eBOOK

DON’T LET BAD DATA

DERAIL GOOD
IT DECISIONS
How to get insights into your IT asset management

Don’t Let Bad Data Derail
Good IT Decisions
How to get insights into your IT asset management
Your role in IT asset management is an integral part
of your organization. And your job requires you to
keep up with a world of technology that becomes
increasingly complicated every day – more data, new
equipment and updated software.
With this growing complexity, you also must
keep tabs on rising costs for both licenses and
maintenance. But it’s often difficult to see exactly
where and on what your budget is being spent.
How do you optimize hardware and software spend
when bad data only drives terrible decisions?
©2019 Flexera
DON’T LET BAD DATA DERAIL GOOD IT DECISIONS
A recent Forrester study showed illuminating the
technological “black hole” saved customers as much
as $2.4 million on software licenses and another $1.5
million on hardware maintenance.
We’ve compiled a set of information articles
spotlighting the pain points we’re seeing across the
ITAM industry.
This information will help you shine a light and gain
actionable insight into your company’s tech spend.
And it’ll ensure you’ll continue to grow more valuable
to your organization.
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 DON’T LET BAD DATA DERAIL GOOD IT DECISIONS

How to Be a Hero When Good Data Breaks Bad

Here are some sobering statistics: 95% of the IT
asset data typically captured by medium to large
organizations is irrelevant. Fifty to 75% is inaccurate.
That’s bad.
Flexera has more than a decade of experience helping
customers gain insights into obscure technology.
We’ve cleaned up an untold amount of dirty data, and
we can say with certainty:
Good data goes bad in predictable ways.
It’s duplicate or conflicting. Because CMDBs
combine data from multiple sources, they often
contain duplicate and conflicting data. A CMDB needs
to resolve those conflicts and filter out duplicates
if it’s going to be the authoritative system of record
supporting IT decisions and processes. If it can’t,
that’s a big problem.
Flexera research shows that
40% of data collected across
different sources is duplicate.

It’s inconsistent. Technology data comes from

multiple sources: discovery tools, procurement and
When the problem scales to millions of lines of data
provisioning systems and more. Each tool represents
across different inventory and asset management
vendors and products in different ways. “Adobe
tools, finding and fixing the duplicates and conflicts is
Creative Suite” and “Adobe CS” might be the same
a hugely daunting task.
product, but thanks to that name variation, they
won’t match between discovery sources. Lack of
standardization like this makes data consistency a
real mess.

Average duplication ratio in vendor names

due to inconsistent naming: 10:1

Average duplication ratio in software product

names due to inconsistent naming: 20:1

©2019 Flexera 3

It’s irrelevant and incomplete. When analyzing data
for an audit, you can ignore .dlls files, knowledge
base files, patches, .exe files and others that are
individual components of a larger bundle. They’re
just noise. What you can’t miss is key information
such as end-of-life or end-of-support date, licensing/
packaging options, current version, vulnerabilities and
compatibility with new versions of Windows. These
external data points—market data, in other words—
are essential for numerous day-to-day processes. But
unless the process is automated, they take a lot of
effort and time to obtain.
Flexera research shows that
95% of data gathered from
various discovery sources is
irrelevant.
So it’s time for you to admit it: you’ve got bad data.
Here’s how to clean up its act:
•S
 tandardize language across IT. Flexera’s
Technopedia® catalog delivers more than 2.1 million
unique software and hardware models with category
and version information. It’s a reference that
standardizes names, taxonomy and nomenclature
across all IT, putting the information you need to
make quicker, better decisions at your fingertips.
©2019 Flexera
DON’T LET BAD DATA DERAIL GOOD IT DECISIONS
• Consolidate data across systems. Flexera has built-
in data extractors to aggregate data across more
than 40 data sources, including HP, ServiceNow,
BMC, Microsoft and IBM. It filters, de-duplicates and
normalizes data to establish asset identity. Then it
enriches it with non-discoverable market data from
Technopedia.
• Enrich CI data with missing metadata. Flexera
augments CI data with non-discoverable metadata
and market information, including end-of-life
dates, support type, upgrade and downgrade
paths, versioning and licensing information, OS
compatibility and more. This information is critical
to security professionals, enterprise architects,
software asset managers, vendor management,
governance and risk teams, your CFO, your CIO and
anybody else making decisions about technology
infrastructure.
Be a hero. Lead the war on bad data. Leverage Flexera
solutions to keep it relevant, accurate and a valuable
asset for your business.
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 DON’T LET BAD DATA DERAIL GOOD IT DECISIONS

It’s clear that an accurate view of technology assets is critical to success for both you and your company,
but that’s easier said than done. There are many ways to get to this view – from manual tracking in excel
spreadsheets to complex CMDB tools. How do we know what the right approach is for us? What makes one
approach better than another?

