The promises of the CMDB have been around a long time. The Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) popularized the concept back in the 1980s and 1990s as a foundational element of IT service management.

The benefits are clear: having a trusted data source with a rich set of relational information provides organizations with decision-making capabilities to support more efficient operations, better user experiences and proactive mitigation of risk. The marketplace has no shortage of services, technologies and service management platforms that support and rely on the CMDB. A CMDB, and by extension, the capabilities it enables, continues to be an important goal for organizations, even more so now considering the impact of digital transformation.

The seemingly endless headlines about security and data breaches can lead us to believe that attackers have become more advanced than ever before. While perhaps their goals and approach are more organized, analysis of recent breaches suggests that their techniques, in fact, have not significantly evolved. As CDW looks back on the last three years…

When I talk with customers, many tell me that their data center teams spend around 80 percent of their time “keeping the lights on,” performing routine management and support tasks. There are a number of problems with this situation. First, an employee who spends 80 percent of working hours on rote tasks will be able…