Kandji today announced it has integrated its management and security platform for Apple devices with the configuration management database (CMDB) at the core of the ServiceNow IT service management (ITSM) platform.
Weldon Dodd, senior vice president of community at Kandji, said the goal is to make it simpler for IT operations teams to manage IT asset management within the context of a larger ITSM workflow.
In the case of Kandji, however, IT teams that have standardized on the ServiceNow platform can continuously track Apple devices in real-time versus relying on legacy asset management platforms that intermittently poll networks to determine what devices are connected, said Dodd.
The data collected by Kandji is then automatically shared via the application programming interface (API) of the ServiceNow CMDB.
That approach also provides IT teams with a method to correlate access to applications with the Apple device being tracked by Kandji as part of any effort to enforce zero-trust IT policies, noted Dodd.
IT asset management is increasingly being integrated with ITSM workflows as part of an effort to streamline the management of IT environments that have become more distributed than ever since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. Today, it’s not uncommon for end users to have three or more devices they are regularly using to access corporate applications, said Dodd.
The challenge is that the IT team can’t effectively manage devices they can’t see or find. End users working from anywhere have become more adept at using multiple devices often acquired outside of the workflows IT teams have historically relied on to provision systems. Addressing that issue requires access to tools capable of detecting any device that has been attached to a corporate network, regardless of how it was acquired.
IT teams, of course, have been dealing with various forms of shadow IT for decades now. In an age of the cloud, that has become a bigger challenge as end users opt to employ a wide range of devices to access applications. However, as regulations become more stringent, organizations are being held more accountable for any violation of a compliance mandate. Levies involving access to sensitive corporate data via unmanaged devices in an era where privacy regulations are being strictly enforced can be especially costly.
Of course, there may come a day when advances in artificial intelligence (AI) might make it simpler to manage IT environments. Still, those platforms require IT teams to be able to collect data to train the models that might one day automate workflows. IT teams will not be able to achieve that goal unless they can track what devices are being used across their IT environments.
The days when IT teams could mandate what devices end users are allowed to employ are long over. The challenge now is to find a way to manage IT environments in a way that provides guardrails for how devices are safely used to access applications that today can be running almost anywhere.
