Organisations have different levels of maturity in the area of Change Management Databases (CMDB’s).

I was particularly looking to understand information like what does the WAN and LAN look like, what Servers and Client computers do we have in the estate, what Operating system and other Applications are running on these servers, etc?

I wanted this information on a regular basis (daily to weekly) so that we could observe change and query information and have confidence that it was fully up to date.

At one end of the spectrum some organisations couldn’t spell CMDB. On the other end of the spectrum an organisation might have a fully automated and integrated CMDB offering which it exposes to its Enterprise Architecture team to do “what-if” analysis, to understand the estate and to help continuously improve network and hardware designs, etc.

We discovered an excellent Software-as-a-Service offering that is not designed as a CMDB, but primarily scans the network for vulnerabilities and security information. However it generates, as a by product of its security scanning, all the base information that an Enterprise Architecture practice can use. It draws up a visual diagram of the WAN and LAN, shows all the IP addresses and categorises all the information in terms of Infrastructure Software and Applications found. This information can then be exported out and brought into the Enterprise Architecture Models.

The best part and the reason for the Blog is that except for a few strategically placed Black Box hardware items that get plugged into the wall on one end and the network on the other end, there is nothing to install!

All the real work is done on the Remote (Software-as-a-Service) Servers in the cloud, over encrypted links to your organisation. The benefits of this are that you can get this installed extremely quickly and not have to alter any ways of working in your IT Operations and Production Environments. A quick win situation all round, without upsetting the Production people and getting really useful information rapidly. Check it out – www.Qualys.com

I find it incredible in this day and age that people feel the need to have a table near the beginning of a document with a column for Sign Off!

Since we first started writing Word (or other) documents, I have never gone to the network drive, opened a file and seen a signature in one- EVER! Even if the document is formally signed it is very rarely scanned back in and kept safely. Why do we bother? Who are we kidding? it's simply an old fashioned notion that we need to get over.