Glossary / Change Management
Change Management
The controlled process for planning, approving, testing, and rolling out a change to an IT environment — designed specifically to keep a planned change from becoming the next incident.
A formal change process typically runs a request through risk assessment, approval, a scheduled maintenance window, and a defined rollback plan before anything touches production — with a review afterward to confirm it actually worked as intended. ITIL formalizes this with named roles and a change advisory board, but scaled-down versions of the same idea show up in any team that's been burned by an undocumented change before.
Mature processes distinguish change categories rather than treating every change the same way: a "standard" change is low-risk and pre-approved for repeated use (a routine patch deployment, for instance), while a higher-risk or novel change goes through fuller review — that distinction is what keeps change management from becoming a bottleneck on everyday work.
The reason change management exists at all is that a badly planned change is a self-inflicted incident — and self-inflicted incidents are, unlike most security threats, entirely within the organization's own control to prevent through process rather than tooling alone.
How Nexus handles this
Nexus's patch engine applies change-management discipline by default — staged ring rollout, maintenance windows, and auto-halt on a rollout that starts failing — and every remote job runs against a default-deny capability registry rather than broad standing permission to change anything on an endpoint.
More terms
MSP (Managed Service Provider)
A company that remotely manages a client's IT infrastructure and end-user systems on an ongoing, proactive basis — usually a flat-fee contract, not break-fix billing.
RMM (Remote Monitoring and Management)
Software that lets an MSP monitor device health and perform remote management tasks — patching, scripting, remote control — across every client site from one console.
PSA (Professional Services Automation)
Software that runs the business side of MSP operations — ticketing, SLAs, billing, contracts, and client records — the system of record most MSP work flows through.
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