Bridging the gaps

Lisa, you hit the nail on the head by saying more can be done around the area of change management, especially considering most outages are caused by unplanned change. The biggest gap that exists seems to be the linking of change activity to the process you alluded to in your article. The big 4 (BMC, HP, IBM, CA) have made strides to marry change management and the provisioning of change, but what about the change happening outside of those workflows? Who is tracking that? We've seen technologies like Solidcore come to the table offering change blocking and reconciliation with process, and tools like Tripwire that provide change and configuration assessment capabilities. We're also seeing these and other technologies emerging for virtual environments. But I would expect more technologies to crop up in this area to help with the pain. And more importantly, it would be nice to see folks like HP and BMC fess up that not all change is within their products purview and not all change can be controlled...even with their precious Opsware and BladeLogic acquisitions. And while the CMDB also helps eases the pain configurations and change with the power of information, the CMDB still needs comprehensive change data to become a trusted source of information. Nevertheless, we seem to be on the right path, but it's just taking a bit longer than I would have expected for this stuff to become popular.

Click to read the article this is in response to.