Resumen de Compliance framework for change management in cloud environments
The Governance, Risk and Compliance (GRC) area is one of the critical management areas for every organization. This is particularly the case for information technology (IT) departments where both human resources and technical infrastructures (software and hardware) need to work seamlessly in order to provide the expected benefits. The study of the literature shows that sound GRC methods are key to running and maintaining secure and compliant computing infrastructures.
An important and particularly challenging aspect of the IT landscape is its constant and perpetual evolution in order to keep pace with new and emerging technologies that find their way faster and faster into the organizational infrastructure. Since assessments of risks and compliance aspects always refer to a certain (more or less static) situation, such frequent changes pose a real danger to the overall relevance of these assessments in the mid and long-term perspective. So, a sound approach to ensuring compliance not only punctually (both in time and space) but holistically – considering the complete IT landscape in a continuous way – needs to integrate with the change management function of the organization.
Another important development in the last eight to ten years was the emergence of Cloud Computing (CC) as a straightforward and efficient way of providing IT functionality to organizations. While it poses many various challenges to IT management in general, CC is particularly relevant for GRC as it makes an IT provision approach that was previously sometimes applied – outsourcing – to a predominant approach to provide infrastructure (called Infrastructure-as-a-Service or IaaS), platforms (called Platform-as-a-Service or PaaS), and software (called Software-as-a-Service or SaaS) within an organization.
CC and outsourcing entail wider challenges for GRC as it involves the inclusion of an external party as a service provider within an organization reflecting specific aspects of provider selection, contract management, service level agreements (SLAs), and monitoring. They become even more challenging in the context of frequent and interdependent changes. Therefore, this thesis is aimed at the definition and validation of a Compliance Framework for Change Management in Cloud Environments (short: CFC MCC). The proposed solution of the problem has been approached from a multidisciplinary point of view taking in consideration aspects from computer science, IT management and IT governance, but also such aspects as legal and cultural dimensions. The proposed solution provides a framework to support the solicitation of requirements from different subject areas (e.g., organizational, technological, cultural) and their subsequent consideration within the change management process of established IT management frameworks such as ITIL. It can be tailored to the specific situation of most organizations and provides a consistent approach to address GRC aspects in rapidly evolving cloud-based organizational IT landscapes.
The scientific discourse within the thesis has been structured following best academic practices and recommendations. In the last phase of the research methodology an empirical validation has been performed to verify the applicability of the framework. The data obtained from the validation indicate that the application of the framework for ensuring compliance in CC environments constitutes a relevant improvement of the change management process
