Abstract: A method of evaluating change risk in an IT environment, including collecting environment state snapshots of configuration parameters in the IT environment, invoking a manifest of a change on the environment state snapshots to form simulated environment state snapshots, analyzing the simulated environment state snapshots relative to the environment state snapshots, deriving a risk score based on the analysis and selectively perform the change responsive to the risk score.

Abstract: A system and a method for characterizing an application the method including one or more of monitoring installation of an application and recording information relating to one or more file system, registry and database resources created or modified during installation of the application, monitoring an application run and recording information relating to one or more file system, registry, database and network resources accessed during run of the application and manually entering information relating to one or more file system, registry, database and network resources employed by the application and filtering the information to provide filtered information and classifying the filtered information to obtain classified information.