Change Management in the Cloud

Publication date: December 3, 2021 (Document history)

Abstract

Like every business function, change management should act as an enabler for your organization to succeed. Just as every business has some kind of finance function to ensure that it optimizes spending, change management is essential for optimizing business risk. You will benefit from change management if you have migrated to the cloud, have a hybrid environment, or are born in the cloud. An effective change management process enables agility and reduces time to market. It ensures that resources deliver business value, reduces failed changes, and helps ensure delivery to business. An effective record of change should also act as one of your first troubleshooting references when an incident occurs.

Research has found that high performance in terms of frequency of deployment, lead time for change, and change failure rate is correlated with version control, continuous delivery, and automated testing. (ITIL 4: High-Velocity IT, AXELOS, 2020, page 89)

This paper discusses change management, the Cloud Adoption Framework, and the Well-Architected Framework in the context of applying governance to deploying changes to your Amazon Web Services (AWS) environment.