AppliTrak Overview
Managing information systems requires a combination of vigilance and effort to differentiate between the “cash cows” and the “pondscum.”
Critical systems and data need to be monitored to ensure they comply with mandates like the Payment Card Industry (PCI) Data Security Standard (DSS), or Federal Government requirements like the DoD Directive 8320.02-G. Unimportant systems (if there are any), don’t require the same rigorous level of monitoring.
The crux of the problem is understanding how to manage and discriminate between these systems, and knowing that it not the file’s name, location, or owner that are important but its contents. A file’s provenance or pedigree is much more important than other metadata. A file’s provenance indicates:
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Who and/or what business application created the file
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What was the disposition of the file after its use (e.g., was it destroyed, renamed, or closed)
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When did the event occur
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Where did the file’s contents originate
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Where were the file’s contents used next
It is a fact that the average enterprise has tens or even hundreds of billions of files and the number doesn’t ever go down; just up, and up, and up. Another unpleasant fact is that critical information doesn’t “stay put.” Critical information tends to wander, migrate, and reproduce; from critical application servers into ad hoc applications, emails, nooks, and crannies that may or (more likely) may not be known.
Another vexing corollary to the issue of billions and billions of files is that today’s business applications are made up of hundreds or even thousands of installed software components spread across multiple servers. Tracing a workflow from its origin to its destination often requires monitoring a whole network of servers and software. It is much too expensive, time-consuming, and error-prone, to manually track and manage workflows but there are few options available to the enterprise. One consequence of not knowing how systems are put together is that files accumulate and are unlikely to ever get deleted (I offer the ever popular, ever growing, Windows “C” drive as proof).
A second, more sinister consequence of not having a thorough understanding of a system’s bits and pieces is that system changes often have unexpected, or even catastrophic outcomes. The Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) Version 3 discusses the threat of fixes that are more painful than the original problem they were intended to address. It’s a safe guess that no one has been spared from the occasional rogue “fix.”
The earlier Windows “C” drive example was offered with tongue-in-cheek, but how many applications install files on a “C” drive because they know it will always be there?
Finally, litigation is a threat (if not a certainty), and the enemy is time. Finding and producing critical information is just one issue; being able to ensure authenticity can be a much more serious issue.
All of this points to the need for an information asset portfolio. The information asset portfolio catalogs information objects, service requirements, and their relationship(s) to business workflows, processes, and line of business applications. An information asset portfolio is one element of the complete IT portfolio:
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Infrastructure assets
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Application assets
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Information assets
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Process assets
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Human assets
Change Management
Change Management is one of the most important functions associated with a well run IT operation. A good, conscientious, change management group is usually at the center of the IT operation, aware of major projects, hardware and software rollouts, configuration changes, resource constraints, and even staffing changes. Sadly, that level of change management expertise is in short supply because it can take years to develop relationships and understand how applications function.
AppliTrak can help. It might take years for a staff person to develop the expertise to identify critical line of business applications, workflows, business processes, and the software components that make it all work, but AppliTrak can figure that out and map the processes. Furthermore, when a change yields unexpected consequences, AppliTrak can immediately pinpoint the extent of the changes. Finally, and perhaps most important of all, when a change produces unexpected results there are often downstream repercussions until the process is disabled or suspended; AppliTrak can trace these repercussions through the enterprise to assist the change management staff and application owners assess effects.
The proactive change management staff can exploit AppliTrak’s inventory of applications and their associations to assess the risk of a change and head off unexpected results. Often a seemingly inconsequential change can have dramatic effects because no one was aware of dependencies between applications or components.