Burning Issues – Documenting Privileged User Changes
By Terry Schurter 
Enforcing compliance (like with the ITIL framework) at the foundational level of the IT infrastructure is a costly manual effort fraught with inaccuracies. Each time a change is made to the IT infrastructure, the change must be documented and it must follow the prescribed compliance process. Most of the time, change documentation is entered into one or more systems manually, burning up precious man-hours and falling prey to human error. The changes are triggered from a variety of sources including remediating incidents, installing patches, updating hardware or software configurations, upgrading software, and so on.
For many IT organizations, keeping up with change documentation for compliance is a burning issue. More and more we are tasked with documenting the details of every change made to the IT Infrastructure, requiring our admins and engineers to manually document each and every change they make.
With IT Foundation Management those changes are recorded automatically, down to the keystroke. Records are created in real-time, they are accurate, and manual documentation requirements are completely eliminated. Changes can even be scanned in real-time to detect threats and proactively enforce policies. The change records are captured automatically and compliance processes are enforced programmatically.
ConsoleWorks allows us to enforce the ITIL framework and accountability on critical network servers by recording server and privileged user activity from the root accounts. These records are then safely stored in ConsoleWorks, where no one can tamper with them.Global Tool Lead, Leading Pharmaceutical
It’s a win, win on every front. Systems administrators don’t enjoy manually documenting changes they do – they would rather spend their time solving technical challenges. With ITFM the time previously spent on manually documenting changes becomes available for other activities, often giving the IT team an opportunity to devote more time and energy to strategic priorities. The business is better served with the accurate records that prove the practice without concern for errors introduced by the manual documentation process. The company saves money. More value-added work gets done…
Whether driven by ROI, compliance, or just good old common sense, automating change documentation with IT Foundation Management is the right way to get the job done.
Tags
Access Control Audit Automation Best Practice Change Management Compliance Configuration Configuration Ports Cyber Asset Cyber Security Detect Event Detection Event Lifecycle Management Events Forensic Records Healthcare HIPAA IEM Isolate IT Foundation IT Infrastructure IT Operations Log Files Monitoring MTTR NERC-CIP Out-of-Band Patching Patterns PCI Persistence Privileged Interfaces Privileged User Real-Time Records Remediation ROI Root Cause Security Security Risk Simplifying Work Solaris System Administrators Utilities Virtual Machine-
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