In search of a change management system (Part IV): The Application View contd…
I was talking to a guru in the change management space and sharing with him all these companies that came up in the search and asked for his opinion on this concept of the application view and he had a really great insight …
Software which starts with the applications, like Asset Management (for example, Mercury Asset Management…) and Relicore (Symantec), Collation (IBM), nLayers (EMC), Cendura (CA), Appilog (Mercury) all have one common characteristic … the need a white list.
Niether this guy nor I have used all these software, but a cursory look at their description seems correct … they all need a pre-configured list of things which they should track. If you think from an application point of view this makes a lot of sense … once you know it is Hyperion, you can enumarate all the files and configuration settings for example with Hyperion and track changes to that.
This clearly has several advantages and dis-advantages. First advantage, since most of the above software (except Relicore/Symantec) scan the system, this reduces the time and resources required for the scan. It also presents change data in an applicaiton context which is more useful for the end-user. The
The dis-advantages are same like with other white-list approaches, they need to be constantly updated, also may not be available for older/newer versions of the software. What do you do for custom software … user has to input all this stuff etc.
Add comment November 28th, 2006
