Managing service delivery in todayís complex and dynamic business environments demands new and different approaches from IT. The explosive growth and the rate of change of information has brought particularly daunting challenges for IT that have contributed to incredibly complex underlying infrastructures. To get a true picture of all of the components necessary to support an IT or Business Service, you must access and bring together data that resides in disparate data silos throughout the enterprise.
Read this white paper from ASG to learn more about what federation is and how it works; true federation vs. mere integration; a federated enterprise: ITIL v3ís CMS; ITIL and end-to-end service visibility; and getting the right data using information models.
True Federation:
A Must-Have for Strategic Service Delivery
A WHITE PAPEROverview
True federation is the key to making sense of data, delivering strategic IT services, and adding value to the business
Items of Interest:
. The need for federation
. What federation is and how it works
. True federation vs. mere integration
. A federated enterprise: ITIL v3's CMS
. ITIL and end-to-end service visibility
. Information models: getting the right data
. True federation: the key to meaningful data and strategic service deliveryTrue Federation: A Must-Have for Strategic Service Delivery
Managing service delivery in today's complex and true federation preserves the data's original context, ensuring its dynamic business environment demands new and validity and completeness. Through all of these capabilities, true federation presents a holistic understanding of service delivery, different approaches from IT. The explosive growth including the multiple components, processes, relationships, and and the rate of change of information has brought business metrics within each service. particularly daunting challenges for IT that have contributed to incredibly complex underlying Using this all-inclusive view, IT decision makers can scrutinize the infrastructures. To get a true picture of all of the entire life cycle of an IT service, uncovering underutilized assets, components necessary to support an IT or Business inefficient processes, and automation opportunities. This knowledge, combined with the ability to view how well IT services are meeting Service, you must access and bring together data that customer needs, empowers IT to be more strategic in its service resides in disparate data silos throughout the enterprise. delivery process.
It is widely recognized that a Configuration Management Federation is not a requirement in the strict definition of a CMDB, and Database (CMDB) holds the key to providing a single some vendors' solutions on the market today do not perform true source of truth; a source of real-time information about federation. However, many industry analysts believe that federation is a critical component to CMDB success. the IT infrastructure. However, for the CMDB to function as a reliable system of record, its data must be current Armed with true federation, IT is better poised than ever to run itself and accurate. like a market-facing business, making the most of limited resources, even as it satisfies customer demand. True federation provides seamless visibility of data in a wide range of related Managed Data Repositories What Federation Is and How It Works(MDRs), enabling added value to be gained from deployed technologies. Enabling data to reside in At its most basic level, federation is a way of accessing distributed configuration information as though it were all in a single data store. existing data sources provides for a more sustainable A CMDB does not store the majority of its data but references related solution with high scalability, decreased maintenance data stored in other trusted sources throughout the enterprise. requirements, and increased security. Simply put, federation is the act of referencing data from other sources instead of replicating it, and then presenting that information CMDB federation is an approach to accessing distributed in a unified view. Through the sheer simplicity of data presentation, configuration information as though it were all in a single data store. federation prepares IT teams to be more responsive and proactive It promises to raze silos in IT's landscape and make data-sharing and helps ensure that data is current and accurate.easier than ever before. But left to its own devices, federation does little to solve either IT or business problems. While it may succeed in connecting disparate technologies, federation can also generate disorganized heaps of unusable data. True Federation: The key to making federation work is securing access to important, Preserving Data's Original Context meaningful information on demand, regardless of the data source. In terms of IT service management (ITSM), the critical data to be True federation avoids the expense of extracting, federated is likely to include financial resources, infrastructure, transforming, and loading (ETL) useful IT management applications, people, processes, and business metrics - ... [download for more]