Your CMDB Is Full of @&#%

Your organization has invested millions in IT service
management—and the tools, process and cultural
change that come with it. It’s a long-term project that
promised to return efficiency, effectiveness and better
service to internal customers. But it’s in constant
improvement mode, and it hasn’t paid off yet.
The good news? It’s not your fault. The culprit
is all that dirty, dirty data in your configuration
management database.
When it comes to data, you have to keep
it clean
Clean data is critical. Clean data, in the context of
ITSM, means that your CMDB must be:
•C
 onsistent—The CMDB is a central repository for
data from many sources. It has to eliminate any
inconsistencies in how those different inputs
report data.
• Authoritative—All data should be deduplicated,
and any conflicts must be resolved. The CMDB also
requires change management to ensure that only
authorized individuals can update it.
• Rich—The CMDB should store all relevant
information for configured items—including
relationships among them, end-of-service-life
dates, Windows compatibility, virtualization
compatibility, hardware characteristics, associated
vulnerabilities and threats. These and other
necessary attributes will fuel decisions across all
constituents.
• Up to date—The data in the CMDB has to remain up
to date and accurate, even as the environment and
external conditions change.

©2019 Flexera 5
 DON’T LET BAD DATA DERAIL GOOD IT DECISIONS

Information Technology Landscape

The challenge? The IT landscape is a wreck

Many IT data sources contribute to your CMDB; the
typical organization collects asset data from at least
three. Each source looks for different attributes, gets
different taxonomies and processes data differently.
Not all sources have all aspects of the asset. No one These issues lead to
source contains the whole truth.
data that is:
Vendors don’t help the complexity or lack of • Inconsistent • Irrelevant
standardization. With acquisitions, renaming of
products and never-ending updates, it’s easy to lose • Duplicated • Incomplete
track of individual IT assets and their attributes. • Conflicting • Out of date
Information about service life is posted in disparate
places, and it doesn’t always follow the asset.
Vulnerabilities sprawl at a rate of more than 20,000
per year. Attributes of all sorts constantly change.

©2019 Flexera 6

And you’re left with a huge problem: Critical
information about your organization’s IT is never
ready, never complete and never trustworthy—
especially not when you need it most.
There’s a powerful tool to eradicate the mess
The Flexera Data Platform makes it possible for
organizations to build and maintain an accurate,
reliable CMDB. It consolidates data across multiple
systems—not only to keep your CMDB clean, but also
to keep it up to date, data-rich and ahead of the latest
product and market changes.
With the Flexera Data Platform, you can:
•A
 chieve high CMDB accuracy rates and constantly
keep CI data current. The Data Platform delivers
best-in-class coverage and accuracy for CI data and
metadata by leveraging Technopedia®—the most
trusted and comprehensive hardware and software
asset information source.
•C
 onsolidate CI data across systems. The platform
has built-in data extractors to aggregate CI data
across more than 40 data sources, including HP,
ServiceNow, BMC, Microsoft and IBM. It filters the
noise and deduplicates and normalizes data to
establish CI identity. Then it enriches it with non-
discoverable market data from Technopedia.
©2019 Flexera
DON’T LET BAD DATA DERAIL GOOD IT DECISIONS
• Standardize CIs with a comprehensive catalog
of CI models and categories. Technopedia also
delivers more than 2.1 million unique software
and hardware models with category and version
information. It’s a reference that can standardize CIs
across all data sources.
• Automate CMDB population by simplifying and
cleansing discovery data. The Data Platform takes
the raw discovery data, cleans it up, normalizes it
to the product catalog and enriches it with missing
information. Thanks to certified integrations with
the top CMDB vendors, CI data and metadata are
automatically populated and continuously updated.
• Enrich CI data with missing metadata. Data
Platform solutions augment CI data with non-
discoverable metadata and market information.
This includes end-of-life dates, support type, OS
compatibility, upgrade and downgrade paths,
versioning and licensing information—plus even
more critical information for CMDB applications.
Getting rid of the @&#% in your CMDB is a dirty job.
But with the Flexera Data Platform, you can do it.
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 DON’T LET BAD DATA DERAIL GOOD IT DECISIONS

