See the forest and the trees with IT Visibility

IT organizations are struggling to keep their IT estates under control in this dynamic environment. To maintain effective management, you need to be able to see both the forest and the trees. The forest is the panoramic view of your entire IT estate or portions of it. The trees are the individual assets that populate the estate.

To gain broad and deep visibility, you need in-depth data on every asset in the estate. But data in and of itself isn’t enough. You also need to transform raw data into actionable information that guides business decisions and fuels automated processes.

Zooming in to see the trees

The Flexera 2023 State of the Cloud Report reveals that less than 25% of the organizations surveyed have accurate visibility into their IT estates.

Why?

Because they don’t have comprehensive and accurate data on the assets in the IT estate. Without complete and detailed data, they can’t get an accurate view of the “trees.”

There are many sources of IT asset data, such as discovery tools, endpoint management tools, SaaS vendors, and cloud providers. The problem is that pooling data from multiple sources often creates a fragmented view of the IT estate.

In addition, a source may report multiple instances of the same asset because different product names are used for that asset, or more than one source may report the same asset. This duplicate data causes “double vision.”

Moreover, the data may need more detail. For example, the software data may not include end-of-life (EOL) or end-of-service (EOS) dates necessary for determining sustainability. Or it may lack security vulnerability data, exposing the company to risk. Hardware data may be missing power consumption or cooling requirements, hindering efforts to calculate operating costs accurately.

Most IT organizations (71%, according to the Flexera 2022 State of ITAM Report) approach the problem by consolidating asset data in a configuration management database (CMDB). Unfortunately, most of these organizations report that they don’t receive meaningful value from their CMDB investments. That’s usually because the CMDB data isn’t complete and accurate. The reality is, aggregating and maintaining accurate data in the CMDB is challenging, especially if you’re using manual processes.

It would help if you could aggregate, clean, normalize, and enrich data gathered from traditional sources to create a reliable, detailed single source of truth about your IT estate.

Zooming out to see the forest

A single, trusted source of truth is essential. But it isn’t enough. Equally important is a mechanism for transforming the data into meaningful, actionable information. That requires the ability to zoom out from looking at the individual trees to a panoramic view of your forest—a high-level overview of your IT estate.

You’ll also need a way to adjust the field of view from an all-inclusive picture to narrower views of selected portions of the estate. With the ability to zoom in and out, you gain valuable insights for making strategic business decisions and acting on them.

IT isn’t the only group in the organization that can benefit from the information. For example, finance and security teams can also improve their decision-making when they have insight into the IT estate.

It’s essential to present the IT estate information meaningfully to various stakeholder groups and provide a way for stakeholders to serve themselves—accessing the information simply, conveniently, and in the form they need.