Recently, many CIOs have been pushing their IT teams to reduce their physical, on-premises infrastructure footprint. And while many applications have moved to private clouds, public clouds, or hosted SaaS consumption models, the CMDB frequently remains off cloud.

Of course, there are good reasons to keep your CMDB (and the discovery that populates it) off cloud and privately managed. The number one reason I hear centers around securing the information contained in the CMDB.

This is especially true for governments, financial institutions, and healthcare providers. Organizations in these spaces are often required to meet extremely high security, regulatory, and information access control standards. As constant targets of malicious action, they must carefully guard both their infrastructure and the information about how it is configured and connected to deliver services—because what an exploitable treasure trove of knowledge that would be for the bad guys. For these organizations, keeping the CMDB off cloud makes sense.

But maintaining an off-cloud, non-SaaS CMDB model carries security risks of its own. What I typically find is that CMDB versions kept on premises are months, if not years, behind the latest releases. True, organizations with highly customized discovery and CMDB information may find CMDB upgrades especially time-consuming and risky. The downside of not upgrading, however, is that many CMDB instances lack the latest security patches and features.

Most organizations that are diligent with their CMDB must carefully and strategically plan their upgrades—testing for weeks and months to ensure the upgrade doesn’t break critical business services and IT systems. Without a team of dedicated discovery and CMDB administrators, the process is so involved that upgrades are planned and implemented once a year at most.

Adopting a SaaS model CMDB ensures constant product upgrades. But there may be trade-offs when it comes to access and security. The first thing one needs to evaluate is the hosting model of the SaaS provider. Your SaaS CMDB may be hosted in a multi- or single-tenant instance in the cloud. While both hosting models provide robust security, having your CMDB information in a multi-tenant cloud environment may go against institutional or organizational security policies. Multi-tenant environments usually restrict access to systems and data—limiting it to the managing and hosting teams rather than to the clients themselves.

While not necessarily a bad thing, these restrictions may mean information delivery or change requests won’t be immediate. Make sure you know what the SLAs are for your provider and plan for those when making requests. If you are the type of organization that makes constant adjustments to your CMDB information, the multi-tenant model may represent a significant change in how you manage your CMDB and configuration information.

Single-tenant models of SaaS CMDBs remove many security and management concerns but may come with significant cost increases compared to a multi-tenant model. If your organization wants the best of both worlds—constant, automatic, and managed upgrades with reduced security access concerns—the single-tenant SaaS CMDB might be for you.

Current Universal Discovery and CMDB customers—it may be time to seriously consider moving your CMDB to SaaS. With the 2023.05 release of Universal Discovery and CMDB, customers interested in a multi-tenant SaaS deployment can now employ a stand-alone model. In other words, you do not have to be a SMAX, AMX, or HCMX customer to move your Universal CMDB to SaaS now. And as we revealed in our recent Universal Discovery and CMDB virtual forum, single-tenant SaaS is on the horizon.

With the increased attention to digital transformation and reducing CAPEX by adopting SaaS, everyone should be taking a hard look at moving not only the CMDB but also other IT Service Management and IT Operations solutions to SaaS solutions. What’s nice is that once you are ready to make that switch, your CMDB doesn’t have to be a roadblock to full on-cloud, SaaS adoption for your most critical ITSM and ITOM solutions.

If you find yourself wanting to keep your Universal CMDB off cloud, that’s perfectly fine too! No matter what direction you find yourself leaning, Universal Discovery and CMDB is there to give you the multicloud, hybrid IT visibility you need to keep your business running.