Nearly 70% of a recently surveyed audience of IT professionals cited that their current configuration management approach is inadequate for meeting the needs of today's ever changing IT operations.

The global survey carried out by Evolven during a recent webinar conducted with Forrester Research reflects the growing frustration by IT Operations management with the current approaches for managing configurations in increasingly complex and dynamic data centers. The surveyed audience included CIOs, IT Directors, Configuration Managers, Release Managers, System Operations Architects, and Change Managers from many Global 2000 organizations.

Definitive Survey Results

The attendees responded to the question: Is your existing configuration management approach effective for facing the new challenges of the modern data center and cloud?

The participants could choose from the following response options with the results being:

• 35%      Not effective, clearly a new approach is needed
• 24%      Needs major improvement, chiefly in dynamics and analytics
• 10%      Questionable, current approaches are rigid and painful to implement
• 31%      Effective, but there are still a few bumps in the road
• 0%      Very effective, they were designed for the modern data center 

Achieving Effective Configuration Management

Evolven's CEO Sasha Gilenson commented on the results saying, “These reactions underscore that today achieving effective Configuration Management is one of IT’s biggest challenges. The rapid growth of virtualization and clouds demand more support for dynamic constantly changing environment configurations. Given, the active state of the IT landscape, and from what we have seen from our customers, it is not surprising that the survey results were inclined so strongly towards the need for better handling of configurations in the modern data center and cloud.”

Today’s Complex and Dynamic Environments

The IT landscape has grown in complexity supporting a wider and growing range of technologies and platforms (Virtualization, Cloud, Open Source etc.), and accelerated application release schedules.IT operations feels the impact from the widening adoption of Agile development processes, employing such practices as continuous integration and continuous build, with sometimes hundreds of changes going into production on a daily basis. Along with this, environments have grown increasing complex as more technologies are implemented, creating many moving inter-dependant pieces, with many individual configuration parameters. A typical environment can include thousands of different configuration parameters. Any of these parameters, if mis-configured or omitted, can impact operations, quickly turning into an incident possibly leading to an outage with lost opportunities impacting reputation, customers, financial performance, legal liabilities, and the overall organization. Managing today’s IT operations requires collecting a tremendous amount of information, then centralizing it for review and intelligently analyzed to deliver actionable information out of the constantly changing, overwhelming configuration data.

Existing Solutions Fall Short

Existing solutions, such as CMDB and configuration management tools, are just too rigid to handle today's dynamics. Also they don't provide visibility at the most granular level – where the root-cause of downtime and incidents start. Furthermore, they lack the detailed analytics required to translate abundant configuration data into actionable information for IT Operations.

Configuration Redefined: Address Risk and Reduced Productivity in the Modern Data Center and Cloud

Evolven redefined configuration management for the modern data center and cloud. Evolven's groundbreaking Configuration Analytics solution takes on the dynamics and complexity of the modern data center and cloud, in a way that was never available before. IT Operations and Infrastructure teams use Evolven to:

• Validate changes and releases to prevent downtime
• Monitor and detect configuration drift to prevent incidents
• Investigate and identify incidents root-cause to cut mean-time-to-resolution (MTTR)
• Audit any changes made to improve processes and meet compliance requirements

Our customers, on average, report a 42% reduction in cost of downtime, 50% cut in mean-time-to-resolution, and a 35% drop in the number of incidents.

Learn More

See the full webinar where the survey was conducted. Presented with Forrester VP and Principal Analyst, Jean-Pierre Garbani, the webinar explores  the complexity, dynamics and disruptive technologies that create a grim situation for business services, increasing risk and undermining productivity:  http://www.evolven.com/webinar-change-forrester.html

We’ve also organized many more articles and insights showing the impact of complexity on IT operations, see below for more:

• Forrester: Assessing Complexity In IT Operations
• Configuration Redefined
• Using Change Management to Catch Issues Before They Impact Business