Managing Change in IT. The Challenge is Real.

by Sue Dunnell.

If the number of blogs and articles focusing on the accelerated pace of change and complexity in IT is any indication, it seems organizations are still struggling with these issues and have yet to find the best way to address them. The challenge is real. 74% of CIOs believe there is too much pressure on IT to keep up with unrealistic demands for new solutions from business and end users.

IT has been trying to adapt and keep pace.

To better manage cost, availability, and deliver innovative solutions at scale, IT has virtualized, migrated to the cloud, and is now adopting multi-cloud solutions. New technology is continuously being adopted, from AI to containers and service mesh to edge solutions, to deliver desired business outcomes.

In the midst of all this, IT must keep critical business systems working. This includes maintaining and extracting value from the legacy apps that run core business systems. And when an outage occurs, IT needs to know how to restore service fast as well as identify and address the root cause of the outage. Whenever IT plans a recovery strategy, moves apps or infrastructure, or adopts new hosting sites, they must consider and comply with new updates to regulatory compliance, privacy, and security requirements.

With all this change, how does IT even know how their apps work, where they are hosted, and what other apps and services they are dependent on to run? Business units often own, define and manage SLA and compliance requirements – but how are these communicated to IT, and then tracked and managed? And what happens when business does not recognize the value or cost savings they expected from the cloud?

Unfortunately, there’s no relief in sight.

IDC predicts that by 2025 the number of apps in use worldwide will grow from 52 million to 792 million – a 15x increase. And over 90% of today’s apps will still be in use with insufficient updates and modernizations, resulting in 40% of IT budgets being consumed by technical debt.

So what is IT to do?

How can you get the data you need to make good decisions about apps, infrastructure, and business requirements, manage and track change, and help business achieve their goals? Where do you even start?

What IT needs is a way to connect their teams and their tools to better understand their environment and its requirements. They need a fundamental understanding of how their applications work, what their dependencies are, and what is a clear disposition and plan for the future of every application. They need access to all their application and related infrastructure data, in one place, and have confidence that it is accurate and fresh. And they need to leverage the expertise of the teams and data they already have to plan change, identify gaps, and respond in real time to outages and service disruptions. They must orchestrate human and automated tasks with precision to migrate apps and restore service without bringing systems down.

Our IT practitioners saw the need to accelerate the planning, management and execution of change while eliminating risk. They developed TransitionManager to provide a visual, interactive, app-centric approach to understanding the IT environment, and give IT the ability to collaborate with business through the lens of a consistent set of data.

We just released 5.0 of this powerful platform and it offers even more automation of time-consuming configuration processes. It makes it easier than ever to integrate easily with execution tools to migrate assets and recover systems at scale, and it provides a companion app for operating securely behind a firewall. This is the platform that experts use to migrate data centers, drive cloud adoption, and build, test, and deploy recovery solutions – while meeting all compliance and security requirements.

Read the release here and sign up for our demo of TransitionManager: