Problem management can be one of the most beneficial IT service management disciplines, but it can also be one of the most difficult to justify and maintain. How well you do – both initially and longer term – depends not only on your problem management process but also the effectiveness of the people involved.

Cloud services have greatly expanded the IT capabilities available to support companies’ diverse business needs over the past few years. The home-grown software is being replaced by SaaS and company run data centres are being replaced with IaaS and PaaS offerings. While the move to the cloud brings significant benefits in business functionality, scalability and reducing capital costs, the management of these environments to provide service assurance to users can be challenging.

One of the aims of Problem Management is to identify and manage the root causes of Incidents. Once we have identified the causes we could decide to remove these problems to prevent further users from being affected.