If you have ever had to move, you know exactly how painful it can be, for sure. 
Carefully packing all of your belongings, each of them in the right boxes, is the first mandatory step. 
Keeping track of all the boxes, and all the stuff in each box is hard but necessary: you don’t want to lose your favorite mug or teddy bear. 
Moving tens or hundreds of boxes requires a huge effort, maybe a moving van and an extra pair of hands to help. ​

Let us understand Configuration Management this way – assume you must dispose a software over hundreds of machines. This software can be an operating system or a code or it can be an update of a currently running software. It is possible for you to do this task manually, but what results if you have to complete this assignment overnight due to any important mass event taking place at your organization next day in which heavy traffic is foreseen. Even if you were prepared to do this by-hand there is a high chance of recurring errors on your big day. In such a case, returning to the previous stable version, will not be possible to do manually with ease.
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To solve this problem, Configuration Management was introduced. By using Configuration Management tools like Chef, we can achieve this.

SAP Solution Manager is a central support and system management suite. With the aim to address questions like … ​

Nowadays, the global marketplace requires systems that can react to fluctuating loads and unpredictable failures, with the end-level agreement (SLA) goal of being available 99.999% of the time. Mitigating the negative impacts of failures, disasters and outages cannot even be contemplated in today’s competitive world. A disaster recovery strategy is too error-prone and resource-consuming: businesses need to operate following an “always on” model. ​

When we talk about operational efficiency and orchestration of IT and Business workflows, workload automation is Enterprise Resource Planning’s best friend.  
We see this every single day with our customers, especially those using SAP to run their critical business processes.  

By leveraging the power of Workload Automation and making the most out of its integration with SAP, we have seen our customers move their businesses to the next level of innovation and maturity. 

​Want to learn how? Let’s start from the beginning. ​

​HCL and IBM are pleased to announce a new release for Workload Automation, version 9.5.0.2, with enhancements that expand the innovations delivered with version 9.5 and enable the orchestration of new scenarios, particularly for datacenter automation.
 
A new website, the Automation Hub, has been launched to allow our customers to easily find all the integrations available to orchestrate their business-critical processes.

​Forewords: coping with a crisis 
It is with an intense sense of modesty that we are approaching this topic, since this article is written in the midst of the most severe crisis for humanity our generation ever faced. 

Consequently, writing about how an IT solution can help recovering from - and coping with - a planetary health emergency is not an easy task at all.