IT Best Practices

IT change management and operational stability go hand in hand. Stable business operations - and, ultimately, business continuity - rely on the ability to manage change across an enterprise infrastructure. Change management, in turn, can only occur when IT managers can recognize when change occurs and verify that it is both authorized and purposeful. Establishing this kind of visibility into change and accountability for change management decision-making requires adopting best practices.

The Key to Risk Reduction, Control, and Operational Stability

Best practices frameworks, such as the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL), give organizations powerful controls for assuring effective, verifiable, repeatable IT change and system configuration management processes. Best practices are proven to pay huge dividends in improved systems availability, IT service quality, IT staff productivity, and cost savings, in addition to simplifying regulatory compliance.

Tripwire IT configuration audit and control software (see Tripwire Enterprise) supports IT best practices in several critical ways:

• Integrates IT change management controls process into existing environments
• Provides the means of instilling accountability for change
• Provides visibility across heterogeneous infrastructures
• Enables pinpoint accuracy in identifying change when it occurs
• Maximizes system availability with rapid change diagnosis and remediation
• Delivers vital data for creating configuration libraries that enable verifiable system states, improving processes, capturing audit trails, and enabling forensics
• Verifies that desired changes are made correctly and completely

Learn more about Tripwire IT configuration audit and control solutions. Or go straight to specific products, such as Tripwire Enterprise.

The following resources provide more information about integrating best practices into IT processes.

• Click here to download a copy of the IIA Global Technology Audit Guide on Change Management
• To request a Visible Ops Assessment, send and email to info@itpi.org
• For more information about ITIL, visit http://www.ogc.gov.uk/guidance_itil.asp
• For more information about BS15000, visit http://www.bs15000.org.uk/

• SD Times "Change For The Sake of Change Management"
• Secure Computing "Last Word - Information Security vs. IT Operations"
• Secure Computing "Decentralized IT: New Security Strategies"
• Secure Computing "Last Word - Recovering from the Wreckage, An InfoSec Call To Action"
• Bettermanagement.com "Your ITIL Questions Answered"
• Tripwire in the News