Did you know the Russian proverb “Trust but Verify” {Doveryai, no proveryai} was the motto of the US Defense Threat Reduction Agency?
The Meaning of ‘Trust But Verify’ in IT Operations
1. Data Integrity: Moving Beyond Basic CMDB Completeness
We often hear the term “integrity”, commonly used to describe a positive attribute of a person or organization, being increasingly applied in the context of data quality. In the world of database technology, having an uncorrupted or complete operational dataset implies data integrity.
In the Information Technology Service Management (ITSM) domain, the central source of operational IT asset information is the Configuration Management Database (CMDB.) In this context, having a complete Configuration Item (CI) record in your CMDB is not enough to build trust. Completeness is just the beginning. The Configuration Item and its associated attributes have to be accurate, current, and properly contextualized for the data to be of business value.
2. Data Accuracy: Validating Against Multiple IT Sources
If a CMDB relies only on a single IT asset discovery tool—like trusting native AWS cloud discovery without verifying it against Datadog telemetry or Appgate SDP access logs its accuracy is easy to question.
3. Data Context: Mapping Infrastructure Dependencies
IT assets such as servers typically don’t stand alone. The context for their use is provided by mapping dependencies between IT infrastructure components, which also need to be validated frequently to maintain CMDB quality.
4. Data Timeliness: Keeping Pace with Dynamic IT Environments
IT environments are very dynamic. Services are constantly being added, retired or updated. To validate any change, it is essential to have current configuration information, which means data quality is always the first order bit in driving value. The core of Blazent’s value add is a relentless focus on Data Quality Management (DQM), ensuring that all data in a CMDB is current and relevant.
Case Study: Establishing a Trusted CMDB Source of Truth
When the State of Georgia outsourced their IT operations to an IT Managed Service Provider, both parties needed accurate and timely configuration data to reconcile any billing anomalies between parties. Blazent uses 19 separate data feeds to maintain the quality of the State of Georgia’s CMDB. All of this data is being leveraged, compared and analyzed to ensure its integrity. The use of Blazent solutions within their shared services delivery environment has helped the asset management and configuration management data become the source of truth within their key systems.
The Public Sector Crisis of CMDB Data Validation
Over the past several months, the industry publication – Governing, interviewed more than 75 public officials who analyze data for a living across 46 different states. Each official was asked, “In your work, how often do you run into problems with data integrity, accuracy, availability or timeliness?” Literally 100% of the officials have issues with data quality, with 69% saying it was often or frequent.
As you can see, this is a significant issue, and considering the role and presence the state government has in most people’s lives, any issue that affects them, affects you. This is an area that is critical to every state, on pretty much every initiative, and is the core focus of Blazent’s solution.
In modern enterprise infrastructure, you cannot afford to blindly trust a single data source. The Blazent platform automates CMDB data validation by cross-referencing your disparate IT tools, ensuring your operations and security teams are always working from a pristine source of truth.
Read the Data-Powered ITSM White Paper