Change Management is an essential process of any IT department. Change Management ensures that only authorized and carefully considered Changes are implemented. There are planned Changes and there are unplanned or emergency Changes and there is a process to handle both.
Typically the RFC (Request For Change) are raised when one of the following happens:
- There is a Problem that needs resolution – RFC raised by Problem Management
- There is a vendor supplied patch or upgrade – RFC raised by Operation/Infratsructure team
- There is a change in Architecture to address growing needs – RFC raised by Capacity Management
- There is emergency which requires a quick fix – Emergency Change raised by Problem or Incident Management
In a Cloud Computing Environment, the requirements are very similar, except in (3) above. Due to Automated Provisioning and Virtualization, Cloud’s promise is rapid elasticity. To ensure that request for new resources are attended to in minutes or hours instead of weeks or months, all the ITIL processes need to suitably modify their functioning. In case of Change Management this is what needs to happen:
1. All provisioning activities follow an established and approved business workflow. In addition it is completely automated.
2. Configuration Management is automatically updated to reflect the Changes.
3. Even regular Changes need to be applied to the Images used by Automated Provisioning.
4. Change Management keep in mind that the Cloud architecture is dynamic by definition, so yesterday’s snapshot may not be good enough for tormorrow’s Change.
Tags: Change Management, Cloud Computing, IT, ITIL, Virtualization
