By: Ryan Kubacki
Without reliable data, many business initiatives fail—more than 40%, according to Gartner estimates. Unfortunately, data is famously unreliable.
You need clean data. To get it, you need insights—insights that can help make each of these common IT initiatives a success:
- Responding to audits
Almost every IT audit begins with a simple question: What is our inventory of assets? The answer is complex, and it can be painful to get. Data center, cloud and client teams scramble to inventory multiple sources of information and asset data. They come up with duplicative data and irrelevant information and that doesn’t align or provide enough clarity for auditors. It’s a red mark on a report, and it’s not the teams’ fault.
Consumers are able to leverage data platforms to respond to internal audits quickly and accurately, regardless of the angle or view.
The number of desktops with an obsolete OS? Check. Deviation standards tools? Check. Inventory location by region? Check.
You can always be confident you’re getting complete, correct results the first time.
- Stopping service outages
Pinpointing the root cause of a service outage is always a struggle. Teams race to identify affected assets, relationships between the configuration items and quick solutions. Without an up-to-date map and inventory that accounts for dependencies, it’s next to impossible.
In an ideal world, after an outage is resolved, a team is able to triage the cause and locate other threats in similar configurations around the organization to prevent similar incidents. In the real world, they can’t always find similar configurations, let alone the threats therein. If the outage was caused by an end-of-life software that was breached, for instance, or by a defective router, can they even earmark and monitor other assets that meet the same criteria?
Teams need information like this on hand for quick turnaround and confident results.
Data Platform equips your operations teams with always-on, always-fresh, always-enriched insights into the IT landscape. It augments and enriches the information in your systems of record with market data that would otherwise be difficult to quickly research or easily get. When an outage brings a moment of truth, having end-of-life information, vulnerabilities and exploitation evidence, Windows compatibility and hardware configuration data is crucial to effective triage and response.
- Windows migration
The majority of any organization’s assets are on Windows 10, but most businesses still rely on some applications that have not been updated for compatibility. Worse yet, those dependencies aren’t always mapped. It’s difficult to know which applications can be safely moved. And with more frequent OS updates, it will be a problem for years to come.
Data Platforms give you access to current information on compatibility that doesn’t stop at “yes or no.” With its up-to-date research on what vendors are planning for products, you can breach gaps and upgrade your OS—all while being confident about the outcome.
- Application rationalization
It’s not uncommon to find organizations with multiple implementations of different software solutions that all have the same function: five PDF readers, four enterprise architecture tools, seven application servers, and business databases. It creates unnecessary complexity, risk, and cost. Your organization is more agile and secure when it can rationalize applications by standardizing on a smaller set.
Enterprise architects need a clean, current state to make decisions and recommendations. But it’s challenging to get when many different sources of inventory contradict each other, aren’t accurate and aren’t complete.
All information sources are able to integrate into one place for enterprise application suites (EAs) to get clean, reliable data that’s enriched for decision-making. They can compare an organization’s software by categories, versions, obsolescence, exposure to vulnerabilities, compatibility with virtualization technologies or operating systems like Windows 10. All angles are explored and available, and no one on your team has to research raw data online.
- Transition to the cloud
Companies are migrating to the cloud faster than ever. That presents a challenge—and an opportunity—for organizations looking to embrace the cloud.
Before moving applications to the cloud, it’s essential to understand their dependencies, versions, service life, and compatibility with virtualization technologies. Researching all that information takes valuable time from teams that have more urgent tasks.
Data is dynamic and your decision-making must follow suit. In a data platform, market data points are consolidated into your workflows, where they’re easily accessible and always ready. You can see applications in the context of the cloud project and understand limitations and compatibilities that require architecture or configuration changes. Instead of wasting time on tedious research, your team can issue recommendations and plan accordingly.
You may run dozens of IT projects at once. With clean data always at your fingertips, none have to crash and burn.
About Ryan Kubacki, Chief Revenue Officer, Flexera
Ryan is a thought leader in go-to-market strategy, marketing, sales, and customer success. At Flexera, the software company that helps organizations realize technology’s power to accelerate their business, Ryan is responsible for reimagining the customer experience to drive growth – innovating Flexera’s go-to-market approach and partnering with customers and partners to achieve their goals. Connect with Ryan on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/ryankubacki/.
