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IT process integration

Occasionally, software vendors will come and audit your usage to make sure that what you are paying for and what you are actually using match accordingly, especially with "per-seat" or "concurrent-user" licenses. Therefore, as your cloud matures, you must track your license usage, historical peaks and valleys, and current usage on certain (if not all) software products to avoid penalties and failed audits. When usage goes above thresholds, it should trigger certain true-up events, and refuse to provision a certain license (pending approval/true-up in certain cases).

The best way to do this is by keeping track of software license utilization, managing changes across environments, and logging those changes in a configuration management database (CMDB). This CMDB is meant to be the "central source of truth" for the organization, storing all the configurations and services delivered by IT.

With multiple CMDBs , such as one for a physical environment, one for a virtual environment, and one for a cloud, there is no single source of truth. If a change, such as a patch, has to happen to multiple environments, then each environment has to be searched independently.

There are two ways to establish a single source of truth: (1) Simply integrate everything to point back to the central CMDB or (2) Federate the separate CMDBs. As your environment grows — and the sheer volume and diversity of your IT environment increases — federation is the recommended approach. With federation, you need not move all data into your single CMDB. Rather, a primary CMDB can be queried, and, through federation, it will reach out to the secondary CMDBs to respond to the query. You then can ask the single CMDB a question and get a holistic answer about your entire environment, including incident and problem management. If an incident does happen, a record of what it was, how it was handled, and the outcome of the problem will be documented and auditable.

Key steps to IT process integration include:

  • Federate your CMDB
  • Enforce license compliance
  • Track, manage, and report on incident and problem management

With the BMC Atrium CMDB – optionally,you can also integrate BMC Remedy Change Management running on a remote ITSM server – you can effectively track assets and license utilization in the cloud.

 

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