Enterprise Architects:
This Is What You Need to See IT Clearly

Enterprise architects are tasked with analysis, design,
planning and implementation of technologies that
drive business transformation. It’s a big job. When
they have unreliable, missing and inconsistent data
about the current IT landscape, they’re forced to do
it blindfolded. Business outcomes miss their targets.
Projects fall short of their potential.
EAs need a clear view of IT, and clean data is the only
way they can get it
Clean data depends on a configuration management
database or IT asset system of record that’s:
• C
 onsistent—The CMDB must resolve any
inconsistencies in how different inputs report data.
So what’s stopping your CMDB from getting the clean
data it sorely needs?
For starters, it likely has too many IT data sources.
The typical organization collects asset data from at
least three, and they all look for different attributes,
get different taxonomies and process data differently.
Not every source has all aspects of the asset. No single
source contains the whole truth. Vendors add to the
complexity. With so much constant change, it’s easy
to lose track of each IT asset and its attributes and
vulnerabilities.
The result? Data is never ready, never complete and
never reliable when you need it.

• A
 uthoritative—All data should be de-duplicated.
Any conflicts must be resolved. The CMDB also
95% of IT asset data
requires change management to ensure that only is irrelevant.
authorized individuals can update it.

• R
 ich—The CMDB should store all relevant
information for configured items. That includes
relationships among them, end-of-service-life dates,
Windows compatibility, virtualization compatibility,
associated vulnerabilities and threats, hardware
characteristics and other necessary attributes that
fuel decisions across all constituents.

•U
 p to date—CMDB data must stay current and
accurate, even as the environment and external
conditions change.

©2019 Flexera 8
 DON’T LET BAD DATA DERAIL GOOD IT DECISIONS

So we’ve established that knowing what your assets really are is very difficult, but it’s also very worthwhile. For
many of Flexera’s customers, they actually found that one of the biggest benefits in a streamlined approach to
ITAM was time – the hours and hours that people were able to spend on strategic projects, instead of manually
managing asset lists ($645,000 in improved productivity as per Forrester Total Economic Impact of Flexera
report 2018). Here are a few ways that Flexera customers were able to leverage these insights to be more
effective and efficient.

How to Get Better Data Insights for Your Organization’s 7 Most

Essential Business Functions
The success of your organization’s IT depends on
reliable data. The bad news is that too much data is
unreliable.
Gartner estimates that more than 40 percent of
business initiatives fail to meet their objectives
due to poor data quality. When business functions
try to address these data-quality issues, they often
do so in isolation. And that just adds to the problem.
Data becomes increasingly fragmented across the
organization, and it gets even more difficult for
functions to exchange information.
Your organization needs clean, robust data. Now here’s
the good news: Flexera solves all of the above for your
organization’s 7 most essential functions.

