Making Change Management in the Data Center
Recently Scott Matteson, a senior systems administrator, wrote in his blog in TechRepublic about 'Best practices for change management in the data center.' He observes that "change management can be a complex road littered with potholes. "
Matteson shared how "effective delivery of services and resources demands that you maintain the best possible uptime while transitioning from old to new, whether replacing technology or simply improving upon it."
So this made us think about the tightrope IT professionals walk in handling change management in the modern data center, wrestling with maintaining status quo performance through rigid controls or introducing needed changes and performance risk - See more at:Entering the Change Twilight Zone and How to Overcome It.
Matteson explained how the pace of change is accelerating, saying "Rollout of new systems and technologies seems to be coming faster and even more furious all the time."
With the pace of change growing, and complexity rising, this made us think about how pressured IT teams are to carry out change management properly and still not jeopardize the availability of critical IT services.
Managing changes despite complexity.
It's simple to correct a change in one system. However, how can you validate your systems' configurations, and then update or correct any ad-hoc changes that were made? The problem is complex, and difficult to resolve. Identifying configuration changes in a timely manner before they impact the application or soon after, reduces the risks to business continuity.
Managing Application Changes requires More than Just Automation
IT complexity is only going to expand.
IT complexity is now doubling every two years. With multiple environments operating simultaneously, IT engineers must execute frequent updates and new deployments at an alarming pace.
How can you update ad hoc changes?
With the pace of change growing, and seeing the way it impacts IT operations, this made us think about how IT teams need new, smoother ways to reduce the fear of change and to painlessly support change for the business.
Drive change while not inhibiting business agility.
A structured change management approach can effectively reduce the number of change and system configuration errors. However, this comes with a price, slowing the enterprise's ability to implement improvements.At the same time, IT operations needs to able to rapidly introduce changes to environments and without change control processes, the risk of environmental failures increases greatly.
Control or Change? Maintaining Enterprise Performance Without Compromising Innovation
How do you handle constant change requests?
Release, Deployment and IT Operations teams are faced with the challenge of ensuring accurate error-free application deployments and software deployments and appropriate system configuration during promotion and deployment, taking into account system configurations that are inherently different between pre-prod and production.
Change Management Challenges In Today's Complex IT Landscape
IT operations needs to re-examine the current change management tools in place in.
The change management tools most organizations rely on are generally considered ineffective, and most of the processes used are labor-intensive.
Chaos Characterizes IT Operations Management
New Solution: IT Operations Analytics.
IT operations analytics translates abundant detailed configuration data and frequent changes into critical decision-support information, providing actionable insights that address practical day-to-day operations questions (like, when an incident occurs, can you quickly know "what changed"?).
Change and Configuration Management Is Sexy Again!
