Change is inherent in any organization but never has it been more critical to take an organized approach to it. Especially in today’s cloud computing environment, each change may pose serious security issues and challenges in the form of expanded attack surface. Most businesses today have set up change control processes to document, identify and authorize changes for their IT landscape.
Organizations generally have a Change Advisory Board (CAB), to assess and approve all change requests periodically. However, it is still largely an honor based system where employees do not carry out changes despite having the technical ability to do so. Cloud today adds additional complexity due to multiple services and entry points. Not surprisingly, an unauthorized change could still go undetected and difficult to track, causing monetary or reputation damage.
A survey by Netwrix (#1 provider of change and configuration auditing software) reveals that a surprising majority (57%) of IT professionals across multiple industries in a range of sizes have made undocumented changes to their IT systems that no one else knows about.
This data clearly reveals that unauthorized changes are a reality and a real risk for the businesses as it impacts system availability and security.
Frequent system changes without authorization can cause system downtime and security breaches from internal and external threats while decreasing overall operational efficiency.
Uncontrolled change can also increase security and compliance risks, opening infrastructure to malicious attacks and limiting an organization’s ability to apply compliance strategies or the principles of good corporate governance. The costs associated with unauthorized change are significant and can impact an organization’s customer service, security and compliance and administration.
Yet if nothing is allowed to change or evolve within an enterprise, an organization can fall behind as competitors take the lead in the market.
CloudOptics solution helps businesses have the agility they need to stay competitive in the marketplace and provides IT managers to enforce control over changes to IT infrastructure.
CloudOptics solution becomes a nodal point for carrying out cloud configuration changes. For example an IT manager can enforce the change control via CloudOptics, while in-force, developers may not be able to make changes to sensitive cloud infrastructure elements such as firewalls rules.
As needed, an approved change number may be provided to CloudOptics to request for change window. CloudOptics will relax policy after validating change number against enterprise ITSM to avoid any service outage or security breaches in cloud computing.
This unprecedented level of eliminating unauthorized changes will ensure that all unauthorized changes are prevented to avoid any service outage or security breach.
