Change is constant across your IT estate. But is it under control?

There’s never been so much change happening across an IT estate.

And it’s constant.

On a day-to-day basis, IT teams might be creating and monitoring user permissions, deploying any scheduled operating system (OS) updates or integrating new third-party software tools.

This is not to mention all the change carried out by external providers, outsourced teams and employees.

Change itself is not a problem.

Indeed, it’s essential for ongoing security, resilience and modernization.

Change that isn’t actively managed, however, is a different story.

This could be change that goes unnoticed, like an external patch that automatically updates a system without IT oversight, or change that is forced, like rushing an OS upgrade to meet an impending end-of-life deadline.

The trouble is many organizations have to monitor incredibly large and complex IT estates that can contain hundreds or thousands of business-critical endpoints .

And so much change is now automated or carried out by external parties.

Consequently, without the right software and processes, this means that IT teams can have limited visibility into many changes taking place.

These changes might seem small or innocuous on their own.

But left unmanaged, they mean systems are drifting away from their intended baseline, which adds risk to each subsequent change – and that’s when systems can fail and damaging outages occur.

Change that is not managed effectively also increases vulnerability to cyber attacks.