The recent SC magazine article, “Winds of Change: Change and Configuration
Management,” drove home the necessity that organizations have strong
change and configuration strategies in place – before the emergency hits.
It reminded me of a colleague’s comment more than a
decade ago –“If it’s not a strength – then it’s a weakness.” In the world
of IT and change and configuration management, this is absolutely true.
How better to exemplify this than with UNICEF’s ability to avert risk and loss
of crucial services – because they had a change and configuration strategy in
place – they were prepared for disaster.
How many organizations have limited or no change
and configuration management practice? Without one, how fast
do you think you could get your location or region back up and running at full
steam? What kind of havoc would the undocumented aspects and ad hoc
management of your network over the years cause in terms of business service
delays – and headaches?
While natural disasters get all of the headlines –
it doesn’t take a huge event to cause chaos. It could be a local fire, a
hardware failure or planned maintenance. If an organization doesn’t have
solid documentation, visibility and a baseline of best practices, IT staff will
have to react – and do whatever it takes to put a “functioning” solution in
place. While this may get them back online – business services and
potentially security are at risk – because standards, configurations and most
recent improvements may be overlooked.
There are several best practices to make change and
configuration management – especially for the network – a strength not a weakness:
- Automate NCCM –
the time and effort to manually keep configurations and changes is huge – it’s
virtually impossible to keep up to date
-
Best practices – Develop, implement and track best
practices and gold standards - throughout the device lifecycle
-
Intelligence – embedded intelligence can help find
subtle and the long term impact of changes – very often overlooked
-
Documentation and tracking –enhancements can fall
by the wayside without documentation and tracking
-
Holistic view – NCCM touches many facets of the
organization – restricting the scope to just one (security or compliance and
not the entire network) limits benefits and potential
So if disaster occurs elsewhere, and you’re
thinking about all of the things that could go wrong, remember that a strong NCCM strategy is a strong foundation for
success. Let’s hope your organization never has to face a major
catastrophe but if you do, make change and configuration management a strength,
not a weakness.