Configuration Data systems gaining ground

BOULDER, USA: “IT organizations are beginning to shift their priorities in investment, architecture, politics and process towards more flexible, federated models for CMDB Systems that are optimized to provide near-term value,” stated Dennis Drogseth, EMA vice president and study leader with the release of its new study.

Enterprise Management Associates (EMA), an IT management research and consulting firm, had brought out some findings from its new research report entitled, “Making Your CMDB System Deployment Count: Who is Winning the Battle to Show Value and Why?”

The study found that Configuration Management Database System (CMDBS) deployments have evolved significantly over the last few years towards higher levels of federation, growing Configuration Item (CI) scope and more defined paths to value.

“In general, IT executives recognize the cost-saving promise of the CMDB and view it as part of the solution to the economic downturn rather than as part of the problem.” Drogseth added.

The research showed Configuration Management Systems help companies gain operational efficiencies, improve IT service availability and reduce hardware and software costs.

Operational efficiencies; improved availability for critical business services; and asset savings from better software license management and the elimination of redundant hardware; These were the top three business benefits that respondents identified from CMDB System deployments.

Also among the findings were the trends that Budgets for CMDB-related initiatives fared better than overall IT spending, with 42 percent of budgets staying the same over the past 12 months and 25 percent actually rising.

This as per EMA came as a clear indicator that IT organizations view CMDB investments as a way to gain operational efficiencies, minimize risk and optimize assets by automating insight into duplicative, unused or inappropriately licensed assets.

A configuration management database (CMDB) is a database that contains all relevant information about the components of the information system used in an organization's IT services and the relationships between those components.

A CMDB provides an organized view of data and a means of examining that data from any desired perspective. An enterprise CMDB is not a singular database, it is a complex system that has to federate other data stores, reconcile alternate views of the same data, detect unauthorized changes, synchronize approved changes with its own metadata store, and be able to dynamically represent configurations graphically on demand.

The breadth of Configuration Items supported by a CMDB System is significant and on the rise, with 36 per cent of respondents targeting between 10,000 and 99,999 CIs (Configuration Items) and four percent currently supporting more than a million CIs. However 56 per cent of respondents selected “lack of automation in establishing and maintaining CMDB data” as the top maintenance concern for their CMDB System.