Importance of Zone Management

Modern IT structures are becoming increasingly complex and difficult to control due to the disparate locations of IT assets and their components. As IT assets are constantly travelling throughout enterprise locations and organizational structures, implementing a comprehensive zone management solution is critical to keep track of assets, service lifecycles, and user responsibilities.

The majority of the time, asset locations are not properly documented due to time and cost pressures. To stay in control, it is necessary to have up-to-date and accurate information on current resources and available capacities. Utilizing a solution that provides a complete overview of all asset relationships is also key to maintaining an optimum balance between all variables.

Gaps in documentation create a lack of transparency that can result in slow service delivery, network downtime, and even a loss in revenue. For example, a major financial services company once lost track of approximately 8,300 PC workplaces and ancillary equipment due to improper documentation.

Since the company did not have a capable asset management solution in place, it was forced to write the assets off as total losses.

Incidents like this can be prevented by maintaining an inventory of all objects in the entire IT infrastructure – including physical and logical dependencies – and systematically transferring the data to a configuration management system. When that information is available to management systems in a coherent and comprehensible form, it is possible to have proactive and efficient control of heterogeneous IT landscapes.

Optimize the Interplay Between IT Assets

The asset management features of FNT Command provide extensive and highly flexible zone management tools to define campuses, sub-campus structures, buildings, and rooms with additional overlying structural definitions as well as assignments to multiple users and organizational units.

Since most IT environments and networks are heterogeneous in structure, managers often use multiple tools to identify the active components in their networks. With FNT Command, managers can gather this information into a single planning and management solution, where it can be merged with assets identified by external discovery tools or with passive components that are already documented for the network. Therefore, FNT Command provides a holistic and transparent overview of all current and planned components within the IT infrastructure.

All relationships between assets and CIs on the physical, logical, and virtual levels can be modeled as part of a fully integrated system, in accordance with the task in hand. Responsibilities across the organization can even be documented for accelerated production processes using automated workflows. In addition to organizing IT infrastructure more effectively, planning scenarios can also be created based on accurate, up-to-date information.

Zone Management and Documentation

Overall, having a transparent view of IT infrastructure and accurately managing IT assets is vital for workflow efficiency and delivering high-quality services. Zone management and proper documentation are especially important when relocating or changing user responsibilities.

As relocation can affect assets such as servers, routers, racks, and even cabinets – all physical, logical, and virtual relationships between IT services and service assets (CIs) in their current and planned states must be documented.

When changing assignments to different users (from local administrators not belonging to the IT team, to responsible department heads, to cost centers for controlling purposes), documentation is crucial to keep track of updated user responsibilities throughout the organization.

From small companies with a singular campus to international corporations with dozens of locations, a comprehensive information management system such as FNT Command helps managers to achieve full control of IT assets throughout infrastructures.

In part three of our multi-part series, we’ll discuss the importance of optimizing purchase contracting and maintenance services.