The Importance Of Router Change Management

Networks have become massive systems that are often difficult to manage. It takes a great deal of skill and experience to do so. To add to the challenge, they also grow in complexity every day as changes are often necessary to keep up with the latest technologies, improve performance, fix errors, and scale with the business. Router change management has become an important subject because of everything that has happened in recent years. Professionals must simply step up their game and be more careful because of the following:

Risk

The probability that something will go wrong along the way is high. It is estimated that about 6 in 10 outages were caused by maintenance work gone wrong. Even the best intentions cannot save a project from going downhill. It takes great care for the change to happen as intended. All of the people involved must be aware of the risks. They must work together to minimize the risks and ensure a successful outcome — one with no glitches that could cripple the system.

Cost

The main reason that errors are so unwelcome is that they can be extremely expensive. A small hardware or software issue can cascade into a huge headache. Sometimes these cause a complete halt to the operations for several hours or even more. The lost opportunities can reach millions or even billions of dollars. What makes these so painful is that most of them are avoidable. If only the change was managed better, then all of that money would not have been lost.

Strategies

Given the risk and the cost associated with failed system changes, professionals should develop strategies that would allow them to steer clear of problems. Among the best practices suggested by experts are:

1. Plan ahead.

The technical team should plan well ahead of time. They should study the system, including possible points of failure and ways to prevent common issues. Every step of the process should be examined careful for possible consequences.

2. Welcome criticism.

Familiarity blindness is a real problem. Sometimes we fail to see obvious flaws when we are too close to our subject. Once the plan is finished, it should be turned over to a knowledgeable third party who can then look at it with fresh eyes and provide feedback.

3. Back up.

All of the vital files and databases should have a backup copy. Although everyone hopes for the best, we should also expect the worse and mitigate the effects.

4. Hands off.

Human error is a common cause of failures. Remove it from the equation by automating processes to that everything can go much more smoothly.