How important is a good change Management Process? 1

How important is a good change Management Process?

A good change management process is a critical part of any IT infrastructure management system.

Making changes is simple, understanding the impact of any knock-on effects and recovering in the event of issues relating to the changes is not so simple (something Facebook have found out in the past 24 hours). A simple change request, such as updating a DNS record or changing a firewall rule, takes seconds to carry out. However, when done properly, the following stages must be gone through:

  • Analysing the actual and potential impacts of the change
  • Taking configuration backups
  • Defining your backout plan (so you know how to undo any changes made which have an adverse effect on your systems)
  • Double-checking the change being made
  • Implementing the change
  • Testing after the change has been made to make sure no adverse effects are evident
  • On-going monitoring (as not all changes have an instant impact)

Does your IT department / IT support company have a thorough change control process? Do you have documented processes to follow and clearly thought through and defined backout plans? If the answer is no, then it’s time to change.

What’s the worst that could happen? In most cases a few hours downtime for elements of IT systems but potentially days of downtime for all of it. Taking a real-life recent event where Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp were offline for a period of 6 hours (due to a change being incorrectly administered which they were unable to recover from quickly as they had no robust backout plan), Facebook’s share price fell by 4.9%, equivalent to £4.4 billion. Not only that but the reputational damage is yet to be seen as companies that heavily rely on Facebook’s services scramble to look for alternative suppliers to use due to the impact the outage had on their businesses.

It is unlikely that a few hours downtime would impact your business anywhere near as much as Facebook’s outage has, but how would your business cope with having no IT systems for a few hours / days? Have you considered this (if not you really must). Whilst you’re thinking about this, what would be the impact to your business if one of your key supplier’s IT systems went offline for hours, or even days? Do you have all of your eggs in one basket or are your systems diverse enough to survive a single company’s outage for a prolonged period of time?

 

For more information, please contact us or visit www.lcsit.com/it-projects