Closing the loop with Change Control

In a world of constantly emerging threats, security is a tough job: but the concepts of best practice have been devised for a reason. The challenge for organizations is to attain that balance between unworkable change control practices and an anarchic environment that provides ample opportunities to hide.

Change control provides a procedural means to compartmentalize expected change activity and, in theory at least, isolate unexpected changes including breach activity. But despite pleas from security experts and the advice of best practice guidelines, including ITIL, COBIT, and FISMA, to deploy effective change control, the vast majority of organizations simply cannot make it work. For most, the constraint of highly bureaucratic change requests creates delays in urgent system changes that add more risk – it is perceived – than a potential security breach.

Yet the business damage that occurs when hackers can hide in plain sight in this way is widely recognized. 

Our CTO, Mark Kedgley explains how to automate intelligent change control using file integrity monitoring to cut down the noise, distinguish the unexpected from the planned and, finally, close the change control loop on Continuity Central.