Carnegie Mellon University

Reading Material
Information System Management Theories & Practices
John Vu

Configuration Management
ITIL (IT Infrastructure Library) is an integrated set of best-practice
recommendations with common definitions and terminology. ITIL covers
areas such as Incident Management, Problem Management, Change
Management, Release Management and the Service Desk and is the most
widely accepted service management framework of its kind. At the core of
ITIL is enterprise configuration management, (CM) supported by a robust
and detailed Configuration Management Database (CMDB) which holds the
relationships between all system components including incidents, problems,
known errors, changes and releases. It also contains information about
employees, locations, suppliers and business units.

The broad variety of potential uses of an ITIL Reference CMDB requires

that any comprehensive implementation will be based on a federated model,
drawing configuration management information about processes, roles,
participants, assets and status from a number of sources.

Configuration Management should focus on system configuration and

assessment finding, understanding and correcting configuration change. CM
capabilities should:

 Be designed to capture comprehensive configuration detail, collecting

configuration data elements from production servers.
 Be designed to accommodate unanticipated emerging configuration
data elements that result from deployment of new
technologies/software versions, out of band configuration change and
emergent vulnerability/exploit signatures.
 Exposes configuration dependencies between systems.
 Support multiple technical controls compliance assessments against
configuration information, collected once from mission critical
systems.
 Supports access to detailed configuration information, even when the
monitored system becomes unavailable.
 Supports all major ITIL areas.
Organizations adopting IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) often seek to
maximize the quality of IT services and the strategic business value of IT. At
the same time, immediate cost reductions and increased IT efficiencies can
be realized through leveraging SCM while implementing ITIL. The use of
SCM in tandem with the most widely used best practice framework for IT
Service Management (ITIL), helps accelerate near term business benefits by
contributing value

The aim of configuration management is to define and control the

components of the service and infrastructure and to manage precise
configuration information.

All key assets and configurations should be assigned to the responsibility of

a manager who ensures appropriate security and control. This is intended to
guarantee, amongst other things, that approval is obtained before changes to
the CI are implemented. The following recommendations for meeting the
specifications for the configuration management process have become
established practice:

1. Planning and implementation

2. Configuration identification
3. Configuration control
4. Proof of status
5. Verification and audit