Was discussing autodiscovery with someone the other day who pointed out that regardless of the accuracy of an autodiscovery tool, the question it can never answer is whether the discovered assets are needed.
We've all heard the stories about the mainframe-era reporting office dutifully printing out reams of greenbar reports and shipping them off to workgoups where they were promptly discarded, or even greeted with bewilderment. How many of your servers are in the same situation: running applications, services, batch jobs that are no longer actively in use?
Autodiscovery will be an important element in the IT supply chain, but it needs to be backed up with process and sometimes a lot of shoe leather (or its virtual equivalent).
Thoughts?
ctb
