There’s never been so much change happening across an IT estate. And it’s constant. On a day-to-day basis, IT teams might be creating and monitoring user permissions, deploying any scheduled operating system (OS) updates or integrating new third-party software tools. This is not to mention all the change carried out by external providers, outsourced teams and employees.
Change itself is not a problem. Indeed, it’s essential for ongoing security, resilience and modernization. Change that isn’t actively managed, however, is a different story. This could be change that goes unnoticed, like an external patch that automatically updates a system without IT oversight, or change that is forced, like rushing an OS upgrade to meet an impending end-of-life deadline.
The trouble is many organizations have to monitor incredibly large and complex IT estates that can contain hundreds or thousands of business-critical endpoints. And so much change is now automated or carried out by external parties. Consequently, without the right software and processes, this means that IT teams can have limited visibility into many changes taking place.
These changes might seem small or innocuous on their own. But left unmanaged, they mean systems are drifting away from their intended baseline, which adds risk to each subsequent change – and that’s when systems can fail and damaging outages occur.
Change that is not managed effectively also increases vulnerability to cyber attacks. Misconfigurations or gaps in security coverage materially enabled more than 90% of cyber incidents investigated in recent research, showing how seemingly minor changes or lapses in oversight can create openings for attackers.
So, what are some of the ways IT teams can effectively control change across their estate?
Here are three key steps:
1. Understand
The first step is to gain greater visibility into change across the IT estate, so teams can identify potential risks and understand their impact before they cause disruption. Achieving this requires the use of automation tools that enable continuous drift detection. With this in place, IT teams can monitor their entire estate – servers, end-user computing, networks, on-prem and cloud – for configuration change in real time.
To do this, the technology needs to scan every layer in the infrastructure to establish a known-good configuration baseline to use. The platform can then flag any time a change causes a device to drift from this intended baseline, while also allowing teams to gain visibility on the gap between the change that was expected and approved and what is actually running in the estate. This means a manual fix or external patch gets flagged, rather than flying under the radar until it triggers an outage or failure.
2. Respond swiftly
One of the key challenges IT teams face is reconciling and approving change. Inevitably, with so much change taking place, trying to manually perform this process leaves room for errors and can delay approvals. So, to reduce manual effort, the next step is to automate change approval processes, using software to automatically reconcile every detected change against approved baselines and validate what steps were taken against those planned in the change request.
With this, teams will then be able to rapidly respond to unapproved changes and use their time to take action on issues before they escalate and impact operations. More broadly, this also speeds up the delivery of new upgrades or projects and gives IT teams greater freedom to innovate safely.
3. Protect
There’s always a risk of a cyber incident taking place. But when teams understand what’s happening in their estate and accelerate their approval processes, they can also detect and remediate issues faster and reduce their mean time to resolution. This can help to mitigate a failure escalating into an outage, or minimize the cost of an incident, while also strengthening overall resilience.
Protecting systems also means ensuring they are compliant and that teams can export defensible evidence on demand whenever a regulator requests to see it. This also highlights why continuous compliance that generates clear and auditable trails is so important. Otherwise, audits are often accompanied by a time-consuming, manual search through spreadsheets and screenshots for evidence, and this also means information can be out-of-date by the time it’s collected.
Controlled change unlocks innovation
IT change is constant, and with the rapid development of AI and cloud tools, it’s also only going to increase. This provides more opportunities for companies to modernize, but it also creates more risk when it happens without control.
To maintain control and prevent damaging incidents from taking place, IT teams need to understand when configuration change happens across their estate, accelerate the rate at which change can be approved and reconciled, and protect their systems through faster remediation and establishing a real-time audit trail.
While it can be easy to put off resilience projects in favor of innovation, the threats facing IT are becoming stronger and more varied, so controlling change has to be a key priority. If anything, it provides the foundation to innovate successfully and safely.
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