Perform Maintenance When No Window Exists

Accelerating demands on technology services place increasing pressure on infrastructure and operations (I&O) staff who need to periodically shut down infrastructure for maintenance or to make updates to applications and other service components. Traditionally, maintenance windows were scheduled to coincide with periods of low demand, such as evenings or weekends. But global business and consumer-oriented services change the demand to a point where such windows are shrinking and even disappearing altogether. When no window of opportunity exists, different approaches are needed. This document will help I&O teams identify which services can tolerate maintenance and which cannot. We'll then provide three techniques for each category so that I&O teams can perform maintenance with minimal to no disruption to the business.