-to-update CMDBs, Elmec has provided clients with a new ally. Its name is Atlantis and is developed by our team of IT specialists by integrating open-source resources.
Why Have We Decided to Develop a Homemade CMDB?
Before we answer this question, let’s go back to basics, that is, what we mean by CMDB. The term was taken from the ITIL world, stands for Configuration Management Database, and provides, thanks to identification, control, management and verification, with a logical model of each configuration item relevant for your business. In the case of information systems, we mean: servers, storage, software, computers, switches, etc… At Elmec, we used a CMDB available on the market, but we had found a number of difficulties such as: lack of scalability, inadequate performance, data replication (single point of failure), a rigid data structure that did not allow us to easily make changes to the types of CMDB items, a difficult insertion of the data coming from other software and a difficult reading of the data coming from other tools. For this reason, we looked for any CMDBs available on the market, but there were always some factors in which we were interested that were missing. Meanwhile, our clients started asking us for advice regarding CMDBs and, in particular, any processes that would help them with data updates. From here, we have conceived the idea to develop a CMDB of our own relying on open-source resources, a CMDB to which we have given a legendary name: ATLANTIS.
Why Is a CMDB Important for a Company?
If adequately populated, this tool becomes a dynamic system that allows you to have a constant overview of your IT estate, their related entities and the relationships between items, but it also requires a good amount of effort to keep it always updated to reality. The reason is because the data often has to be inserted manually and change management processes are not coordinated.
There are many companies who do not have a CMDB and, to track their assets, rely on Excel files which end up in different hands to be updated, spending a great amount of time and often making errors. Instead, if we consider the case of a company paying for a CMDB, costs are very high because both internal and external resource efforts are required.
In addition, because of the lack of adequate processes, companies often have to turn to their suppliers to know how many machines are managed by such suppliers, and rely on the information given. One of the aspects lowering management costs for CMDBs is the insertion of automated processes, which exploit products’ original APIs (Application Programmable Interface). These are software interfaces that allow you to create items, make changes to them and read their information directly on tools such as WorkspaceOne, Snow, LanSweeper, etc…
IMPORTANT!!! One of the most frequent mistakes is to think of CMDBs as discovery tools. Discovery tools only detect merely technical information and, unlike CMDBs, are not able to provide any business-related information. By ‘business-related information’ we mean: machine criticality, maintenance, the services delivered by that machine, impact on your business caused by machine interruption and the role the machine itself plays (production, quality, development, etc…). This information cannot be automated, and is managed manually by involving the various stakeholders through well-built change management processes.
So What Does Elmec’s Atlantis Offer Clients?
Atlantis allows clients to:
- Have a unique IT Asset Inventory tool, open to the stakeholders (like suppliers) involved, which enables clients to perform a correlation analysis between the assets inserted;
- Have a clear and simple overview of clients’ business assets to facilitate any decisions related to restructuring;
- Have total transparency on what we manage, also allowing clients to keep their governance on what is happening;
- Implement any validation processes where it is clients who approve or deny any changes to a single asset;
- Integrate CMDB reading and writing into other tools and software by API;
- Optimise IT Asset Inventory model by automatically acquiring and maintaining data and more. Clients can also change manually any asset characteristics and upload any items not included in Elmec’s service perimeter;
- Improve process efficiency by reducing time and effort currently respectively spent and made by internal and external resources;
- Have facilitated access thanks to our integrated portal, MyElmec.
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