A standard enterprise IT environment is typically composed of widely disparate hardware from multiple vendors running a variety of operating systems and can be spread across multiple datacenters, worksites and the cloud. Because of this growing distribution of IT assets and ever-growing sensitivity of data assets, there is an increased need for adherence to industry standards, government regulations and corporate policies. These often robust auditing requirements demand increased accountability for changes introduced into the IT environment.
Concurrently, within these ever-growing IT environments there pressure to increase IT productivity. Tight or frozen budgets and attention to the ROI of IT expenditures are major concerns on the financial side, while SLA and MTTR/ MTBF issues are “top of mind” with IT managers.
Adding a certain amount of chaos to an already complex situation, “cowboys” still frequently rule those “Wild West” IT environments that exist when there is no enforcement of existing change management policies. Enterprises have traditionally lacked the ability to detect and report change, so changes to IT assets remain unidentified—regardless of the initiator’s intent or purpose.
The downside to uncontrolled change is wide-ranging, and includes:
- Unplanned work that eats up personhours and keeps teams from more productive tasks
- Preventable downtime that leads to missed SLAs
- Difficult and time-consuming audit preparation and findings
- Weakened security posture
Why You Need Tripwire to Help You Control Change
Tripwire solutions provide the following capabilities, critical to controlling change:
- Ensures configurations meet organizational standards
- Detects all changes across the entire IT service stack
- Captures in real-time detailed configuration change data
- Audits configuration changes independent of automated tools
- Reconciles changes with organizational change policies
- Allows change management systems to reconcile with change tickets
- Provides comprehensive, multi-level reporting and alerting
- Links with CMDBs to assure configuration and change data integrity
- Can roll back inappropriate changes
- Support for virtualized and cloud environments
When control over IT infrastructure is improved, a number of important advantages are gained: compliance with regulations and internal policies is simplified, “firefighting” is reduced, the enterprise runs more smoothly, afterhours calls no longer interrupt nights and weekends, users are more satisfied because services are always available, and budget flexibility is increased as operating costs decrease.