The enterprise CMDB has had a checkered past and its future is murky. The pace of change motivated by cloud migration initiatives, continuous delivery, and microservices architectures all threaten to upend the CMDB’s utility, particularly for timely response to critical incidents.

We feel this report from Forrester, “Rethink Your CMDB”, clearly explains why a traditional asset discovery & mapping approach centered around a single monolithic CMDB is no longer suitable for the cloud-native era. In this report, you’ll learn:

• Why the promises of a CMDB have not yet been realized, despite decades of trying;
• Why software asset and technology lifecycle management remains important, and how to do it in a cloud-native era;
• How to modernize your CMDB efforts: Moving away from slow, centralized discovery-based approaches, planning for scale and frequent updates, and satisfying critical CMDB use cases by using a best-of-breed, distributed information management approach rather than a single monolithic database.

Rethink Your CMDB: CMDBs Have Failed Us, But The Right Approach Can Transform Them, by Charles Betz and Rich Lane, 11 September 2020