IT Change Management: The Foundation to the Cloud

Dealing with change within information technology is an inherent function. How one deals with change or champions change for the better good is often the difference between the great IT organizations and the average. Inventory control lacking in your organization? Tony Bishop takes a few minutes to tout the benefits of application dependency mapping tools and how they can uncover hidden relationships between applications and infrastructure resources. As a side benefit these applications can identify idle servers, legacy infrastructure that poses a security risk, production servers using development or test resources, and changes in the environment over time.

IT Change Management: The Foundation to the Cloud — IT shops continually struggle with keeping resource documentation up to date. Too often IT departments seem resigned to accepting mediocre results, as if the world conspires against them. Resource tracking is a prime example of this. Fundamentally, the different organizational aspects refuse to comply with these manual processes to keep a CMDB updated. This creates the number one barrier to moving to some form of a cloud-like delivery model. Furthermore, advancements in virtualization have made the situation worse, as software resources have been severed from physical resources. Traditional resource tracking methods are further confused as the virtual resources change their physical location over time.