ITIL

Do your require a change record for a regularly scheduled Data Center swing?

Our company has two DC's, DC1 and DC2, During the day these are 80/20, but at night we swing to one DC making it 100% active while the other is marked inactive and we do changes to the offline DC. Recently teams have been scheduling changes during the swings causing issues with the changes. The problem is the team doing the swing is stating that this is BAU and don't need a change. I've been arguing with them that we need the change to ensure there are no conflicts. If teams don't have insight into the change the tool can't identify it.

What do you do? Thoughts or suggestion?

Great question!

Unless it's a "standard change" (ITIL definition), any change to the production environment should be required to follow the change management process. In environments that have fully automated CI/CD, that may be an exception, but it doesn't sound like your organization has that level of maturity.

Based on your statement that there are 'issues' during some executions of the swing, that increases the risk and should not be considered a standard change. That being the case, the swing change should have the benefit of change management controls of ensuring no conflicting changes, awareness, approvals, etc.

IMO, the fact there are issues during some swing events means you need appropriate controls and those that don't want the controls have to demonstrate they have mitigated all risks before the organization relaxes the controls.

Corde