©2019 Flexera 9

1. Information security
Hardware inventory and software inventory are the
bedrocks of most cybersecurity frameworks and best
practices. If security professionals don’t know what
they’re protecting, they can’t protect it.
Lack of visibility is one of the most serious problems facing
information security, and there’s no magic solution. With
more than 20,000 new vulnerabilities bubbling up every
year, plus a sprawling number of devices, it’s imperative
that security functions have access to clean, updated
and validated data. This data is essential to coordinating
mitigation strategies and deploying protection, detection
and response mechanisms that are current and effective.
How Flexera helps: Flexera offers visibility and enriched
information to information security professionals so they
can plan for end-of-service-life, reported vulnerabilities
and active exploitation evidence on assets detected
in the environment. No matter the source, no matter
the prevalence.
2. ITAM and SAM
About 25 percent of an organization’s software budget
is wasted thanks to software licensing complexity (IDC),
and it’s not getting better with the stampede to the cloud.
ITAM and SAM professionals rely on accurate, clean data
to make informed recommendations and decisions
about the lifecycle of IT assets. Their recommendations
on software reclamation, license management and
spend optimization have to be grounded in an accurate
landscape of deployed assets. In reality, ITAM and SAM
practitioners find themselves consumed by attempts to
get useful reporting from mountains of raw data, or with
creating and managing processes to transform that dirty
data into something useable.
How Flexera helps: Flexera customers get standardized,
filtered, structured, complete data to drive their
businesses. They don’t have to waste time trying to make
data useful. Instead, they can focus on higher-value
projects like software rationalization, lifecycle planning
and project tracking.
©2019 Flexera
DON’T LET BAD DATA DERAIL GOOD IT DECISIONS
3. Enterprise architecture
It’s a struggle for EA groups to get a comprehensive view
of the current state of an organization’s software and
hardware technologies. Creating an “as is” picture from
the many existing data silos and scaling it to a robust,
trusted and authoritative source can exhaust limited
resources. It might also fail to deliver value.
How Flexera helps: When inventory data is processed
through Flexera’s Data Platform, users can readily view
every product in an IT portfolio, and those products can
be broken into individual, functional areas. EA groups can
easily get answers: about how many different vendors,
products and product versions are deployed under select
categories, for instance. Or how to rationalize down to a
select few products/versions so they can negotiate better
contracts, reduce support costs and improve overall
management.
4. Governance, risk and compliance
Every major regulation emphasizes the importance of
having a consistent and current inventory of hardware and
software. PCI, NERC, HITRUST, PCI, HIPAA, CSC Controls,
NIST 800.53 (and more) include strong language on the
subject. Yet inventory continues to be a difficult aspect
of IT for GRC teams to tackle. Once again, bunk data is
the culprit.
How Flexera helps: The Data Platform consolidates,
normalizes, enriches and shares clean and validated
data about an organization’s IT assets. Flexera customers
report more than 70% reduction in time spent responding
to audits, and a 75% reduction in time spent researching
IT data.
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 DON’T LET BAD DATA DERAIL GOOD IT DECISIONS

5. Vendor management According to Flexera’s State of

Inaccurate entitlements result in poor preparation for the Cloud Report, companies
vendor audits, potentially significant true-ups, lack of plan to spend 24% more on
leverage in vendor negotiations, quarter and year-end public cloud in 2019 vs. 2018.
scrambles—not to mention time and money wasted on
manual data correlation.
7. Cloud team
How Flexera helps: The Data Platform turns
Digital transformation is in the air. Cloud teams
inconsistent, unstructured, hard-to-decipher IT
are looking for ways to move assets to the cloud
procurement and inventory data into clean, consistent
for efficiency, scale and service improvements.
information that supports purchasing decisions and
But moving to the cloud is no easy lift-and-shift. It
audit preparedness. With Flexera as a partner, vendor
involves application dependencies, architectural
management groups can make more flexible, agile
and compatibility challenges and a myriad of cloud
cost and investment decisions and trade-offs based on
environment options. It’s a daunting project—especially
accurate, real-time data. There’s no more guesswork.
if teams don’t have visibility into every aspect of the
In a few clicks, vendor managers have the information
technologies an organization plans to move.
they need to negotiate with the supply chain and
squeeze all the value they can from their investments.
How Flexera helps: Flexera delivers curated, enriched
insights into every asset, pre-migration to the cloud.
6. Operations and ITSM
Organizations can assess the risk, effort and cost
Providing excellent service to internal customers is involved before it’s too late. After migration, Flexera
difficult even under perfect circumstances. And most provides visibility crucial to accurately reporting on
circumstances are not perfect. When it takes more than cost, operations and assets.
30 seconds during a support call to determine which
assets are involved in a problem, employees are losing Of course, far more than seven business functions are
time. If it takes more than five minutes to pull a report affected by poor quality information. But when they’re
on hardware assets during an outage, the organization supported by Data Platform, all will have the consistent,
is losing money. authoritative, rich and up-to-date data they need to
achieve success.
How Flexera helps: Smooth operations require a
clean, constantly updated configuration management
database that feeds ITSM processes. Yet this is the single
most common point of failure for operations initiatives.
Flexera delivers a CMDB that is constantly supplied
with quality, reliable and up-to-date insights that are
enriched with market data from outside IT.

