Right now the news is filled with stories of Great British institutions facing cyber threats, with companies like Marks & Spencer,
the Co-Op, and Harrods suffering attacks that disrupt trading and revenue.
In the IT Industry it is largely held that a large percentage of problems that are caused are due to unexpected outcomes of Change in the environment, or mistakes being made having unforeseen consequences on end user and in some instance end consumer facing services.
Indeed it is not unusual for things to be left untidy after IT Changes have been implemented, things such as users retaining elevated account privileges, firewall ports left open or machines left in an insecure state.
These mistakes or oversights can leave an organisation open to abuse and attack, not because those undertaking Changes intended for that to be the case or that the Changes they were undertaking were intended to leave the infrastructure vulnerable, but simply an error of judgement or a lack of understanding of how various elements of the estate interact with one another or teams not being aware of what is being worked on by other teams within the organisation… there can be many reasons for the situation to be what it is.
One of the challenges in IT security is maintaining hygiene and oversight, which is where Configuration Management tools like CMDB come into play.
This lack of hygiene, understanding and communication means even the most complete databases in an company, the Configuration Management Database (CMDB) or Service Management tools present to help departments and teams stay joined up can fail to take into account all possibilities. With many organisations having very complex infrastructure setups, some with on-premise, others with a mix of on-premise and cloud and others with on-premise and multi-cloud capabilities it’s easy to see how things can become foggy and it becomes hard for any one system to hold all this information to be referenced in one place.
Many companies rely on their CMDB to help give the holistic view of the estate, they are leveraged heavily by Change and Configuration Management teams when analysing for impact of Change in the environment and they are seen as a central point of reference. But they fail because in the world of Configuration Management, of which I’m a big advocate, the CMDB does not hold all information about everything – how could it? – If the CMDB were to hold everything about everything you would have a seriously unwieldy data store that would take an eternity to search, or keep in sync for that matter with the real world.
What is needed are smart ways to augment data from the various trusted sources on demand so as a consumer data you have as full a picture as possible of your estate, the Changes that are ongoing in it, the Changes that are to come and those responsible for them. Add to this you also want to ensure that your Service Desk is aware of Change and your Change Management teams are able to trust that Change is occurring only when approved and completed successfully.
Having checks and balances on Change does not mean adding more process, it doesn’t mean tying people’s hands, it doesn’t mean a longer CAB process what it means is that dotting I’s and crossing T’s needs to be automated so that the firewall DOES look like it’s supposed to at the end of the Change, that Bob’s elevated privileges are rescinded at the end of the Change and that the filesystem you were working on should be in a certain state at the end of the Change.
Here at Cloudhouse we work with customers and organisations that want to get a handle on Change but still enable Change to occur in their organisation, they want to ensure their business can evolve at a pace that enables them to grow safe in the knowledge that the technology that provides value can evolve with them, securely and safely meeting the needs of their business, people and standards applied to them.
Providing visibility into the technology that runs your business with the assurance that standards are being adhered to, that devices are configured how they should be and that Change does not accidentally result in those with nefarious intentions into your organisation.
By leveraging Guardian by Cloudhouse, organisations can strike the balance between enabling change and ensuring security. Whether integrating with ServiceNow or FreshService, automated reconciliation ensures your IT estate remains configured and protected, safeguarding business continuity.
