IT organizations struggle to perform efficient change and release management. ITIL best practice guidelines clearly identify pre-production testing as a very important step to improve change and release management efficiency. Effective pre-production testing includes building realistic staging environments for IT testing, testing all changes that are targeted for production, and testing the impact of a change across the entire software infrastructure stack from end-to-end. This is sound advice in theory, but IT professionals face a ‘Perfect Storm’ of challenges:
• Production system availability expectations are extremely high
• IT supports very complex production environments with multiple inter-dependencies
• the volume, diversity, and acceleration of changes requested of production systems is overwhelming
IT organizations that adopt a structured change and release management approach also enjoy a smoother, more mature, change process. ‘Second generation’ virtualization serves as an enabling technology upon which to create a structured approach to improve change and release management maturity. It introduces both benefits and challenges of its own. While virtualization is not a complete answer for change and release management, it offers promise that IT organizations should consider.
Takeaways:
• IT Operations faces a 'perfect storm' of extreme availability demands, highly interdependent systems, voluminous and accelerated change, and confusing system complexity
• Structured change management processes according to ITIL best practices includes setting up a staging environment for IT testing, testing all changes, and testing changes from end-to-end across the infrastructure.
• For companies that have adopted structured Change Management processes, Change drives 25-30% of incidents in production. For companies with less structured processes, Change drives 75-80% of incidents in production
• Virtualization can improve efficiency of pre-production preparation and the adequacy of the testing of changes, but it comes with its own costs and challenges.
Good afternoon everyone, welcome to session 309 My name is dennis powell, sr pm with stacksafe My presentation is entitled “Next Step for Virtualization – Pre Production Testing”
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