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HP OpenView and Tripwire: Closed-Loop Change Management

page 2 page 2 page 3 page 4 Introduction Change Management: Visibility, Workflow & Accountability Closing the Loop The Bottom Line

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HP OpenView and Tripwire: Closed-Loop Change Management

In most large businesses, critical business processesincluding accounts payable and receivables, order administration, customer billing, inventory management, and payrollrun automatically on a vast, complex computing and networking infrastructure. Its tempting to believe that this infrastructure is a monumental, unchanging entity and once policies are established and the systems are running, everything is fine. In fact, IT operations are fluid. New servers and network devices are put into production. New software is installed. Old software is patched. Hundreds of configurations can change daily. Systems can change from a known and trusted stateeither intentionally or via a phenomenon known as integrity drift. Security breaches or unintentional errors create vulnerabilities that may go unnoticed. Changes made while remedying security breaches or patching software should also be fully documented. Operational integrity of business processes and the underlying IT infrastructure hinges on change and configuration management processes. Systematic event management, documented process, and managed workflow are critical components in enterprise systems management. When these capabilities are combined with proven change monitoring and reporting software, enterprises can ensure that critical processes are enforceable and that all monitored systems match a known and trusted state. In todays business environment, regulators and auditors mandate that businesses not only understand what is changing in their IT environments, but that they demonstrate the ability to map all changes back to valid business reasons. Therefore, when an organization implements internal controls to satisfy compliance requirements, the only way to assure that internal controls are effective is to assure the integrity of the underlying IT change and configuration management process. The silver lining in all of this? When IT best practices and integrity assurance frameworks are implemented, organizations can systematically evaluate systems and controls against a known good state. This aids in satisfying compliance regulations such as Sarbanes-Oxley Section 404. Furthermore, these capabilities provide benefits that enable enterprises to achieve higher systems availability, better IT service quality, improved IT staff productivity, and significant cost savings.

Change Management: Visibility, Workflow, and Accountability

Operational change management is a prerequisite to providing high IT service quality. It is not optional, says the Gartner Group (Best Practices for Operational Change Management, March 6, 2003). While most IT managers would agree, the difficulty has long been lack of visibility into changes that affect their operations. Now that compliance regulations such as Sarbanes-Oxley are mandated for SEC-regulated companies, organizations must have that visibility. At its essence, change management involves three key aspects: visibility, workflow, and accountability. HP OpenView provides a central integration point from which to monitor the health of enterprise infrastructure, providing a single pane of glass approach to systems management. In conjunction with heterogeneous data sensors like Tripwire, HP OpenView enhances the perspective, context, and awareness of the IT operations staff. Workflow management is achieved using HP OpenView Service Desk. Service Desk is a service management tool that displays and manages the relationships and workflow between business services, supporting technologies, and the people who are responsible for keeping everything running.

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HP OpenView and Tripwire: Closed-Loop Change Management

Tripwire products provide visibility into system change across the heterogeneous enterprise, and are the means to achieve closed-loop accountability within the change management process. By providing detailed change information to HP OpenView Operations and HP OpenView Service Desk, Tripwire enables a closedloop IT management strategy in which every change is known and explainable.

1 Change Request 6 Detect, Review & Verify 2 Change Impact Resource Estimates and Assignments

Change Management Process

5 Change Implementation 3 Change Approval or Rejection

4 Change Build and Testing

Closing the Loop

The HP OpenView IT Service Management solution, combined with the Tripwire configuration audit and control solution, provides a practical means of achieving an enforceable change management process. Tripwire software enables IT to integrate change monitoring and reporting into its operations. This means IT staff can immediately detect and pinpoint change, reinforce controls, prove compliance, deter attacks and prevent policy circumvention. Tripwire software establishes a digital inventory of known, trusted files and their attributes and uses it as a baseline for monitoring changes. Changes from the baselines known and trusted state are recorded, and detailed change information is fed into HP OpenView Operations and HP OpenView Service Desk. Service Desk tracks change orders, incidents, and configurations of servers and devices that comprise the IT infrastructure. Tripwire software provides the ability to detect specific changes to these assets in order to be able to report and correlate these changes with change orders or incidents. Tripwire solutions are integrated into the process flow through a certified Smart Plug In (SPI) for HP OpenView Operations, and a Smart Link (SLI) for HP Service Desk. Through these integration points, Tripwire provides functionality to allow change managers to close the loop and validate changes made to specific systems or configuration items. This enables verification that change orders have been completed, and provides third-party validation so change managers can reconcile actual changes with open change orders within Service Desk.

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HP OpenView and Tripwire: Closed-Loop Change Management

OpenView

Service Desk

OpenView Operations

Network Node Manager

Tripwire for Servers

Tripwire Enterprise

Servers

Servers and Network Devices

In addition to detecting and validating authorized changes, the Service Desk SLI integration provides a mechanism for the detection of unauthorized changes, enabling tight process control by detecting changes that don't have an open change order associated with them. This also reduces the time required to recover from unauthorized changes.

The Bottom Line

Whether your focus is on audit and regulatory compliance, improved IT cost metrics, better service levels, increased security, or dozens of other business drivers, you will benefit from a robust, enforceable change management strategy built on best practices and supported by industry leaders like HP and Tripwire. Closed-loop change management from HP OpenView and Tripwire helps enterprises maintain stable information services, improve IT efficiency, and improve compliance capabilities. And all of this is possible while achieving lower IT operations costs.

US TOLL FREE: 1.800.TRIPWIRE MAIN: 503.276.7500 FAX: 503.223.0182 326 SW Broadway, 3rd Floor Portland, OR 97205 USA

www.tripwire.com

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