What is Cloud Computing Change Management?

Cloud change management is a structured approach to planning, approving, testing, and deploying changes to cloud infrastructure while minimizing risk and maintaining compliance. Key benefits include improved visibility and governance, increased reliability, reduced incident risk, faster deployment velocity, and better cost control. A solid strategy combines IaC, CI/CD pipelines, policy-as-code guardrails, and audit trails. The post outlines a six-step implementation guide: aligning team processes, gaining cloud visibility, automating deployments, layering governance policies, embedding audit controls, and iterating continuously. Relevant tooling spans ITSM platforms, version control, CI/CD, infrastructure orchestration (e.g., Spacelift, Terraform), GitOps tools, policy engines (OPA, Sentinel), drift detection, and security scanners.