Johannesburg, 23 Nov 2022
There is a growing trend among IT teams to move away from traditional service management ticketing systems, which don't necessarily cater for the automated process of change tracking.
Instead, what organisations are looking for is an automated approach to managing change in their infrastructure. And they achieve this by giving support staff the ability to corollate a change ticket to what the actual engineer does with the change ticket issued by the ITSM system. Each ticket has also been issued in accordance with the predetermined change management process.
Better manage change in processes
This is a critical step in delivering formal IT operational frameworks such as PCI, DSS and SOX, to mention a few. These standards all essentially state that an organisation must be able to detect a change in the environment. However, this has been a manual and, in turn, a tedious task at best.
When done correctly and in an automated fashion, change tracking and logging speed up productivity and can, in certain instances, even prevent downtime.
As we know, most downtime and security risks are often caused by human error, poor processes and poor change management practices. When these factors are coupled with technology failures, the ability to determine what has, in fact, caused an outage without proper change management in place can take up a great deal of time.
In a recent article, Donna Scott, VP and Research Director at Gartner, claimed: “80% of unplanned downtime is caused by people and process issues, including poor change management practices, while the remainder is caused by technology failures and disasters.”
Automation equals efficiencies
The reality is that change control and configuration management are two key processes in ensuring the seamless running of systems – but only if done correctly and intelligently.
Their purpose is to prevent outages in critical systems caused by ongoing application deployment and updating configurations within production platforms. Without change control and configuration management in place, your business runs the risk of being unable to effect effective change management and creating security issues in the business.
One fantastic example is closed-loop intelligent change control, which essentially enables existing processes and uses intelligent and highly-automated technology to deliver change control without all the red tape and stifling resource requirements. This automation is central to ensuring change control is done automatically and that it adheres to the change management processes that you have outlined in your business.
It also ensures every step is done securely and is done in line with security parameters, compliance and regulation requirements, and predetermined change management processes.
According to New Network Technologies: “Intelligent change control means that changes are detected as they are made and reviewed automatically. Suppose the change matches any pre-defined planned change patterns. In that case, it can be reconciled automatically with the relevant RFC details, even for estates with thousands of devices and even more changes happening. If an unplanned change is recorded, this is then highlighted for review – because all the known, expected and pre-approved changes are taken care of automatically, more time is freed up to investigate changes that may be security incidents.”
Recipe for change success
In summary, clear governance, processes and compliance result in less downtime for organisations, better profitability, fewer war room situations and less finger-pointing. Not to mention improved security as a result of oversight of the change process across the entire business.
This can only be achieved when we remove the potential for error and adhere to standards upfront – which ultimately lies in the hands of an automated intelligence control management offering.
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