©2019 Flexera 11

6 IT Projects That Crash and Burn Without Insights, and How You
Can Save Them
Without reliable data, many business initiatives fail—
more than 40 percent, according to Gartner estimates.
Unfortunately, data is famously unreliable.
You need clean data. To get it, you need insights—
insights that can help make each of these common IT
initiatives a success:
1. Responding to audits
Almost every IT audit begins with a simple question:
What is our inventory of assets? The answer is
complex, and it can be painful to get. Datacenter,
cloud and client teams scramble to inventory multiple
sources of information and asset data. They come
up with duplicative data and irrelevant information
and that doesn’t align or provide enough clarity for
auditors. It’s a red mark on a report, and it’s not the
teams’ fault.
Critical insights: Flexera customers can leverage Data
Platform to respond to internal audits quickly and
accurately, regardless of the angle or view. Number of
desktops with an obsolete OS? Check. Deviation from
standard tools? Check. Inventory location by region?
Check. You can always be confident you’re getting
complete, correct results the first time.
©2019 Flexera
DON’T LET BAD DATA DERAIL GOOD IT DECISIONS
Flexera customers report
75% reduction in time
spent responding to audits and
researching tech information
2. Stopping service outages
Pinpointing the root cause of a service outage is
always a struggle. Teams race to identify affected
assets, relationships between the configuration items
and quick solutions. Without an up-to-date map and
inventory that accounts for dependencies, it’s next to
impossible.
In an ideal world, after an outage is resolved, a team
is able to triage the cause and locate other threats
in similar configurations around the organization
to prevent similar incidents. In the real world, they
can’t always find similar configurations, let alone the
threats therein. If the outage was caused by an end-of-
life software that was breached, for instance, or by a
defective router, can they even earmark and monitor
other assets that meet the same criteria? Teams need
information like this on hand for quick turnaround and
confident results.
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Critical insights: Data Platform equips your operations
teams with always-on, always-fresh, always-enriched
insights into the IT landscape. It augments and enriches
the information in your systems of record with market
data that would otherwise be difficult to quickly
research or easily get. When an outage brings a moment
of truth, having end-of-life information, vulnerabilities
and exploitation evidence, Windows compatibility and
hardware configuration data is crucial to effective triage
and response.
3. Windows migration
The majority of any organization’s assets are already
on—or about to be on—Windows 10, but most
businesses still rely on some applications that have
not been updated for compatibility. Worse yet, those
dependencies aren’t always mapped. It’s difficult to
know which applications can be safely moved. And
with more frequent OS updates, it will be a problem for
years to come.
Critical insights: Data Platform gives you access to
current information on compatibility that doesn’t stop
at “yes or no.” With its up-to-date research on what
vendors are planning for products, you can breach gaps
and upgrade your OS—all while being confident about
the outcome.
©2019 Flexera
DON’T LET BAD DATA DERAIL GOOD IT DECISIONS
4. Application rationalization
It’s not uncommon to find organizations with multiple
implementations of different software solutions that
all have the same function: five PDF readers, four
enterprise architecture tools, seven applications
servers and business databases. It creates unnecessary
complexity, risk and cost. Your organization is more
agile and secure when it can rationalize applications by
standardizing on a smaller set.
Enterprise architects need a clean, current state to make
decisions and recommendations. But it’s challenging to
get when many different sources of inventory contradict
each other, aren’t accurate and aren’t complete.
Critical insights: Flexera customers can integrate all
information sources in one place for EAs to get clean,
reliable data that’s enriched for decision-making. They
can compare an organization’s software by categories,
versions, obsolescence, exposure to vulnerabilities,
compatibility with virtualization technologies or
operating systems like Windows 10. All angles are
explored and available, and no one on your team has
to research raw data online.
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5. ServiceNow implementation
Many sources of information contribute to ServiceNow
implementation. The typical organization collects
asset data from at least three, and they all look for
different attributes, get different taxonomies and
process data differently. Not all IT data sources have
all aspects of the asset. No single source contains the
whole truth. Limiting your organization to the sources
supported by ServiceNow means limiting the value
you can realize from that investment.
6. Transition to the cloud
Companies are migrating to the cloud faster than
ever. Eighty-four percent of respondents in Flexera’s
State of the Cloud report[link] have a multi-cloud
strategy that mixes public and private cloud. Docker
and Kubernetes adoption is rapidly expanding. That
presents a challenge—and an opportunity—for
organizations looking to embrace the cloud.
Before moving applications to the cloud, it’s essential
to understand their dependencies, versions, service
life and compatibility with virtualization technologies.
Researching all that information takes valuable time
from teams that have more urgent tasks.
©2019 Flexera
DON’T LET BAD DATA DERAIL GOOD IT DECISIONS
But data quality is one of the most important
requirements for proper IT asset management and
IT service management. With inaccurate or missing
information from any source, not even the best asset
management solutions can help you.
Critical insights: Flexera solves the fundamental
challenge of data quality. Using Data Platform
with ServiceNow as an integrated solution can
save hundreds, or even thousands, of hours in
implementation time—not to mention potentially
millions of dollars in implementation costs.
Critical insights: Data is dynamic, and your decision-
making must follow suit. In Data Platform, market data
points are consolidated into your workflows, where
they’re easily accessible and always ready. You can
see applications in the context of the cloud project
and understand limitations and compatibilities that
require architecture or configuration changes. Instead
of wasting time on tedious research, your team can
issue recommendations and plan accordingly.
You may be running dozens of IT projects at once. With
clean data always at your fingertips, none of them has
to crash and burn.
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 DON’T LET BAD DATA DERAIL GOOD IT DECISIONS

