For some Cherwell customers, enough is enough. Ivanti’s 2021 acquisition of Cherwell has meant that the product is no longer being updated with the latest and greatest features. If you’re a Cherwell user, your ITSM organization is basically stagnant with the capabilities you have.
In this article, let’s assume that you’re ready to make the switch from Cherwell to Ivanti. While Ivanti will make the process as pain-free as possible, there are steps you can do on your side to ensure a seamless, successful migration.
The first step is to give yourself a little breathing room with automation. By automating common service management processes and workflows, such as onboarding and offboarding processes, password resets, enabling service availability, remediating low disk space, and enabling application self-healing, you can free up ITSM staff to focus on laying the groundwork for a successful migration.
Every hour that automation can take off a key ITSM staff member’s hands is an hour they can spend keeping the migration on the front burner instead of allowing it to slip due to higher priorities. In addition, an automation solution like Resolve includes pre-built integrations with both Cherwell and Ivanti, which means the time-saving automation you incorporate now will make for an easier transition when you flip the switch, helping you make the most out of your Ivanti investment.
Next, take a close look at your configuration management database (CMDB). Over the course of any platform usage, there is going to be a lot of data you no longer need. While it's often a hassle to manually weed out bad data in a CMDB, there’s no good reason to bring this data over to your new platform.
This is the time to determine what is still valid and what can be left behind. Alternatively, you can start fresh and use an automated discovery and dependency (DDM) mapping tool, like Resolve's DDM solution, to tell you exactly what is in your current environment. Either way, this lets you start with known, verified data instead of working with content that may or may not have errors.
Similarly, you’ll need to select a cutoff date for your ticket data to avoid migrating unnecessary data. Depending on the size and complexity of your organization, you may only need to bring over a year’s worth of ticket data or you may need several years’ worth. By limiting the data you bring over to what you need—not what you have—you can ensure your new ITSM tool runs smoother from Day One.
During the migration stage itself, consider using automation to help migrate data and remap your classes and relationships. If you have fewer or more class structures than before, you may find yourself in the position of having to consolidate or expand, especially if you were using custom classes before that don’t easily map to the new solution. Automation can help you migrate and map this data accurately, or even help you determine if it is no longer necessary.
Once the migration is complete, remember that you’re now just at the beginning of your new ITSM journey. Ivanti is likely to have new features, capabilities, and processes than what you’ve been able to access with Cherwell, which can be incredibly exciting, as it expands your opportunities to provide better support. As you analyze the new environment, continue to look at the old processes you’ve migrated over and seek out ways to make them better using your new solution.
By making Resolve part of your migration journey, you can leverage automation to make the move easier before, during, and after:
- Pre-migration: Resolve can help you identify all of your assets and their relationships so you have a clear understanding of what you need to migrate and how to classify it so it works effectively with Ivanti without manual work.
- Migration: During the migration process itself, Resolve can automate many of your ITSM processes and workflows. This frees up your people to focus on the migration itself instead of getting distracted with emergencies, keeping the migration on schedule.
- Post-migration: Once the migration is complete, Resolve can help you automatically verify that everything is in place so that you have the confidence that your new ITSM will work as it should. In addition, the automation of ITSM workflows will help your new solution work even more effectively while freeing staff up to focus on continuous improvement.
