Granular Configuration Automation
Encyclopedia
Granular configuration automation (GCA) is a specialized area in the field of configuration management
which focuses on visibility and control of an IT environment’s configuration and bill-of-material at the most granular level. This framework focuses on improving the stability of IT environments by analyzing granular information. It responds to the requirement to determine a threat level of an environment risk, and to allow IT organizations to focus on those risks with the highest impact on performance. Granular Configuration Automation combines two major trends in configuration management: the move to collect detailed and comprehensive environment information and the growing utilization of automation tools.
Downtime and system outages undermine the environments that IT professionals manage. Despite advances in infrastructure robustness, occasional hardware, software and database downtime occurs. Dunn & Bradstreet reports that 49% of Fortune 500
companies experience at least 1.6 hours of downtime per week, translating into more than 80 hours annually. The growing costs of downtime has provided IT organizations with ample evidence for the need to improve processes. A conservative estimate from Gartner pegs the hourly cost of downtime for computer networks at $42,000, so a company that suffers from worse than average downtime of 175 hours a year can lose more than $7 million per year.
The demands and complexity of Incident Investigation have put further strain on IT professionals, where their current experience cannot address incidents to the scale of environments in their organizations. The incident may be captured, monitored and the results reported using standardized forms, most of the time even using a help-desk or trouble tickets software system to automate it and sometimes even a formal process methodology like ITIL. But the core activity is still handled by a technical specialist “nosing around” the system trying to “figure out” what is wrong based on previous experience and personal expertise.
Configuration management
Configuration management is a field of management that focuses on establishing and maintaining consistency of a system or product's performance and its functional and physical attributes with its requirements, design, and operational information throughout its life.For information assurance, CM...
which focuses on visibility and control of an IT environment’s configuration and bill-of-material at the most granular level. This framework focuses on improving the stability of IT environments by analyzing granular information. It responds to the requirement to determine a threat level of an environment risk, and to allow IT organizations to focus on those risks with the highest impact on performance. Granular Configuration Automation combines two major trends in configuration management: the move to collect detailed and comprehensive environment information and the growing utilization of automation tools.
Driving factors
For IT personnel, IT systems have grown in complexity , supporting a wider and growing range of technologies and platforms. Application release schedules are accelerating, requiring greater attention to more information. The average Global 2000 firm has more than a thousand applications that their IT organization deploys and supports. New technology platforms like cloud and virtualization offer benefits to IT with less server space, and energy savings, but complicate configuration management from issues like sprawl. The need to ensure high availability and consistent delivery of business services have led many companies to develop automated configuration, change and release management processes.Downtime and system outages undermine the environments that IT professionals manage. Despite advances in infrastructure robustness, occasional hardware, software and database downtime occurs. Dunn & Bradstreet reports that 49% of Fortune 500
Fortune 500
The Fortune 500 is an annual list compiled and published by Fortune magazine that ranks the top 500 U.S. closely held and public corporations as ranked by their gross revenue after adjustments made by Fortune to exclude the impact of excise taxes companies collect. The list includes publicly and...
companies experience at least 1.6 hours of downtime per week, translating into more than 80 hours annually. The growing costs of downtime has provided IT organizations with ample evidence for the need to improve processes. A conservative estimate from Gartner pegs the hourly cost of downtime for computer networks at $42,000, so a company that suffers from worse than average downtime of 175 hours a year can lose more than $7 million per year.
The demands and complexity of Incident Investigation have put further strain on IT professionals, where their current experience cannot address incidents to the scale of environments in their organizations. The incident may be captured, monitored and the results reported using standardized forms, most of the time even using a help-desk or trouble tickets software system to automate it and sometimes even a formal process methodology like ITIL. But the core activity is still handled by a technical specialist “nosing around” the system trying to “figure out” what is wrong based on previous experience and personal expertise.
Potential applications
- Release validation — validating releases and mitigating the risk of production outages
- Incident prevention — identifying and alerting of undesired changes; hence avoiding costly environment incidents
- Incident investigation — pinpointing the root-cause of the incident and significantly cutting the time and effort spent on investigation
- Disaster recovery verification — the accurate validation of disaster recovery plans and eliminating surprises at the most vulnerable times
- Security — identifying deviations from security policy and best-practices
- Compliance — discovering non-compliant situations and providing a detailed audit-trail
See also
- Configuration managementConfiguration managementConfiguration management is a field of management that focuses on establishing and maintaining consistency of a system or product's performance and its functional and physical attributes with its requirements, design, and operational information throughout its life.For information assurance, CM...
- Release managementRelease managementThe release management process is a relatively new but rapidly growing discipline within software engineering of managing software releases....
- Change managementChange managementChange management is a structured approach to shifting/transitioning individuals, teams, and organizations from a current state to a desired future state. It is an organizational process aimed at helping employees to accept and embrace changes in their current business environment....
- Information technologyInformation technologyInformation technology is the acquisition, processing, storage and dissemination of vocal, pictorial, textual and numerical information by a microelectronics-based combination of computing and telecommunications...
- Information Technology Infrastructure LibraryInformation Technology Infrastructure LibraryThe Information Technology Infrastructure Library , is a set of good practices for IT service management that focuses on aligning IT services with the needs of business. In its current form , ITIL is published in a series of five core publications, each of which covers an ITSM lifecycle stage...
- Virtualization (disambiguation)
- Cloud computingCloud computingCloud computing is the delivery of computing as a service rather than a product, whereby shared resources, software, and information are provided to computers and other devices as a utility over a network ....
- Business continuityBusiness continuityBusiness continuity is the activity performed by an organization to ensure that critical business functions will be available to customers, suppliers, regulators, and other entities that must have access to those functions. These activities include many daily chores such as project management,...
- IT service continuityIT service continuityIT Service Continuity is a specific form of business continuity planning. It is the process of assessing and managing risks associated with information technology departments...
- Seven tiers of disaster recoverySeven tiers of disaster recoveryThe Seven Tiers of Disaster Recovery was originally defined by Share to help identify the various methods of recovering mission-critical computer systems as required to support business continuity....