Navy takes central command of IT assets

Computerworld - The U.S. Navy recently launched its first enterprisewide IT asset discovery and management initiative, which is expected to help it make more effective business decisions on the thousands of disparate systems it has deployed worldwide.
Since January, the Navy has been using a hosted software service from Mountain View, Calif.-based BDNA Corp.s to scan the IP addresses of hardware and software residing on its sprawling MCI network. The effort has enabled the Navy to identify and locate more than 250,000 systems installed in some 200 locations throughout the continental U.S. and Hawaii and Alaska, said Capt. Chris Christopher, a leader in the Department of the Navy's Program Executive Office for Information Technology in Arlington, Va.
Prior to the initiative, IT assets such as PCs, servers and routers were purchased and tracked by local IT managers, he said.
In the coming months, the Navy expects to pinpoint at least 250,000 more systems it has deployed on its bases and ships around the world using the centralized network scanning approach, Christopher said. Last week, the group began scanning the Navy's enterprise IT assets on a monthly basis and is storing the information in an Oracle repository, he said.
Christopher placed the cost of the BDNA asset discovery services at "more than six figures" on an annual basis.
Through this program, the Navy hopes to get a better handle on its widely distributed IT assets and help it make more informed business decisions about its IT operations. For example, the effort has already helped the Navy identify the use of some obsolete operating systems thats the group intends to eliminate. Christopher declined to name those systems.
"We have every operating system that's been developed over the past 15 years, some of which I've never even heard of," Christopher said. "What we intend to do once we have our arms around everything out there is to look at what we have and make business decisions" about their use.
For instance, if the Navy should discover that it is running a disproportionate number of application servers from one vendor, it will determine whether it makes sense to buy servers from other vendors to reduce its reliance on a single vendor, Christopher said.
The program has yielded other insights. For instance, in evaluating the distribution of the Navy's operating systems, Christopher's team discovered "that we have a good chunk of Linux out there." Because the Navy hasn't standardized on a particular version of Linux, "it would probably make sense for us to develop a standard policy,"Christopher said. "Scanning on a monthly basis will allow us to see those trends."
The Navy's centralized approach to scanning and identifying its IT assets reflects a trend that's starting to catch on with other organizations, said Barbara Rembiesa, president of the International Association of Information Technology Asset Managers Inc., a for-profit user association in Cleveland.
"If you're going to run IT as a business, then we advocate using a centralized approach" toward IT asset management, Rembiesa said.
Still, she warned that centralized server-based discovery tools have limited effectiveness if organizations don't put the proper asset management processes in place beforehand.

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