With drift and other issues putting your desired state at risk every day, you may wonder: What is configuration management? And how does it work? Every organization needs to define the ideal configuration of its systems. That ideal configuration, or desired state, is the state in which systems and resources are aligned to support development, network performance, and efficiency. In short, you want your environment to keep running in a desired state. Configuration management helps you do that.
Cybersecurity threats are coming in hot and have quickly become an urgent concern for organizations of all sizes. In response, security teams are shifting away from homegrown security solutions and towards automation using commercially available tools. As organizations seek to improve their security resilience, they find themselves also needing to scale their security teams more efficiently as they address continuous staffing shortages.
The third and final chapter in our three part blog series. John Appleby sits down with Nick Miletich, CTO at Managecore, to discuss how building a next generation managed service firm had to include automation at the helm.
The true financial harm of downtime is significant. As of Aug 11, 2022, each minute costs an average of $9,000, according to the Ponemon Institute, raising the downtime cost per hour to over $500,000. It goes without saying that network outages hurt revenue, kill productivity, and harm the corporate brand, as well as the reputations of professionals who may be dragged into the mess.
For the last ten years, one of the most popular Integrations in the market has been for organisations that have deployed Microsoft System Center to manage their infrastructure, who also use ServiceNow as their corporate Service Desk. The need to integrate Microsoft System Center was originally driven by the need to automate the generation of ServiceNow tickets from events in System Center Operations Manager.
Budgets in IT departments are tight these days, so proving a return on investment is essential for justifying or expanding a project. The good news is that automation saves money by reducing the amount of human effort required. It is similar to investing in a robot vacuum cleaner. Despite the upfront cost, you save time (and money) by not having humans do the vacuuming. Reporting the value delivered by an automation program can be challenging since the value depends heavily on what is being automated.
For slides and more information, see our blog post:
https://cfengine.com/blog/2023/cfgmgmtcamp/
