Rajeev Puri

Managing risk in multi-node automation of endpoint management

Endpoint management, including patching, health checking, configuration etc., is a key function for data center and cloud management. Managing multiple nodes through automation tools or scripts significantly increases efficiency. However, the risks of adverse impact due to excessive privilege or human error may propagate to a large pool of endpoints and lead to massive service disruptions and SLA (Service Level Agreement) violations. In this paper, we present a system that proactively and systematically manages the risk throughout the lifecycle phases of automation. We present a prototype implementation consisting of an authorization mechanism that guarantees the right level of eligibility and privilege of accessing the automation content (during the deployment stage), and an execution validator that controls the risk of human error which may cause massive damage to the infrastructure (during execution of the automation content). Our current implementation has been deployed to more than a dozen customer environments and achieved an efficiency gain of 58% with high execution accuracy.

SLA-driven applicability analysis for patch management

To strengthen patch management, organizations are required not only to focus on sole patch management on single server, machine or application servers, but also to consider other IT system management processes as well because patch management relies on them to be efficient. Processes such as inventory, system configurations, risk management, change management, system audit, and business cost on policy and SLA should be evaluated and enhanced together with patch management; appropriate applicability assessment of patch should be built in and coordinated with all these processes to make patch management a safe, reliable and efficient process to carry out its high profile tasks. This paper presents a patch management framework based on SLA-driven patch applicability analysis. It provides automatic patch applicability analysis and risk assessment for supporting business-impact analysis and logical control during patch process. Experimental results collected from the simulation on realistic business services case study show that SLA-driven patch applicability analysis based patch management outperforms traditional patch management.

Designing standard service offerings for reducing IT service management cost

A significant portion of a typical Enterprise IT services budget is spent on steady state management operations known as ”operational expenses”. Recently ”Standard Services Offerings” based approaches are proposed to reduce such cost where only a few set of versions and configurations are used to build an Enterprise IT services platform. A key challenge in these approaches is the choice of appropriate base set of configurations that can be used as seed configurations. Our paper addresses the above problem by studying several methods towards choosing the right set of application stack with configurations that minimizes the cost of building the target services environment from this seed set of offerings. We present four different methods and use model driven simulation studies to compare the performance of these approaches. We validate our key findings by analyzing our approaches for a large Enterprise customer IT environment.