A Successful CMDB Implementation

Today, the core of any business lies in its CMDB infrastructure, which is becoming more complex as new technologies emerge. This complexity adds work for the IT teams in trying to maintain, control, and consolidate infrastructure data. This challenge can be easily overcome by using the right strategies and the right tools and solutions. In this article, I would like to discuss CMDB’s or Configuration Management Database solutions, and how companies can use them to streamline the IT processes.

Configuration Management Database is a solution that empowers businesses with improved control over the different configuration items. You can think of CMDB as an extensive database that stores all the information about the infrastructure configuration items of a company. Having all in a single place it’s sure much easier to manage and control.  

CMDB Benefits

Implementing a Configuration Management Database will give your company the necessary tools to gain better control over the IT environment while reducing internal communication costs, and downtime, it will also provide a comprehensive analysis of the impact that software, firmware or hardware changes might have over the existing environment.

CMDB Implementation

Like many other solutions, CMDB implementation requires a fine touch and careful planning.

• Establish the governance framework – Who will be the owner of the configuration management strategy? The first thing to do is to establish who will be responsible for the entire structure and process. This person should define the purpose, responsibilities, guidelines, policy statements, and procedures.
• Define roles – All the people involved in the SACM policy should understand their tasks and responsibilities. For example, the configuration manager is the one that controls the entire process; the configuration database administrator is responsible for the daily maintenance of the CMDB, and the configuration database developers are responsible for designing the actual solution.

• Determine the CMDB method – Depending on your business’s needs, you can choose how you want your configuration items to be stored. Whether you need them to be stored anywhere within the IT organization, which is called the federation method, or you need them stored in a single place, which is called centralization.

• Determine Configuration Items classification – You need to decide how will configuration items be classified – by type, class or family.

• Design the CMDB solution – The final step is to design the actual structure of your CMDB solution. This should be done after you’ve decided what are your business priorities and goals. The optimal structure should represent the balance between the configuration items that needs to be traced, the range to which each of the configuration items need to be tracked and the number of attributes to be tracked for each configuration item.

A CMDB solution might save your business, and it definitely cuts hours of time-solving complex incidents.  It’s a good idea to have a CMDB in the house.

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