End IT's data deficit

Hard to believe, especially given the reams of reports spewing out of IT, but Ray Homan argues, "There's a data deficit in the office of the CIO."

Homan is the CEO of BDNA Corp. in Mountain View, Calif., which supplies, you guessed it, more information to IT. However, this might just be the data you've been missing.

The company's Insight software discovers assets on your network and can tell you some interesting tidbits. For example, do you know when a vendor is scheduled to cease support a critical application's underlying operating system? Do you know which systems encrypt data at rest? Do you know the current number of systems in your server consolidation project that have been moved to virtual machines?

Homan claims Insight can do that and more. After the software crawls your network and begins to classify what it finds through its "fingerprint library" of IT system data, you can group assets according to your internal needs. That is, systems can be gathered by department, division, project, vendor, or mix and match them as you need. So, you might create a grouping to track test servers in your engineering division that are slated for VM migration.

Insight v. 5 ships today and adds new features, including time-based analysis that lets you follow a project over time. You can also track attributes, such as where patches or upgrades have occurred. In addition to a behind the firewall version, Insight 5 also can now be acquired as a software as a service, which starts at around $100,000 per year.