ServiceNow is a critical platform for many enterprises, and IT service management is an extremely
focal and sensitive topic for many IT organizations. Similar to our last article, how do we maximize our
investment of time and capital into this tool? How do we set ourselves up for success, so we manage the
tool instead of it managing us?

How to Solve the Top 5 Data Problems in Your ServiceNow

Implementation
Data quality is one of the most fundamental
requirements for successful IT asset management and
IT service management. When you have inaccurate
or missing information, not even the best asset
management solutions can help you.
Average duplication ratio in vendor names
due to inconsistent naming: 10:1
Average duplication ratio in software product
names due to inconsistent naming: 20:1

The Flexera Data Platform solves the most

persistent problems surrounding data quality,
Solution
including five major data problems that can arise
while implementing the ServiceNow ITSM in your Standardize CIs with a comprehensive catalog
configuration management database: of CI models and categories. The Flexera Data
Platform leverages Technopedia®—the most trusted
Problem 1: Inconsistent data and comprehensive hardware and software asset
information source—to deliver more than 2.1 million
Data in a CMDB comes from multiple sources:
unique software and hardware models with category
procurement and provisioning systems, discovery
and version information. It’s a reference that can
tools and more. Each source represents vendors and
standardize CIs across all data sources.
products in different ways. Micro Focus® Universal
Discovery or DDMi may represent the same product
differently than Microsoft SCCM, for example. This
lack of standardization makes data consistency a
real challenge.

©2019 Flexera 15

Problem 2: Duplicate or conflicting data
Because CMDBs combine data from multiple sources,
they also often contain duplicate and conflicting data.
And a CMDB with duplicate or conflicting data is a
CMDB that is not authoritative.
40% of data collected
across different sources is
duplicate.*
If your CMDB is going to be the system of record
supporting all IT decisions and processes, it must
resolve conflicting data and filter out duplicates.
When the problem scales to millions of lines of data,
however, finding and fixing those issues can be a
daunting task.
Solution
Achieve high CMDB accuracy rates and constantly
keep CI data current. By mining Technopedia®,
the Flexera Data Platform can deliver best-in-class
coverage and accuracy for CI data and metadata.
Problem 3: Incomplete data
Let’s say you’ve addressed the first two problems, and
your data is consistent and authoritative. But if your
CMDB is missing data— such as the data you need to
make architectural decisions, or for ITIL processes to
be effective—it has yet another serious limitation.
Data is only as good as its source. In a CMDB, data is
sourced from outside IT systems. These systems can
lack critical information about CMDB assets, such
as end-of-life or end-of-support dates, licensing/
packaging options, current versions, vulnerabilities,
compatibility with new versions of Windows and so
much more. These external data points—market data,
in other words—are essential to day-to-day processes.
Unless they’re automated, they take a lot of time and
effort to obtain.
* Finding based on Flexera research.
©2019 Flexera
DON’T LET BAD DATA DERAIL GOOD IT DECISIONS
Solution
Enrich CI data with missing metadata. Flexera
Data Platform solutions augment CI data with non-
discoverable metadata and market information.
This includes end-of-life dates, support type, OS
compatibility, upgrade and downgrade paths,
versioning and licensing information—plus even more
information for CMDB applications.
Problem 4: Irrelevant data
When evaluating data for an audit, you don’t need
to review .dlls files, knowledge-base files, .exe files,
patches and other files that are individual components
of a larger bundle. They’re just noise, and you can
ignore them. But first you have to filter them out.
95% of data gathered from
various discovery sources is
irrelevant.*
If your CMDB is going to be the system of record
supporting all IT decisions and processes, it must
resolve conflicting data and filter out duplicates.
When the problem scales to millions of lines of data,
however, finding and fixing those issues can be a
daunting task.
Solution
Consolidate CI data across systems. The Data
Platform has built-in data extractors to aggregate CI
data across more than 40 data sources, including not
only ServiceNow, but also BMC, Microsoft and IBM. It
filters the noise and deduplicates and normalizes data
to establish CI identity. Then it enriches it with non-
discoverable market data from Technopedia.
16

