Application inventory for IT infrastructure transparency
Taking an inventory of applications can help business leaders gain complete transparency into their IT infrastructures. When organizations take the time to note how their IT infrastructure relates to each business application they enhance their IT professionals’ ability to manage technology directly in line with the business’s needs.
From conducting proactive and reactive impact analysis to calculating the total cost of ownership per business app to disaster recovery and technology lifestyle management, many benefits emerge. Conducting this due diligence of risk and asset management can help businesses retain transparency and save long term.
You may be familiar with the term CMDB, or configuration management database, which is renowned as IT’s source to mapping how technology offers business value. Application mapping can be done to help companies identify which business applications and data exist on each server to help with further transparency. Awareness of this information also helps with prioritization of how each app is handled, supported and looked at in terms of investment.
How to take inventory
There are multiple solutions that help IT managers to keep all the cloud spends under control.
There are two types of inventory to consider for mapping – infrastructure and business applications.
For infrastructure inventory, servers and databases are typically prioritized. It’s often a more manual process to conduct business application inventory. It’s focused on a process of application portfolio management. Businesses should also be wary not to skip out on defining the relationship between business apps and their relevant environments. Leaders can do this effectively by setting standards of development, testing and production application services that then relate to parent business applications.
While there’s a manual component to taking inventory and mapping, doing so will provide a clear strategy for tracking infrastructure and data from apps. The idea is that this process helps leaders to truly understand their needs and priorities as they pertain to support, upgrades, security, app treatment and investment.
Businesses that identify data sources and classify the processes that govern such data will help to provide clear IT infrastructure transparency to stakeholders.
Additionally, application inventory helps businesses by giving them a clear picture with which to analyze their IT application landscapes.
This knowledge allows them to better evaluate IT costs, look for opportunities for standardization of software throughout their business and identify areas where innovation can take place. For example, this system allows leaders to essentially grade the technical and functional values of their applications and identify shortcomings. This process of application rationalization can save a business $2 million, according to Infosys1.
Additional cost savings can also be achieved with greater transparency into unused applications which can be removed, opportunities for vendor consolidation and decreased IT costs in operating and managing unused applications.
Aligning apps with their support for your business
Application inventory helps provide clarity on which applications are not supporting your business effectively. With regular questions from stakeholders on which apps truly need continued investment, taking a moment to analyze each can prove fruitful to make these arguments.
It’s likely not surprising that many applications being used by enterprises do not, or no longer, functionally support their initial goal for implementation. Application inventory provides a prime opportunity to gain transparency, remove applications and save on IT costs.
Hystax’s platform is designed to help you analyze, track and monitor each application your business is utilizing. We can help you to gain the transparency into IT infrastructures that your management is seeking to remove costs associated with unneeded apps.
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