Understanding Configuration Management
Configuration management plays a vital role in information security of your computer system. Initially, when you first look at information security you would not think of configuration management. However, you need to have an understanding of what items are being protected in order to offer the best security for them. Normally it is more of a challenge to put into operation a good configuration management for an established business than it is for a brand new organization, where you can build from base upwards. Unfortunately, when companies are setting up their computer systems and IT system levels do not take into consideration the extreme importance of implementing a configuration management system.
It can be possible to set up a configuration management process that will align directly with your current IT data retrieval system already in place in your company. This makes it easier for you to have the strongest configuration for the business and results in better security of the data
present.
An important aspect of configuration management is to have clear goals and objectives that you want to obtain with the configuration management. Once you have the goals and objectives set up, the next step is to create methods that will accomplish the objectives.
One recommendation is to begin using a simple objective and modify it to fine-tune it for your particular environment. For instance, your company could basically begin with a hardware and software configuration, data location and data owner. In preparation for your specific company's configuration management development it is important to follow a few basic configuration management ground rules. Recognize Recognize and set up all the infrastructure or communication assets along with the ownership of each asset. The ownership might belong to the IT group or perhaps a particular division of the company based on the over-all organizational arrangement within the business. Once assets are recognized and ownership established, this information should be assigned a configuration documentation that can then be sent to the actual configuration management database. You do not want confusion inside the database so these documentations must have a unique identifier. Change Requests You do not want any changes that are made to the configuration management database to happen with some sort of change request documentation. This will require that a log be created for any type of modification, addition or removal of information within the configuration management database. Tracking All items in this database need to have a history from the original piece of information that was added to the time that the information is dumped from the system. Companies can then regulate which of the hardware and software within the system are operating and thus provide proper maintenance and security checks without any piece of information being accidently over-looked. Auditing It is imperative that the configuration management process be routinely audited to make sure that everything is in proper running order and no additional fine-tuning needs to be done to meet the initial objectives and goals. Summation A quality configuration management process can take up a great deal of time but it is imperative to creating and maintaining a resilient platform for security implementations. These can include such things as patch management, complete network segregation when needed, information protection and many other security measures. The configuration management process needs to be fine-tuned to meet the goals and objectives of the company while blending in with the company's data and information systems.
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