Cloud Management - Deploying and Managing a Cloud Infrastructure - page 104

Change Advisory Board
The change advisory board (CAB) is made up of stakeholders who provide input to the
change manager regarding RFCs. This group is made up of representatives from all affected
areas, including end users and customers, and as part of the evaluation process for each
RFC should consider the following:

The reason for the change

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The benefits and risks when implementing or not implementing the change

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The required resources for implementation

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The time table for the implementation

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The impact of the outage in terms of service levels and agreements to customers and
planned compensation in case the outage is lengthy

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The back-out strategy plan in case of failure

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Review and Closure
After the implementation of the change, it must go through a defined process of full review
and closure. This is intended to verify that the process was successful by evaluating whether
the objectives of the change were met, the affected stakeholders are satisfied, the benefits
are fully realized, and any risk or side effect has been avoided or mitigated. This would
include the evaluation of the resources used in the process, which includes the time and the
overall cost of the change. This evaluation will ensure that future changes are successful
and are also the basis for standard changes so that evaluation will no longer be needed and
you can skip to implementation.

Documentation
Change initiatives sometimes fail because there was not enough strategic thought given
toward the communication of the rationale and the impacts of the change to the stakeholders
involved. To ensure that a change is understood by everyone affected and that the complexity
and magnitude of the initiative is understood, the endeavor should be clearly documented.
This includes the following:

The reasons for undertaking the change in the first place, the business drivers, and
the rationale

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The expected outcome for the objectives of the change

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The benefits and negative effects to the stakeholders, the organization, and any other
entity that would be affected by it

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Configuration Control
In a cloud computing environment, changes are often be caused by customer demand
and technology. In any case, when there is a request for change, especially when it requires
changing some infrastructure or virtual environment configurations, there will be some