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    Asset Management / CMDB

    Know What You Run, How It Connects and What Breaks If It Fails

    Maintain a trusted, CSDM-aligned model of services, configuration items and assets that every Nexus process can rely on.

    Asset Management and the CMDB combine automated discovery, a service-aligned data model and asset lifecycle records. Relationship visualization and impact analysis turn the model into operational decisions.

    Explore: The Service Topology Map
    The enterprise challenge

    The CMDB exists, but nobody trusts it

    Configuration data is loaded once and decays. Teams keep their own spreadsheets and impact analysis is done from memory.

    • Stale records

      Decommissioned servers still appear while new cloud resources are missing.

    • Unknown dependencies

      A database upgrade affects three services nobody linked to it.

    • Licence surprises

      Software in use differs from what was purchased.

    Capabilities

    What Asset Management / CMDB covers

    Select a capability group to see what it includes.

    Service & configuration model

    Structure that reflects how services are delivered.

    • CSDM-aligned configuration database
    • Business and application service models
    • Infrastructure and service relationships

    Every Nexus process that reasons about impact — incident, change, capacity, cost — is only as good as the model beneath it. Asset Management and the CMDB treat that model as a governed product: discovered continuously, reconciled against authoritative sources, owned per class and service, and consumed as the single foundation for operational decisions.

    Signature view

    The Service Topology Map

    Incidents, changes and costs are evaluated against real service dependencies rather than guesswork.

    Business services: What the business consumes — the layer every process reasons about.
    Representative workflow

    From discovered change to trusted impact analysis

    Trigger: Discovery detects a new or changed configuration item.

    1. Step 1

      Discover

      Items detected in the estate.

    2. Step 2

      Reconcile

      Matched against existing records.

    3. Step 3

      Relate

      Linked to services and dependencies.

    4. Step 4

      Govern

      Owner reviews exceptions.

    5. Step 5

      Use

      Consumed by incident, change and cost processes.

    Participants
    • • Configuration manager
    • • Service owners
    • • Asset manager
    • • Change and incident teams
    Work items
    • • Discovered item
    • • Reconciliation result
    • • Relationship updates
    • • Asset record
    Decisions & approvals
    • • Accept, merge or reject discovered data
    • • Service the item belongs to
    Automation
    • • Scheduled discovery
    • • Reconciliation rules
    • • Relationship inference where configured
    Governance controls
    • • Ownership per class and service
    • • Change history on configuration items
    Outcome
    The model is current and impact analysis reflects real dependencies.
    Operational depth

    Inside the Asset Management / CMDB lifecycle

    The decisions, exceptions, automation and analytics that make the practice enterprise-grade.

    1. Decisions inside the lifecycle

      Configuration managers decide whether discovered data is accepted, merged or rejected; service owners confirm suggested relationships before they become authoritative; asset managers decide refresh, reallocation or retirement from utilization and cost evidence.

    2. Exceptions and escalations

      Reconciliation conflicts, ownerless records and data-quality failures surface as exception queues with accountable owners. License compliance gaps escalate to renewal or procurement workflows before they become audit findings.

    3. Automation with human control

      Discovery, classification and relationship suggestions run automatically on schedule; reconciliation applies configured precedence rules. Authoritative changes to the model — accepting a relationship, retiring an asset — remain confirmed human decisions.

    4. Analytics and integrations

      Model health, data-quality trends and asset cost positions report through Analytics Hub. Incident and Change consume the topology for impact analysis, ITFM allocates cost through service relationships, and Vendor Management connects assets to contracts and suppliers.

    Enterprise scenarios

    Asset Management / CMDB in practice

    Representative situations drawn from common enterprise technology-operations patterns.

    • The database nobody linked

      A database upgrade is approved as low risk — until it takes down three business services that were never connected to it in any record.

      How Nexus helps: Service-to-infrastructure relationships are discovered, reconciled and owned, so impact analysis shows the three dependent services before approval, and the change is rescheduled with the right reviewers.

    • The audit that finds the gap

      A software vendor audit reveals usage that differs from entitlements, and the true-up bill arrives unbudgeted.

      How Nexus helps: License entitlement tracking with usage metering identifies compliance gaps continuously, so positions are corrected on the organization's own schedule rather than the vendor's.

    • Two sources, one truth

      Discovery says a server exists; the procurement record says it was retired; both tools are confident.

      How Nexus helps: Reconciliation rules define precedence between data sources, and exceptions route to the accountable owner — conflicts are resolved by policy instead of accumulating as drift.

    Standards and frameworks

    Aligned with recognized service-management practice

    How specific capabilities support practices from international frameworks. This describes alignment of practice, not certification or formal conformity.

    • ITIL 4

      Service Configuration Management & IT Asset Management

      A CSDM-aligned configuration model, discovery with reconciliation and lifecycle tracking of hardware and software assets support the ITIL 4 service configuration and IT asset management practices.

    • ISO/IEC 19770-1:2017

      IT asset management system requirements

      Lifecycle records from procurement to disposal, license entitlement tracking and reconciliation between discovered and recorded data align with the standard's requirements for an IT asset management system.

    • ISO/IEC 20000-1:2018

      §8.2.6 Configuration management

      Owned configuration records, documented CI relationships and change-linked configuration history support the standard's configuration management process.

    What sets it apart

    Why enterprises choose Nexus for asset management / cmdb

    • The hub every process trusts

      Incident blast radius, change impact, capacity planning and cost allocation all read the same topology — one model, governed once, consumed everywhere, with no integration latency between copies.

    • Current by construction

      Scheduled discovery and explicit reconciliation precedence keep the model aligned with reality continuously, rather than decaying between annual audits.

    • Ownership down to the class

      Every CI class and service has an accountable owner who confirms suggested relationships and resolves reconciliation exceptions — data quality is a responsibility, not a hope.

    AI and automation

    How AI supports Asset Management / CMDB

    Suggested relationships are confirmed by owners before they become authoritative.

    • Predictive

      Health intelligence

      Signals from related items are combined into a service health view.

    • Recommendation

      Relationship suggestions

      Likely dependencies are proposed for owner confirmation.

    • Assistance

      Impact summaries

      Affected services are summarized for responders and approvers.

    Governance and controls

    Enterprise controls built into the lifecycle

    • Data ownership

      Each class and service has an accountable owner.

    • Audit history

      Changes to configuration items are retained.

    • Reconciliation rules

      Precedence between data sources is explicit.

    • Tenant isolation

      Records are scoped to the organization's own environment.

    Cross-module intelligence

    How Asset Management / CMDB connects across Nexus

    Part of the Technology Operations & Resilience Function.

    Business outcomes

    What changes for the organization

    • Trusted data

      Teams rely on one model.

    • Safer change

      Dependencies are checked before approval.

    • Faster diagnosis

      Responders see the blast radius.

    • Asset control

      Lifecycle and entitlement are visible.

    Where this module is used

    See service dependencies and impact analysis

    Explore the CMDB model and discovery with the iShield Nexus team.

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