Need Of Infrastructure Discovery Automation

By Author: Alice Coope
Total Articles: 213
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The IT infrastructures of most companies and organizations are in a constant state of flux and growth. This is because everyday new applications and new technologies hit the market promising companies with scintillating growth prospects. Companies in their eagerness to take advantage of the benefits offered by the new technological innovations and to put their businesses on the fast track to success adopt it without any second thoughts. There is nothing wrong in keeping pace with innovations as it brings a wide range of benefits to the companies and organizations. For instance, the adoption of virtualization software helps companies to improve scalability and workloads. However, frequent renewal and modernization of IT infrastructure can make its management extremely difficult and challenging.

The constant addition of new equipments, devices, systems, networks, facilities, applications, servers, workstations, routers, switches, printers, hardware and software components so on and so forth makes it difficult ...
... for the IT personnel to keep the business up and running at its peak. Moreover, with the federal government and the IT industry adopting a carrot and stick approach, there are innumerable regulations and compliance issues that the companies and organizations have to deal with. Hence, what is required is an effective infrastructure discovery automation that helps companies and organizations to manage effectively their IT infrastructure environment.

In a typical corporate environment, the major management issues faced by the IT department are as follows:

• Poor or no documentation of physical and virtual assets
• Badly maintained or fragmented network map of physical and virtual assets in a multi-vendor and multi-class environments
• Lost or poorly documented manual of equipments that are repurposed or moved to another location on the corporate network
• Lack of real-time visibility and identification of assets, their locations, configurations, and software patch levels
• Lack of real-time identification of rogue, unauthorized, or non-compliant hardware or virtual assets

For any IT department it is highly essential to have a very good understanding of the IT infrastructure that it manages and operates. With automated infrastructure discovery, the IT department gets unprecedented visibility into the kinds of assets that the company owns. The following are some of the advantages of infrastructure discovery automation.

• Track and manage the life cycles of resource configuration
• Identify and document new or moved assets
• Access real-time virtual and physical asset information to ensure security and compliance
• Automatic reporting and generation of network asset maps while leaving IT staff available for other projects
• Enable increased uptime and reduced downtime by scaling hardware
• Ensure mission critical components implement the latest software updates, patches, and config files
• Remediate out-of-date, poorly patched, or misconfigured devices

Hence, when considering the innumerable benefits of infrastructure discovery automation, it is a must in today's’ corporate milieu.

Also read on - data center infrastructure management, data center automation