Configuration Management Information System

By Kai Holthaus

“The Cloud” is one of the biggest paradigm shifts in the IT world. Instead of provisioning physical hardware in a physical data center and then managing applications running on the physical hardware, virtualization has allowed IT organizations to decouple logical infrastructure from physical infrastructure, and thereby deliver new-found flexibility to provide and manage value-add services.

Additionally, IT organizations can now provision the cloud infrastructure itself, along with the infrastructure they are already running themselves. Infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), and software as a service (SaaS) are now available to supplement or even replace traditional IT offerings. One common use case is to monitor the performance of a web server.

Once the performance reaches a certain limit, a new service is automatically provisioned in the cloud. The cloud-based server is used as long as performance demands require it, and once demand drops below a certain threshold, the additional cloud-based server is decommissioned. All of this can happen in a matter of minutes and can be fully automated.

Different cloud-based offerings need to be managed differently, in terms of configuration management, to ensure that the needs of the customer can be met.

Configuration Management Principles
According to ITIL, the purpose of the service asset and configuration management process is to ensure that the assets required to deliver services are properly controlled, and that accurate and reliable information about those assets is available when and where it is needed. This information includes details of how the assets have been configured and the relationships between assets.

The objectives of configuration management are to:

• Ensure that assets under the control of the IT organization are identified, controlled and properly cared for throughout their lifecycle
• Identify, control, record, report, audit, and verify services and other configuration items (CIs), including versions, baselines, constituent components, their attributes and relationships
• Account for, manage and protect the integrity of CIs through the service lifecycle by working with change management to ensure that only authorized components are used and only authorized changes are made
• Ensure the integrity of CIs and configurations required to control the services by establishing and maintaining an accurate and complete configuration management system (CMS)
• Maintain accurate configuration information on the historical, planned and current state of services and other CIs
• Support efficient and effective service management processes by providing accurate configuration information to enable people to make decisions at the right time – for example, to authorize changes and releases, or to resolve incidents and problems