IT Asset Discovery

Understand what IT inventory is really in use

The issues

Very few companies have a complete understanding of the business value of their IT assets, and the more successful a business is, the more likely this is to be the case. This is because fast moving companies, which need to constantly develop new business systems for ever more discerning customers, just do not have the time or the resources to keep up with the pace of change. As a result, data centers become full, network capacity is strained, and asset registers get out of date.

Our approach

Companies spend a great deal of effort developing asset registers based on financial ledgers and Configuration Management Databases (CMDBs) based on IT processes, and need to be confident that the information in them is both accurate and up to date. This service identifies differences between our clients’ historical understanding of their IT infrastructure and usage, and a current view of it, based on a short, sharp, automated discovery project. The comparison is made using our multi-dimensional modeling system, IDAP, and in partnership with our customers, all discrepancies are identified, challenged, and acted upon. The outcome is much better data quality. We have a variety of discovery tools at our disposal, and can use intrusive or non-intrusive, agent based or agentless, approaches, depending on customer preferences. The process improvement is illustrated below:

The benefits

The IT Asset Discovery Service is delivered as a SaaS (Software as a Service) project. The main benefits are:

• Improved service delivery, as a result of a more complete understanding of the way applications deploy IT assets
• Reduced costs, as a result of decommissioning unused IT assets
• Greater operational stability, as a result of making configuration changes based on accurate and up-to-date information about the business use of IT assets
• Continuous improvement, as a result of using the Illumix IT asset monitoring service