Ben Ennis
Founder, Ennis Studio · Editor, Change Risk Intel
Independent research on IT change management, operational risk, and ITSM/GRC tooling.
Bio
Ben Ennis is a software entrepreneur and product builder based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. He works at ServiceNow, where he has spent more than six years in strategic technology partnerships and ecosystem advisory, working with implementation partners on the ITSM platform that a large share of enterprise change management actually runs on. That is the direct source of the CAB mechanics, CMDB modelling, and change-workflow detail covered on this site.
Alongside that role, he runs Ennis Studio, where he builds and operates SaaS products in adjacent infrastructure and security domains. CertIndex is a Certificate Transparency log API and MCP data service; GuardHound is a consumer domain security monitoring product. Both keep him working in the same territory this site covers — cloud infrastructure, API reliability, certificate and TLS plumbing, and the operational risk that surfaces when any of it changes without warning.
Change Risk Intel is an independent publication and is not affiliated with or endorsed by ServiceNow. Here, Ben writes and edits coverage of IT change management, operational risk intelligence, and ITSM/GRC tooling, with a focus on the practical mechanics that CAB leads, SREs, and risk teams use in production rather than the vendor-facing version of the same topics.
How I approach coverage
Ben's approach to coverage starts with understanding the domain deeply, citing primary sources, and staying vendor-neutral. Change Risk Intel is the editorial expression of that philosophy — applied across ITSM, GRC, and operational risk.
- Domain-deep — no thin summaries or AI-only rewrites.
- Primary-source cited — CISA, NIST, vendor status pages, SEC filings.
- Vendor-neutral — no undisclosed affiliate or sponsor influence.
- Practical — written for the CAB lead, SRE, or risk officer, not the boardroom.
Areas of expertise
- Change management and CAB operations
- Enterprise ITSM platforms, including ServiceNow
- IT service management (ITSM) and GRC tooling
- Operational and cyber risk intelligence
- SaaS architecture and compliance technology
- Certificate Transparency and TLS infrastructure
- Cloud infrastructure, CI/CD, and API reliability
Additional notes
Change Risk Intel is edited from Grand Rapids, Michigan. If you have a tip, a correction, or want to reach the desk, use the contact page.
Recent articles
- This Week in Change Risk — Week of Nov 9, 2026
11 KEV adds incl. OpenSSH and Barracuda, a GitHub migration that hit Actions, Cloudflare's Workers change outage, Jira's 422 limits and NIST SP 800-221r1.
- Google Cloud europe-west2 Incident Report: 6 Lessons for CABs
Google's report on the October 20 London outage traces it to a maintenance posture and a PLC flaw. What it means for failover, capacity and change review.
- November 2026 Patch Tuesday: A CAB Plan for 1,000+ CVEs
November 10 shipped 1,094 Microsoft CVEs, 63 Critical and one exploited Outlook flaw (KEV due Nov 24). How a CAB triages it, plus .NET end of support.
- This Week in Change Risk — Week of Nov 2, 2026
Ivanti, WordPress and a 2024 Apple flaw join KEV, GitHub's retry-storm RCA, Datadog's Q3 usage warning, NIST CSWP 50 and Alpine's sshd restart lesson.
- WordPress CVE-2026-119977: When the Upgrade Is the Risk
CISA's WordPress KEV entry is due Nov 6 and the exposure sits in the upgrade itself. How to scope, triage and run the core update as an emergency change.
- Provider Incident Evidence Retention: Keep It Past 90 Days
AWS, Azure, Google, Cloudflare and GitHub drop most incident history within 30-90 days. How to keep provider evidence for SOC 2, SOX and PCI change audits.
- This Week in Change Risk — Week of Oct 26, 2026
php2shell, Cisco ASA and GitLab KEV adds, three entries with months-old fixes, Cloudflare's provider outage, ServiceNow Q3 margins, PCI's Oct 31 sunsets.
- php2shell KEV Deadline: Evidence First, Then the Emergency Patch
CISA's php2shell KEV entries are due Oct 29 and flagged for forensic triage. How to run the emergency change: collect evidence, patch, restart, verify.
- eMudhra Certificate Compromise: A Trust Store Change Runbook
Browsers blocked the eMudhra intermediates on day 0. Servers, containers and runtimes may not have. A change runbook before Chrome drops the root Oct 27.
- This Week in Change Risk — Week of Oct 19, 2026
Plex and BeyondTrust KEV adds, PHP's critical RCE fix, Google's europe-west2 power failure, the eMudhra CA compromise, and GitLab's fourth critical patch.