Configuration Audit Briefing Center

Change happens. IT infrastructures are in a constant state of flux — and that can be a good thing, unless changes are unseen, unplanned and unverified. Unmanaged change potentially opens the door to outages, security hacks, compliance breaches and long and costly audit processes, but change done right opens the door to business acceleration. This site is a collaboration between TechWeb and Tripwire.

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Whitepapers

  • Challenges and Opportunities of PCIChallenges and Opportunities of PCI

    Controls-particularly those around change and configuration issues-are critical to meeting the PCI DSS (Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard) mandates. As it happens, they also are critical to delivering the sustained and continuous improvement to stabilize the IT environment and avert risk that define top-performing companies. Find out why change auditing carries so much weight. Read the whitepaper »

  • Configuration Audit and Control: 10 Critical Factors to CCM SuccessConfiguration Audit and Control: 10 Critical Factors to CCM Success

    Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) points out that in today's complex IT infrastructures, businesses need a single, independent source for enforcing and reporting on a change policy across the organization. Learn the 10 key elements that are important to Configuration Audit and Control solutions so that you can improve your systems management productivity, reduce costs and sustain configuration visibility. Read the whitepaper »

  • Optimizing Infrastructure ControlOptimizing Infrastructure Control

    An investment in configuration assessment and change auditing solutions can stabilize IT operations, lowering the operational costs associated with the IT infrastructure; and provide a solid foundation that increases the effectiveness of the investment in information security. Discover why IDC Research says TripWire can claim complete configuration control as its own domain. Read the whitepaper »

Ask the Expert

Q.

The IT infrastructure is constantly changing, and that can lead to a drift away from desired states that threaten the ability to deliver business services. How can IT managers and administrators deal with this problem?

A.

Complexity of IT components, new technologies such as virtualization, problems with IT system reliability, and an overwhelmed IT staff all may contribute to difficulties in maintaining the integrity of IT foundations. That can result in problems including poorer performance, weakened security, and compliance gaffes that impact business service delivery.

Businesses have to make ensuring IT infrastructure integrity a priority in order to optimize efficiency, increase confidence and trust in the IT infrastructure, improve security, and maintain proper regulatory compliance. IT research firm IDC has recommended that they do this through deploying change auditing technology. This requires establishing a baseline of a desired state for any object (such as file systems or system registries) and piece of infrastructure (from servers to firewalls); making comparisons between the current state and the baseline state; flagging deviations; and alerting appropriate parties so that rapid correction and recovery can occur. Couple change auditing with configuration assessment to gain further specific business benefits including: saving time and money by detecting undesired changes to software configurations or operational activities that would normally be undetectable, so that they are proactively discovered and corrected; improving IT staff efficiency and processes with policies for regularly running checks on systems, such as server configurations; and supporting the CIO's fiduciary responsibility with a change auditing policy that ensures he or she can effectively control and monitor information assets.

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