previous experience and personal expertise. Potential applications Release validation — validating releases and mitigating the risk of production outages Incident prevention — identifying and alerting of undesired changes; hence avoiding costly environment incidents Incident investigation — pinpointing the root-cause of the incident and significantly cutting the time and effort spent on investigation Disaster recovery verification — the accurate validation of disaster recovery plans and eliminating surprises at the most vulnerable times Security — identifying deviations from security policy and best-practices Compliance — discovering non-compliant situations and providing a detailed audit trail See also Configuration management Release management Change management Information technology ITIL Virtualization Cloud computing Business continuity IT service continuity Seven tiers of disaster recovery References Configuration management Cloud computing Disaster recovery IT risk management