It is widely acknowledged that unauthorized changes made to an IT Infrastructure cause up to 80% of system unavailability. Learn how adding change control to your existing or planned change management infrastructure can help improve IT service availability, lower compliance costs, and accelerate your ITIL implementations.
Most unavailability today is caused by change. Most IT organizations recognize the centrality of change to their operationaleffectiveness. Yet a gap persists between actual change activity and the documented Change Management Process.This change control gap results in manual activity by IT departments to control and minimize the costs of change. In thispaper, we explain how adding Control to existing Change Management solutions can bridge this gap and enable yourIT organizations to deliver highly available IT services.
Do you monitor for change? availability. To solve these problems, organizations invested insolutions to monitor these aspects of their daily operations.Ensuring the continuous availability of critical systems is the Holy Today it is routine for organizations to monitor hardware, utilizationGrail for IT organizations. To move towards that goal, IT (CPU, Memory, Network) and network traffic for anomalies ororganizations have invested heavily over the past decades to failures, and when we ask organizations whether they monitorbuild sophisticated systems that help them prevent, monitor, these parts of their organization, we invariably have headsdetect, and remediate failures in the least amount of time - nodding in assent.maximizing uptime and minimizing downtime. The organization's capabilities in these areas have become moreHistorically, bottlenecks in infrastructure tended to be around sophisticated, and as a result, the bottlenecks have shifted. Therehardware failures, capacity constraints and network bandwidth is the occasional hardware failure or capacity overload, but these
Do You Use Software to Monitor IT Infrastructure?
Hardware CPU, Memory, Load Capacity NetworkChange Management + Control = Higher Availability
are rare and easily resolved without a great deal of cost in most Increasing Uptime: Change Management.cases. Today, the bottleneck is different. The cause of mostdowntime has shifted to change. Industry research shows that Organizations generally increase service uptime throughuuuuuppppp tttttooooo 8888800000%%%%% ooooofffff sssssyyyyysssssttttteeeeemmmmm uuuuunnnnnaaaaavvvvvaaaaaiiiiilllllaaaaabbbbbiiiiillllliiiiitttttyyyyy iiiiisssss cccccaaaaauuuuussssseeeeeddddd bbbbbyyyyy improved change process. The most common means byiiiiinnnnncccccooooorrrrrrrrrreeeeeccccctttttlllllyyyyy aaaaappppppppppllllliiiiieeeeeddddd ccccchhhhhaaaaannnnngggggeeeeesssss..... The natural question that follows which organizations improve their change process is byis: DDDDDooooo yyyyyooooouuuuu mmmmmooooonnnnniiiiitttttooooorrrrr aaaaannnnnddddd cccccooooonnnnntttttrrrrrooooolllll ccccchhhhhaaaaannnnngggggeeeee????? implementing a change management system. As the graphicbelow indicates, the key actions required for better changeWe tend to see far fewer people nodding their heads in agreement process are:this time. It's not surprising because downtime caused by changeis a more difficult beast to manage. To begin with, change happens z DDDDDeeeeefffffiiiiinnnnniiiiinnnnnggggg CCCCChhhhhaaaaannnnngggggeeeee PPPPPooooollllliiiiiccccciiiiieeeeesssss..... Define the rules andalmost continuously and with much greater frequency than a circumstances in which changes can be implemented. Thesehardware upgrade, for example. Second, change tends to be rules can be encoded using a change management systemcomplex and interdependent, with multiple parties involved. In (e.g. "high priority changes require two approvals"), butmost organizations, the impact, dependencies and ramifications validating that the rules were followed is still an exercise inof change are not known fully until it is actually deployed in faith and hope in most cases.production. Finally, the ways in which change occurs in theorganization has its roots deep in the organization's culture and z MMMMMeeeeeaaaaasssssuuuuurrrrreeeee AAAAAccccctttttiiiiiooooonnnnnsssss aaaaannnnnddddd EEEEEvvvvveeeeennnnntttttsssss..... One of the key tenets ofbehavior. ITIL is measurement. How can change activity be measuredand reconciled against the documented change process?Since most unavailability is caused by change, getting control of Do you know how many changes were made in thechange in your environment would be the logical next step in the organization? ... [download for more]
