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2 Out of 3 IT Pros Put Systems at Risk of Downtime

Pete Goldin
APMdigest

Almost three-fourths (70%) of companies forget about documenting changes, up from 57% last year, according to Netwrix Corporation's 2015 State of IT Changes Survey, covering 700 IT professionals across over 40 industries.

In addition, the number of large enterprises that make undocumented changes has increased by 20% to 66%.

Undocumented changes pose a hidden threat to business continuity and the integrity of sensitive data. The survey shows that 67% of companies suffer from service downtime due to unauthorized or incorrect changes to system configurations, while the worst offenders are again enterprises in 73% of cases.

The report states: "Incorrect or unauthorized changes to system configurations can impact sustainability of business processes and cause IT services to stop. The majority of IT pros admit that they still are not able to control sustainable performance of their IT systems and continue to make changes that were a root cause of system downtime; the share has even increased throughout the year."

Despite the fact that companies still have shortcomings in their change management policies, the overall results of 2015 show a positive trend. More organizations have changed their approach to changes and have made some effort to establish auditing processes to achieve visibility into their IT infrastructures.

Key survey findings:

■ 80% of organizations surveyed continue to claim they document changes; however, the number of companies that make undocumented changes has grown throughout the year and reached 70%. The frequency of those changes has also increased.

■ 58% of small companies surveyed have started to track changes despite the lack of change management controls, against 30% last year.

■ Change auditing technology continues to capture the market, as 52% of organizations surveyed have established change auditing controls, compared to 38% last year. Today, 75% of enterprises surveyed (52% in 2014) have established change auditing processes to monitor their IT infrastructures.

■ Organizations opt for several methods of change auditing at once. 60% of SMBs surveyed traditionally choose manual monitoring of native logs, whereas 65% of enterprises deploy automated auditing solutions.


Pete Goldin is Editor and Publisher of APMdigest

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2 Out of 3 IT Pros Put Systems at Risk of Downtime

Pete Goldin
APMdigest

Almost three-fourths (70%) of companies forget about documenting changes, up from 57% last year, according to Netwrix Corporation's 2015 State of IT Changes Survey, covering 700 IT professionals across over 40 industries.

In addition, the number of large enterprises that make undocumented changes has increased by 20% to 66%.

Undocumented changes pose a hidden threat to business continuity and the integrity of sensitive data. The survey shows that 67% of companies suffer from service downtime due to unauthorized or incorrect changes to system configurations, while the worst offenders are again enterprises in 73% of cases.

The report states: "Incorrect or unauthorized changes to system configurations can impact sustainability of business processes and cause IT services to stop. The majority of IT pros admit that they still are not able to control sustainable performance of their IT systems and continue to make changes that were a root cause of system downtime; the share has even increased throughout the year."

Despite the fact that companies still have shortcomings in their change management policies, the overall results of 2015 show a positive trend. More organizations have changed their approach to changes and have made some effort to establish auditing processes to achieve visibility into their IT infrastructures.

Key survey findings:

■ 80% of organizations surveyed continue to claim they document changes; however, the number of companies that make undocumented changes has grown throughout the year and reached 70%. The frequency of those changes has also increased.

■ 58% of small companies surveyed have started to track changes despite the lack of change management controls, against 30% last year.

■ Change auditing technology continues to capture the market, as 52% of organizations surveyed have established change auditing controls, compared to 38% last year. Today, 75% of enterprises surveyed (52% in 2014) have established change auditing processes to monitor their IT infrastructures.

■ Organizations opt for several methods of change auditing at once. 60% of SMBs surveyed traditionally choose manual monitoring of native logs, whereas 65% of enterprises deploy automated auditing solutions.


Pete Goldin is Editor and Publisher of APMdigest

Hot Topics

The Latest

I've spent a lot of time in the channel, and one thing I keep coming back to is this: a partner program is only as good as what it looks like in the field. Many programs look great on paper, but when a partner is in front of a customer navigating a complex hybrid environment or trying to make the case for AI-powered observability, the gap between what a vendor promises and what it actually delivers becomes very clear, very fast ...

Enterprises today operate in a real-time environment where uninterrupted access to trusted data has become a baseline expectation for users, applications and automated systems. Traditional DataOps models, built on manual effort and human triage, cannot keep pace with this always active demand. AI agents are emerging as the operational backbone, ensuring consistent data availability, reinforcing trustworthiness and enabling a level of scale that manual processes cannot achieve ...

For decades, trust in the digital workplace rested on familiar signals. We trusted faces on video calls, voices on the phone, and emails that appeared to come from people we knew. These cues felt human and intuitive. They anchored how decisions were made, approvals were granted, and access was authorized. AI-powered deepfakes have quietly broken that model ...

Cloud migration was supposed to be a one-way door. For most enterprises, it turns out it isn't. Cloud data repatriation is a real and growing trend. A new survey ... finds that 89% of organizations plan to expand their on-premises infrastructure footprint over the next two years — and 75% have already moved at least some workloads back from public cloud in the past 24 months. The findings point to a broad rethinking of where data belongs ...

Over the past few years, large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized the software industry. Given their ability to excel at multi-step reasoning, LLMs have helped enterprises streamline workflows and adapt to the unknown. However, employing such models comes with sky-high costs, latency issues, and limited flexibility. In the realm of IT operations, it is generally wiser to employ smaller, domain-specific models instead ...

For years, DevOps teams operated under a simple assumption: collect enough telemetry, and you can find and fix any problem. That assumption is breaking down. Modern enterprises now operate across microservices, hybrid cloud environments, APIs, Kubernetes, and highly automated delivery pipelines. Releases happen continuously, dependencies shift constantly, and failures spread faster than teams can diagnose them ...

New Relic surveyed IT and engineering leaders from the media and entertainment (M&E) sector to understand what's working — and where challenges persist with their observability practices. The findings reveal how M&E organizations are navigating rising platform complexity, audience expectations, and AI-driven change. Below are five takeaways that stand out ...

Let me start with something I've seen play out more times than I can count. A team hits a wall with the cloud. Costs creep up, then spike. Performance starts to feel inconsistent. Someone in finance asks a simple question like "why did this double?" and nobody has a clean answer ... Maybe this isn't the right place for everything. That realization feels like a breakthrough, like you've identified the problem. In reality, you've just identified the starting line ...

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 24, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses network observability tool sprawl ... 

In cloud-native systems, scaling is often as simple as moving a slider. For on-premise databases, the stakes are different. Over-provisioning hardware is expensive. Under-provisioning leads to performance bottlenecks that are difficult to fix once the equipment is in the rack ...