Cloud Management - Deploying and Managing a Cloud Infrastructure - page 106

With a configuration management process in place, you can ensure consistent and
reliable performance throughout the IT infrastructure. It also helps to avoid incurring
costs and risks from poorly managed IT assets that may lead to unexpected and extended
outages and to avoid failure when it comes to compliance with both industry standards
and the customer service-level agreements, all of which leads to fees or fines.
Here are some benefits of configuration management:
■ Provides a clear understanding on the part of the technical staff of configurations
and relationships of IT assets with other resources, which gives the team the necessary
skills to troubleshoot problems and quickly identify root causes. This will also give
them the proper tools to pinpoint possible issues, thereby preventing them.
■ Serves as a good source for change management information that can be used to
base future decisions on regarding the implementation and configuration of planned
changes with current IT infrastructure and assets.
■ Improves overall compliance with customers and legal, financial, and regulatory
commissions, resulting in less administrative overhead.
■ Provides realistic visibility of the cost and risks for delivering IT services.
■ Provides insight into current baseline configurations compared to the original objective
and requirements and the ability to track the difference.
■ Ultimately reduces the time and cost associated with configuration discovery, and it
certainly eliminates trial and error.
■ Ensures compatibility across the whole IT environment.
Configuration management sounds simple, and in essence and principle it is, but
in practice it is actually tricky and a bit tedious. It is not merely tracking IT assets and
defining relationships between them, as you will soon find out.
Even at the beginning of the implementation process, configuration management is
already present through definition, documentation, and tracking of IT assets that will be
managed as configuration items (CIs). Careful selection of CIs is important in this early
stage of implementation and could mean the difference between success and failure. Once
a CI has been selected, there are various CI-related activities and processes:

Each CI must have a unique identifier in order for all of its instances to be
identified easily.

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CI changes must be done through change management processes.

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A configuration management system's database or the change management database
(CMDB) should record all the attributes of the CI and be the authority on the docu-
mentation and tracking of them.

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CIs must contain an ownership attribute that will be used for asset accountability. It
should clearly state who is in charge of particular CIs or assets and who will keeping
all attributes and configurations current and be in charge of inventory, security, use,
disposal, and financial reporting regarding the CI. The CI owner must be a member of
the change advisory board.

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