Ray Smyth of Swindon’s The IPstore says, “There is a lot happening in your IT network and you need help to determine what might be business critical.”
Once your business requires more than a few laptops and printers, you start to create an IT network infrastructure. There can be many elements and these will include familiar items such as Routers, Switches, Fire Walls, File Servers, Active Directory (AD), VM, Databases, Storage, SharePoint – the list is long. Each one of these devices will generate information about itself and this can be useful for IT managers and administrators. It can help them with device management, service configuration, and performance and error reporting; they are generally called (system) logs.
It is very easy to create a network with hundreds of elements, each independently producing data logs and in most cases it is only possible to view the log content manually. This is usually achieved by logging into each device and using a command line interface (CLI) which is not really for the average user as it may use programming language style commands. The information held in these logs can be quite critical; it may indicate an unauthorised access, accidental or deliberate configuration changes and reports that presage massive system down-time with evolving problems that can be extremely time-consuming to trace and resolve. The inadequate review of logs may conceal evidence of an advancing security compromise such as an APT (Advanced Persistent Threat) which could wreak havoc on your organisation.
There is only one response to this challenge and that is a tool to automatically audit changes in all aspects of the IT infrastructure, and in real-time. Such a solution can report and alert (in real-time) against rules and exceptions, produce simple compliance reports and offer reliable forensic analysis. Such forensic analysis can be used to quickly locate a problem and aid a prosecution in the case of malfeasance. Some tools in this category will take snapshots of key system data at prescribed times. This can provide a very fast recovery to, for example, the total loss of all Active Directory settings and entries.
It would be wrong to think of such a software tool as a security device, however an IT Change Audit solution does sit as a sentinel and could prove to be very effective in managing data within the requirements of regulatory and legislative compliance. Some will think that IT Change Auditing is time-consuming, difficult and expensive – it isn’t. A good solution can be up and running in hours without days of consultancy and once it is, your organisations head will be elevated away from the sand of your competitors and those that wish to do you harm.
The IPstore is offering a free Business IT mentoring session for the first five qualifying SBN readers to apply. To find out more contact The IPstore at: Advantage@TheIPstore
