The document discusses a company's project to reduce its data center footprint by 70% within three years by transitioning to cloud services. The initial approach of workshops and mapping failed due to incomplete asset registers, disparate data sources, and many stakeholders. So the company built an automated system to discover assets, map applications and services, and provide scorecards and exception reports. However, the home-built system was not properly maintained after the project and eventually failed, losing all the collected data.

1. @dez_blanchfield
I.T. Asset Management – Nothing Beats A Real World Example
• Requirement
“..reduce our Data Center
footprint by 70% within
three years..”
• Solution
“..whole of business
Cloud Transition..”

2. @dez_blanchfield
Project Business Goals – Frankly Nothing Short Of A Miracle
• Consolidate own data centers
• Leverage 3rd party data centers
• 3rd party clouds (AWS, Azure)
• X86, iSeries, pSeries, Mainframe
• Oracle, MS SQL, MySQL, PSQL
• Windows / Linux / AIX / Solaris
• NetApp / Hitachi / IBM / EMC

3. @dez_blanchfield
We Had Lots Of Inputs – None Of Them Good Unfortunately
• Incomplete asset registers (5)
• Disparate data sources (90+)
• Multiple core service models (8)
• Conflicting service groups (114)
• Myriad of stakeholders (400+)
• Misaligned business entities (74)

4. @dez_blanchfield
The Initial Approach – We Simply Threw Bodies At It
• Workshops with domain experts
• Map Business requirements
• Application discovery
• Performance data
• Data validation
• Reporting

5. @dez_blanchfield
Throwing Bodies At It Didn’t Work – So We Build A System
• Use tools to map the ecosystems
• Automated audits of datacenters
• Automated discover of services
• Capture full scan of applications
• Build a new single source of truth
• Throw automated tools at it

6. @dez_blanchfield
Our System Was Very Sophisticated – But Who Would Maintain It
• Automated Score Card
• Suitability %’age ranking
• Mapped against AWS baseline
• Mapped against Azure baseline
• Mapped against VMware fitment
• Reporting of exception mapping
• Almost never do manual override

7. @dez_blanchfield
Great Project Outcome – But Home Baked System Was Left To
Die
• We didn’t have a mature
managed ITAM solution
• We home baked one but the
business wasn’t prepared to
maintain it along with existing
CMDB and ITSM tools
• The project outcome was a
resounding success but we built
a Frankenstein, eventually it died,
along with all that data !!