[Music] hey everyone it's justin thank you for watching in this video we're going to talk information objects right we don't have enough videos on this channel about the cmdb and this topic comes up once in a blue moon it just came up at work today and i was like i can't believe i don't have a video on information objects who wouldn't want to know more about information objects alright so what are they in the cstm in the common service data model there is a domain called design in the design domain there is a ci class called information objects information objects live on the cmdbci information object table within the cmdb and what you can do or what these are i'll show you right here if we go to the documentation information objects are types of information that a business application or any other entity handles so here i've got an example employee salary data employee personal data sales data i want you to think about pii phi credit card numbers first name last name social security number address phone number these are all types of information people are working with every day and how cool would it be to know which servers have pii which databases have employee data which um you know network servers or what i don't know would it fill in the blank what has access to this data so that when you're prioritizing an incident vulnerability management something else you know where to go look now you probably haven't heard of this because it usually comes up in the risk part of servicenow the privacy management part of servicenow or application portfolio management is part of the strategic portfolio management suite of products right so it's heavily used there to plan around your application life cycles understanding which tech stacks have things and on privacy side sometimes things are exposed and that could be pii phi or the specific granular things that i just mentioned so what does this look like inside the cmdb if you were to actually associate this with something well let's take a look here i've pulled up some examples you can see in my demo environment i've got about 67 of them and what's cool here is you've got computer games email address date of birth driver's license number right you can see all the examples in the green box there but when i click on one of these let's go customer date of birth here's the kind of things you can say about the information object what's this data classification internal public confidential highly sensitive who owns it who's responsible for that information object in your organization what business you know what department how do you describe this information object really simple here but really really powerful and let me show you why i'm going to go to uh the cmdb and i'm going to open up servers and i'm just going to want to find all the different let's actually go to uh windows servers so we got all the windows servers and i see i've got some now that i got 346 in demo i went to azure aws um let's see we got this azure shared com2 d16v3 server and i want to say because i want to start tracking this from my organization that this server has certain types of information on it so what do you do if you look just above my head i'll zoom in here and post i've got the relationship builder so i'll go ahead here click the plus sign and i get the suggested types of relationships there at the top right so we're going to let this load here for a second it's going to load a filter and what i'm actually looking for is i'm going to use um the uses the application or the server uses that i mean you could get into a big debate over hosts contains uh whatever that is but you decide in your organization what the standard is going to be make sure that's documented and people are using the same type of relationship so it's not confusing so i said i wanted to use uses it's still running here let me pause for a second clip out some wait time here all right there we go so one of my suggested one is uses and i'm going to say it uses and the server is actually the parent i'm going to get rid of all of these filters down here because i just want where the class is information objects so i'm just going to change this here to class and we'll select that there and we'll say is an information object pick that there i'm going to run the filter and then down below i should see the same information objects that we saw on the previous screen there you go customer full name their gender their job position their maiden name their political affiliation telephone number trade you do i mean this is all sensitive information that you may want to associate with this so we can just pretend that this particular server has a bunch of employee information on it i'm just going to check up as many employee wins as i can there and uh and then we're done with adding all those configuration items as relationships so there they are now they're all going to be associated with this particular ci and i've got that documented and so the next time that your boss the director the vp the cio says oh my gosh we need to prioritize this vulnerability and we need to protect financial information or we need to protect customer information we need to protect health information this is your solution it's available in the cmdb it's a platform-wide thing you don't need apm you don't need privacy or risk management in order to use these information objects in your cmdb i hope you found this video helpful if you did please like please subscribe or share it with somebody you think might be interested in protecting their information as information objects in their cmdb until next time don't forget to always be learning [Music] you