Do You Trust the Data in Your Configuration Management Database (CMDB)?

A single source of truth

Your Configuration Management Database (CMDB) should be the single source of truth that powers effective processes and decision-making across your IT organization. But often, it’s not.

An accurate CMDB is vital in making informed IT decisions. It provides crucial information about your digital services and the infrastructure that supports them. And yet, 99% of organizations using CMDB tooling that do not confront configuration item data quality gaps will experience visible business disruptions – through 2024, according to a 2022 Gartner® report, 3 Steps to Improve IT Service View CMDB Data Quality. The CMBD should enable key operational processes, helping you predict, prevent, and resolve service outages, minimize the risk of changes, and respond quickly to end users. Of course, at the heart of any CMDB is data.

Yet, many organizations populate their CMDB with stale, inaccurate data. So, instead of a single source of truth, it’s a source of confusion, greater security risks, and slower incident remediation.

A lack of timely, accurate data in a CMDB reduces efficiency, increases cost, and degrades security and governance initiatives. To successfully manage your assets, you must be able to trust your data, whether you’re in IT operations, security or the business.

When something goes wrong

It’s impossible to prevent every issue that could possibly happen when providing business services to employees and customers. Eventually, something will go wrong. And when it does, IT and security operations teams are often scrambling to understand what’s been affected. As they struggle to meet SLAs while minimizing security and finance risks, minutes matter. And trusted CMDB asset data is vital in analyzing downstream impacts and providing immediate remediation to quickly restore services.

An up-to-date, accurate CMDB can help any organization answer simple questions quickly and accurately — not just during an emergency but any time. Questions such as:

• How many endpoints do I have in my environment?
• What software is deployed, and are we using all the software we paid for?
• Am I at risk of known and zero-day vulnerabilities of unknown assets?
• Do my assets meet the required audit and compliance rules?

Why is acquiring timely, accurate asset data so hard?

Hybrid environments make data gathering far more complex. You have in-office employees. Fully remote employees. And some who split time between home and office. Then there are contractors, sub-contractors, and partners with varied levels of access. The application ecosystem includes on-premises and cloud services. Under these circumstances, it’s much more difficult to track software, hardware and network assets.

But without full visibility into your enterprise asset inventory and real-time reporting of aggregated data from online and offline assets, the risk of a security breach is much greater — and the outcome much more likely to be catastrophic. Moreover, the lack of a complete enterprise asset inventory doesn’t just compromise security — it dramatically affects how well an organization can control and optimize its asset spending.

Tanium asset integration for ServiceNow — one accurate set of data for all IT and security operations workflows

With IT asset management (ITAM) using Tanium asset integration for ServiceNow, customers regain control of their assets. ITAM gives them the insights they need to prioritize decisions about managing their devices and systems efficiently, reducing costs and lowering the risk of an attack.

Here’s what ServiceNow customers with Tanium Asset integration can do:

• Automatically map all of your hardware asset management (HAM) and software asset management (SAM) data to the appropriate object structure in ServiceNow.
• Aggregate real-time, live asset data with the most recent data from offline assets.
• Easily define servers, attribute mappings and schedules for HAM and SAM data to be synced from Tanium into ServiceNow.
• Create automated actions and work from a single, unified platform without the need for context switching.
• Get maximum value and efficiency from infrastructure investments.
• Significantly reduce costs from underutilized assets.
• Reduce mean time to resolution (MTTR) and exceed service level agreements (SLAs) by focusing on resolving issues, not chasing down endpoints.

“With Tanium asset integration for ServiceNow, Fox Corp not only can modernize its asset management, but now we get a significant increase in the accuracy and visibility of all our asset data in near real-time.” David Ly, Associate Director, ServiceNow, Fox Corporation

Learn more about Tanium asset integration with ServiceNow and join us for a webinar on March 29 to learn how Fox Corporation (Fox) is benefiting from this integration. Register today!