Problem 5: Outdated data
Few things in life are certain, but you can be sure
that some of the data in your CMDB is out of date.
Networks continuously evolve with new devices and
software. Vendors constantly change with the latest
software versions, patch updates, product names,
support changes and mergers and acquisitions. A large
organization may have hundreds of CI updates each
week, all while you’re gathering the data.
Organizations often spend a lot of time and money
to set up a CMDB, only to soon find out that the CIs
change nonstop. If your organization fails to maintain
CIs, data in your CMDB will rapidly become outdated.
25% of Fortune 500 companies
use software that is past its
support date.
Solution
Automate CMDB population by simplifying and
cleansing discovery data. The Data Platform takes
the raw discovery data, cleans it up, normalizes it
to the product catalog and enriches it with missing
information. Thanks to certified integrations with
the top CMDB vendors, CI data and metadata are
automatically populated and continuously updated.
So what does all of this mean for your
ServiceNow implementation?
By eliminating these kinds of problems, the Flexera
Data Platform—as an integrated solution with
ServiceNow—can save your organization hundreds,
even thousands, of hours in implementation time and
potentially millions of dollars in implementation costs.
The Flexera Data Platform makes it possible for
organizations to build and maintain an accurate,
reliable CMDB. It consolidates data across multiple
systems—not only to keep your CMDB clean, but also
©2019 Flexera
DON’T LET BAD DATA DERAIL GOOD IT DECISIONS
to keep it up to date, data-rich and ahead of the latest
product and market changes.
Linking Flexera with ServiceNow improves overall
management of hardware and software assets,
regardless of your organization’s size or the scope
of your implementation. The Flexera Data Platform
benefits ServiceNow deployments by dramatically
reducing implementation time and using Technopedia
to improve the accuracy and timeliness of asset
reporting, analysis and action.
“With over nine different tools,
and quality issues with raw
discover data, we were facing
serious timeline and feasibility
risks. The solutions enabled us to
consolidate the data across the
various tools into the ServiceNow
platform. We cut implementation
effort by 75 percent and ongoing
maintenance efforts by 90 percent
by automating the data cleansing,
population and maintenance.”
Autotrader
Every ITSM implementation has its data problems,
and ServiceNow is no exception. With the Flexera Data
Platform, your organization has solutions.
According to Flexera client reports, the Data
Platform reduces the overall ServiceNow
implementation effort by as much as 75%,
while providing solutions for rationalization,
refresh, security, automation and planning.
17
 DON’T LET BAD DATA DERAIL GOOD IT DECISIONS

About the Flexera Data Platform and Technopedia®

Flexera’s Data Platform and Technology Insights
deliver the world’s largest and most comprehensive
repository of market intelligence on enterprise
software and hardware. The Data Platform captures
indispensable sources of IT asset information,
normalizes that information, and improves the
quality of data you need to make decisions about
your organization’s systems of record and technology
workflows. The platform leverages the power of
Technopedia®, a constantly updated, human-curated
content repository of more than 1.2 million products
and 87 million data points. With its timely and relevant
product and market intelligence, Technopedia
provides a complete, categorized listing of your
organization’s hardware and software and ensures that
all your systems speak a common language. When you
have Technopedia as a reference, the insight you need
to quickly make the best, most effective decisions for
enterprise technology is at your fingertips.

ABOUT FLEXERA
NEXT STEPS
Flexera helps executives succeed at what once seemed impossible:
For more on how getting clarity into, and full control of, their company’s technology
Data Platform can help “black hole.” From on-premises to the cloud, Flexera helps business
you, visit us online. leaders turn IT insight into action. With a portfolio of integrated
solutions that deliver unparalleled technology insights, spend
optimization and agility, Flexera helps enterprises optimize their
technology footprint and realize IT’s full potential to accelerate their
Learn More flexera.com
business. For over 30 years, our 1300+ team members worldwide have
LEARN MORE been passionate about helping our more than 50,000 customers fuel
business success. To learn more, visit flexera.com

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