As the rate of growth in the number of applications that organizations manage continues to accelerate, the importance of managing the application portfolio is becoming increasingly important. Excellent data quality provides the foundation for effectively managing proliferation.
The five key imperatives are:
- Attaining accurate asset counts: To calculate the operational and administration costs associated with an application, it is essential to have an accurate count of each server, networking device and dedicated client computer that the application uses. If an external service provider manages the application, then it is even more important to know which assets are actively being used to validate the billing for the service.
- Determine software license costs: To assess accurately the total cost of an application, there must be an accounting of software. Procurement departments aren’t always diligent about canceling licenses associated with retired systems or verifying that a purchased license was actually used.
- Assuring application continuity: A critical application availability factor that is often overlooked is ensuring that an application and its data are frequently backed up. This can best be achieved by ensuring that backup software has been installed and is active for every application server and client.
- Securing applications. Once you have covered application availability and performance, security takes center stage. For regulated industries, it is vitally important to validate anti-virus software, and ensure anti-theft software is installed and active.
- Ongoing application manageability. Microsoft SCCM (System Center Configuration Manager) manages half of the world’s business computers. SCCM ensures every system is regularly updated and can apply emergency patches on demand. SCCM is agent-based, where the agent provides a policy-based application of updates. If the agent is not installed, then the system becomes a source of vulnerability for the organization. Being able to double-check every system that the SCCM or any agent installed requires a solution such as Blazent’s, which uses multiple management systems data sources to crosscheck and validate software coverage.
Application owners rely on IT operations, infrastructure and service management teams to run their applications. These teams in turn rely on solutions such as Blazent’s to deliver on the five imperatives through automation. You can read more about Blazent’s data quality solutions here