IT organizations are under pressure to further reduce the cost of IT operations, increase service levels, stay compliant, and reduce risk while improving visibility into financial and operational decisions. Moreover, they must do so with IT infrastructures that are more complex, hybrid and sophisticated than ever before.
Change management, whether driven by business or functional requirements or by operational reasons (lifecycle management, patches, risk management, etc.), becomes proportionally more complex. To cope, the IT department needs strong management disciplines supported by integrated tools. To be able to manage changes safely, taking into account everyone’s requirements, it is necessary to arm yourself with the information necessary for decision-making, to make the right decision.
Manage IT changes
The introduction of agile delivery of digital solutions and DevOps ways of working, combined with the adoption of cloud-native and public cloud-hosted architectures, has also changed the role of the change management discipline. These are being rolled out at a much faster, almost continuous pace and classic change management concepts need to be rethought. In the agile world, pre-approved standard changes become the norm rather than classic changes in the traditional way of working. This does not mean that the control function of change management is no longer necessary, but that understanding and visibility of all these changes becomes more important. This information requires automated change discovery and detection solutions that are integrated into the DevOps value stream.
The move to DevOps introduces an additional challenge when it comes to operational changes: the use of infrastructure as code (IaC) by agile development teams – using provisioning tools such as Terraform by example – leads to increased sprawl, more opacity, even compliance issues if not governed properly, as these teams will no longer or only partially use the consumption and compliance pathways put in place by IT . Overcoming these challenges requires a governance solution with safeguards around the use of IaC. These then ensure that the tracking of infrastructure changes applied by the agile teams, integrating their costs and expenses against the budget, and the validity of these changes in view of IT compliance rules.
Inventory assets for controlled change management
Managing changes to the physical, virtual, financial, and contractual aspects of on-premises or public cloud computing assets requires strong rules for inventory, IT asset management (ITAM), software asset management (SAM) and cloud financial management, as part of a broader enterprise service management (ESM) solution for IT organizations. No one likes unexpected expenses or fines for using software. Organizations should manage software licensing across all computing platforms, including those hosted in the public cloud, to moderate licensing costs and reduce compliance risk. An up-to-date inventory of hardware and software in all IT environments is a critical foundation and can only be achieved effectively and efficiently through automated discovery, cost and change tracking.
Another salient issue is how IT can contribute to the company’s environmental objectives as part of its ESG policies. Accurate visibility of all IT assets and their relationships, preferably with integration data from data center infrastructure management (DCIM) tools that monitor environmental parameters, can aid decision-making for infrastructure consolidation, transformation, lifecycle management and more to reduce carbon footprint.
Control, track and govern
So, do we need to change? Absolutely. But changes must be controlled, tracked, and governed as part of the modern DevOps value stream. IT operations management solutions should provide the capabilities to do this: discover all hardware and software assets and their relationships, enable enterprise service management, including design and deployment of (cloud) services, ‘ITAM and SAM. Support agile teams by providing ongoing, real-time compliance and cost management for IaC-based changes. Service assurance and observability solutions additionally provide a feedback loop in the planning phase of the DevOps chain. Thus the loop is closed and new changes can be undertaken.
In today’s agile way of working, IT change has become one of the “permanent” elements of the “continuous everything” paradigm, which requires constant visibility, cost tracking, and compliance validation.