Regulatory compliance. Server virtualization. IT Service Management. Business Service Management. Business Continuity planning. Vulnerability assessments. Information Life-cycle Management. Change Management. Service Level Agreements. IT departments are inundated with a neverending, diverse list of standards, regulations, initiatives, projects and best practices. As unique as the tasks are related to each of these challenges, they all hold one thing in common. Success depends on being able to produce understandable reports validating expected settings, whether to internal policies or external regulatory standards. Ecora offers the industry’s only solution for automating detailed reporting that ensures Enterprise Configuration VisibilityTM—reducing the time and cost associated with IT control, compliance, and security, and ensuring the highest levels of availability and performance for your organization.
1 Automate IT Audit and Compliance Reporting and Processes
In this era where new compliance regulations are becoming law on an increasingly frequent basis, organizations are now facing multiple audits from internal auditors and external regulators. With a constant need to prepare for the next audit, critical IT projects can get delayed and hold the business back from implementing important technologies that could provide a competitive advantage. Ensuring the integrity, confidentiality, and availability of data is the primary objective of these regulations. Each law requires you to prove control over the information in your IT infrastructure and who has access to it. Failure to demonstrate compliance can lead to costly disclosures in a corporation’s annual report, substantial financial penalties, jail time, brand-tarnishing press coverage and more.
Manual efforts to collect data and generate reports validating compliance are cumbersome, time-consuming, error-prone, and, ultimately, impractical. However, with Ecora Software, you can automate IT audit and compliance reporting. In fact, you can use preinstalled report templates to perform a pre-audit of your IT environment, pinpointing any existing security misconfigurations in your servers. Then, after any problems have been identified and remediated, you can generate up-to-date reports as a deliverable for those auditing your infrastructure.
2 Monitor and Identify Any Possible System Change
Controlling the complex relationships among the millions of configuration items in your infrastructure could be the difference between efficiently delivering uninterrupted service to employees and customers or struggling with intermittent service outages, costly slowdowns in transmitting information, and the potential of a security vulnerability being exposed. Maintaining control requires the ability to identify the myriad of changes taking place throughout your environment and quickly pinpointing any potential problems. Even with a change control process in place, it’s impossible to validate that approved changes were made correctly—and that there weren’t any new, unanticipated changes. Even more critical is the need to find any unauthorized changes that may have been made outside the change control process.
Only Ecora solutions can identify and report on all configuration changes—both approved and otherwise—across virtually any operating system, database, application, and device on your infrastructure.
3 Accelerate ITIL Adoption
The ITIL concept emerged in the 1980s, when the British government determined that the level of IT service quality provided to them was not sufficient. Large companies and government agencies in Europe adopted the framework very quickly in the early 1990s. It is now, by far, the most widely adopted IT service management best practice approach in the world. The Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) is organized into two main areas: service support and service delivery. Service Support includes: Change Management, Release Management, Problem Management, Incident Management, Configuration Management, and Service Desk. Service Delivery involves: IT Financial Management, IT Continuity Management, Capacity Management, Availability Management, and Service Level Management.
The key to rapidly adopting and implementing ITIL standards is an automated reporting solution. With Ecora solutions, organizations accelerate ITIL adoption through our automated, agentless collection of configuration items vital to all of the Service Support and Delivery disciplines and providing pre-installed report templates to quickly validate appropriate management controls are being maintained.
4 Improve Your Change Management Process By Automating Change Validation
In order to control the negative consequences of uncontrolled change, many organizations have invested in automated solutions for recording changes like BMC Remedy, IBM Tivoli, HP OpenView, or others. While these solutions do bring structure to the change approval process, their weakness is they have no method of identifying whether the approved changes can actually be validated as being deployed in the environment.
