Similarity metric for risk assessment in IT change plans

The proper management of IT infrastructures is essential for organizations that aim to deliver high quality services. Given the dynamics of these infrastructures, changes become imminent. In some cases, these changes might raise failures, causing disruption to provided services and consequently affecting the business continuity. Therefore, it is strongly recommended to evaluate the risks associated with changes before their actual execution. Learning from information of past deployed changes it is possible to estimate the risks for recently planned ones. Thereby, in this paper, we propose a solution to weigh the information available from past executed plans by the similarity calculated in relation with the analyzed change plan. A prototype system has been developed in order to evaluate the effectiveness of the solution over an emulated IT infrastructure. The results obtained show that the solution is capable of capturing similarity among activities in change plans, improving the accuracy of risk assessment for IT change planning.