BrainBlog for Tanium + ServiceNow by Jason English
In this article, provided by Intellyx, Jason English examines the negative impact that sprawling digital estates have on hybrid workplaces and the way that the partnership between Tanium and ServiceNow can address vulnerability and compliance gaps.
If you manage, operate or create software within an enterprise, chances are some part of your day will intersect with ServiceNow. They rose to a leadership position in service management by focusing on increasing the collaborative responsiveness of an organization to customer needs, changes, and crises.
ServiceNow has built and acquired a broad set of solutions that revolve around their widely used flagship ITSM platform. In addition to signing up customers on their platform, much of the company’s success can be attributed to their open partner ecosystem, which has allowed systems integration and software vendor partners to flourish by integrating their own practices and platforms using ServiceNow as the work surface and system of record.
That’s wonderful, but it’s also daunting to think about managing every trouble ticket coming in from various on-prem and distributed services once the platform’s implementation reaches enterprise scale.
How can we improve the work experience of IT operators, developers and security teams, so they can better understand what matters, given the event and alert loads so many nodes and services can generate?
Taking stock of technology inventory
Why try to optimize service management processes, if you aren’t sure exactly what assets exist within the organization?
A critical part of the ServiceNow platform is the Configuration Management Database (or CMDB), which documents the current software and hardware assets under management by the enterprise.
While this core IT management repository can become quite expansive in scope, its capability to act as a ‘single source of truth’ has limitations. To an operator or developer trying to get to the root of difficult problems, a CMDB is only as useful as the completeness, accuracy, and timeliness of the asset data it contains.
The trend for enterprise workforces, and their application estates, to become more distributed than ever is only accelerating, thanks to hybrid work practices and cloud computing, as I discussed in a previous article.
Employees and business partners—who used to work in offices and answer support calls near on-premises datacenters—are now using a mix of devices and remote access methods to support customer issues occurring in hybrid cloud infrastructure.
Inevitably, such complexity means there will be many endpoints and server instances that go forgotten or unreported. Research indicates that 94% of enterprises are unaware of 20% or more of the assets connected to their networks!
Tanium IT Asset Manager for ServiceNow provides an automated way for teams to take stock of the hardware and software assets that exist across the extended IT estate, leveraging the firm’s deep expertise in enterprise search and asset discovery honed in threat hunting and cyberdefense.
By continuously scanning for signals that indicate the presence of a connected system, the asset management software is able to capture and feed near-real-time asset data directly to the ServiceNow CMDB. Engineers and analysts can resolve incidents faster and with less friction when they are certain that consistent information about the state of all assets is in play.
Read the entire BrainBlog here.
