Towards predictable and risk-free enterprise systems

The complexity and continuous evolution of enterprise systems is making it increasingly difficult to maintain the predictability of the system. The system managers are often unaware of the impact of an action across various layers of enterprise IT ranging from business functions, to applications, to IT infrastructure. Due to lack of this transparency, many risks go unnoticed leading to business outages or violations of Service Level Agreements (SLAs). In this paper, we address this problem of impact analysis of an action of an IT component on the enterprise system. We present novel techniques to model various aspects of system dependencies and then present algorithms to perform impact analysis. The ideas presented in this paper have been developed by applying them in real-world environments.