What is service mapping?

Perhaps the primary benefit of effective service mapping is that it provides businesses with the service-relevant insights they need to make decisions and respond to emergent IT events quickly. With service mapping, organizations can immediately identify service issues as they arise and then prioritize issues based on business impact. Beyond that, service mapping empowers businesses with a clear understanding of the services themselves, including their associated costs, how to optimize service architectures, how changes impact services, and more.

When businesses migrate to a multi-cloud environment, it’s usually not a clean break. On-premises applications that still demand support necessitate a hybrid environment where cloud-based and locally hosted services must coexist and interact. This can result in the creation of difficult-to-govern short-term infrastructure. Service mapping provides complete visibility into applications and services in hybrid environments, allowing organizations to create effective governance immediately.

Effective service mapping allows organizations to quickly create an accurate picture of how their IT applications, equipment, and dependencies work together to deliver end-user services. This results in a faster time to value across the board.

A clearer, more accurate understanding of the entire IT infrastructure also delivers insight into which areas or applications may present security vulnerabilities. These high-risk services and conditions can then be flagged for immediate remediation. Additionally, service mapping improves ongoing monitoring of IT infrastructure, improving the speed of response when unexpected issues occur or outages present themselves.

Working through multiple cloud providers can create overly complex IT infrastructures, potentially leading to increased vulnerabilities, misutilized services, reduced governance, and other issues. Service mapping simplifies and accelerates multi-cloud strategies, helping businesses keep up with dynamic cloud environments across multiple vendors and technologies.

Too often, organizations are forced to wait for issues to occur before they can identify underlying causes. Service mapping empowered organizations with detailed service maps so that they can identify bottlenecks, single points of failure, and other problems before they impact service availability. With service mapping, IT departments can protect the services their companies depend on, proactively maintaining and improving IT environments before any negative symptoms may be felt by service customers.

Key features of service mapping include the following:

Possibly more than anything else, service mapping exists to provide transparency, visibility, and clear understanding. With a coherent, visual depiction of how services, applications, and components insect and interoperate, decision makers can easily evaluate how specific infrastructure services are impacting employees, customers, and the business itself.

The modern business’ IT infrastructure is not static; it’s a dynamic, constantly evolving maelstrom of connected services. To understand how these connections work and to turn those insights into something actionable, organizations need reliable data. Service mapping functions in real time, automatically updating whenever any aspect of the infrastructure or its components change. With reliable, real-time data, decision makers can act secure in the knowledge that they are building on a firm foundation of accurate information.

A key reason that service mapping exists is to improve efficiency by performing specific tasks that would otherwise fall to human employees. Rather than having IT specialists dedicate their valuable time towards constantly monitoring IT applications and components, and addressing any errors or vulnerabilities they might uncover, service mapping takes over for many of these responsibilities. This frees up IT experts to focus on more strategic concerns.

Because so many organizations have moved either partially or fully away from on-premises computing solutions, service mapping must be able to chart services through hybrid and cloud-based infrastructure environments. Service mapping should be capable of integrating with leading cloud services so that this functionality is available right out of the box. And, when faced with non-compatible cloud vendors, service mapping should be customizable enough so that organizations can extend their solution beyond the out-of-the-box capabilities.

The primary purpose of service mapping is to allow businesses to develop a clearer understanding of how service components connect and interact. Organizations may also take this further, by applying service mapping in a variety of use cases:

When problems arise within the IT infrastructure, it’s not always enough to simply put out fires or address symptoms. Identifying and remediating the root cause of the issue will help ensure that the organization in question doesn’t have to revisit the same problems at some point in the future. Complete visibility into application services and relevant connections greatly simplifies root cause analysis, so IT professionals can quickly eliminate or repair the problematic elements at the heart of the trouble.

Companies can deploy service mapping to help visualize the information systems and technical requirements necessary for evaluating options when considering possible business solutions. With data gathered from effective service mapping, leaders and other decision makers can make their choices with confidence, and can also more easily communicate their recommended solutions—and the reasoning behind them—to stakeholders.

A business’ resources are finite. There are only so many employees available to perform tasks, and only a limited number of work hours in which to do so. At the same time, some tasks are more urgent than others. As such, prioritizing work is an important part of operating a business with efficiency. Service mapping aids in prioritization, helping businesses understand the impact of different services, so that they can determine which issues, tasks, or concerns should be addressed first.

Configuration management is an approach that relies on the accurate identification of relationships between configuration items so that businesses have access to reliable information about configuration servicers and their components. Configuration management plays a role in availability planning, cause and effect analysis, cost allocation, impact analysis, and risk analysis. Service mapping can improve the effectiveness of configuration management.

Service mapping can also help organizations manage their portfolios, informing decisions based on service objectives, investments, and limits. This is made possible by visualizing service components and dependencies. Backed by service mapping, portfolio management has more accurate data to help ensure that businesses are correctly executing their strategy within the confines of budget and other resources.

Relationship management is a business discipline focused on improving communication between stakeholders relevant to services, expectations, and experiences. Service mapping provides concrete details backed by reliable data and presented visually in a way that is easy to follow. This helps optimize communication and keep everyone on the same page.