[MUSIC] In this lesson, I'll discuss updating systems. There's many strategies to updating systems. This could be hardware, this could be software, things need upgraded. So I'll discuss a little bit about why we need to upgrade systems, update them, as well, for newer technology, and discuss the strategies surrounding that. Also we're going to discuss change management as well. And why we need change management in place for updating systems. Upgrading or updating enterprise systems is necessary for many reasons. So we might have bugs that are reported in software, we may have hard drives that are failing. Hardware, in general that's failing, we may have security risks. But it's all something that needs to be updated, upgraded, okay? How often do you look at your phone and notice that I have five or six apps that need to be updated? Well, this is a constant need for patching bugs, vulnerabilities, and adding new features. So updating is a normal process for information technology in general. So we also have a lot of other services that could be affected, because of updating. So mail servers, web servers, video streaming, ERP systems, for example, are all something that you're going to have to upgrade, or might be impacted from upgrading at some point in time. Systems get old, okay, and if we're talking about hard drives. For example, enterprise hard drives, we look at the mean time between failures as a reliability factor. So when a hard drives says it has a million MBTF that means that it's a very reliable hard drive. And a million hours is a long time for a hard drive to be operating and under certain loads. But it's a measurement of how long a bunch of hard drives run until one of them dies. Let's talk about upgrade strategies. There are many upgrade strategies out there. Software typically comes with some kind of automatic updating like your phones, for example. See that there's an update on your phone, let's say you have an Apple iPhone, for example. Or an Android phone, I have both. So my Apple always has updates, my Android always has updates. Automatic updates always happen. I always notice that I have the latest and greatest software on both devices because they have an automated installation policy, okay. Careful analysis on that needs to be applied, however if those are critical systems, maybe we shouldn't upgrade at a certain time. For example, if we're using an iPad to control certain portion of a room like video streaming, for example. And it's the remote. What happens if you upgrade and it's not compatible with your streaming device, okay? Package managers for operating systems, especially for Linux, look at the compatibility of all the software that is being installed. Now, it doesn't guarantee that things are going to be compatible, but they should. Operating systems should allows us to make sure things are compatible. Windows, it's hit and miss, some stuff is compatible, some stuff isn't. Majority of the time software is going to be compatible. Hardware becomes more difficult to upgrade to update. Because a lot of the enterprise hardware that we are running, is running very large systems. So if we have to replace a hard drive in a system, we may need to, schedule some down time for that service. Change management is really important when it comes to upgrading or updating, or changing anything in a system. Why do we have change management in place? It's optimizing the overall business risk, okay? Changes should be implemented to optimize or lessen the risk that you have that the update or upgrade or change affects the system, okay? We may need to minimize the risk to upgrading that system as well. Achieving success at first tempt is one of those outcomes that we hope to have, when we implement change management. We lessen the impact if we can understand what systems the change will impact. So let's talk about a definition of a change first. We have change management in place at this university for IT. So several years ago we developed what the definition of what we believe a change is. The addition, modification, or removal of anything that could have an affect on IT services and production. The scope should include changes to all architectures, processes, tools, metrics, and documentation as well as the changes to IT services and other configuration items. So effective change management ensures that risks are taken into account. Timelines are reviewed, backup plans are established, stakeholders are met with to discuss timelines, and post implementation is also discussed. What went wrong? Or what went right with the change? So making sure everybody's informed. And communication is extremely important when we're upgrading or updating systems. So in conclusion, change is inevitable. We upgrade things, we downgrade things, we put new hard drives in. We increase the RAM of a server. All these things are updates to business requirements generally. So as long as we plan for those changes to happen, we will have success.
