Alleviate Risks With Security Configuration Management

By Author: Alice Coope
Total Articles: 213
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Today IT environments are becoming increasingly complex. Presently it supports both distributed and virtual platforms.  Hence companies need to make sure that they have control on data and system management. Furthermore, IT organizations are required to manage several point-based technologies that add to its cost and complexity. As a result, there is a need for a new approach for streamlining IT environment to ensure improved security and IT risk management with a cost efficient ownership. This is where innovative security configuration management comes into action.

Need for Security Configuration Management
A security configuration management solution is essential to manage effectively endpoint configurations. Today end users are able to install and download software, and this result in the scope of application conflicts, that can reduce user productivity and increase IT operation expenses due to security incidents. Monitoring configurations proactively is equally essential as applying crucial patches. This is because 60 percent of exploited vulnerabilities arise due to insecure configurations. Today both ...
... organization and Government regulations are realizing this and that explains the rise in security configuration management requirements.

However, without standardization of endpoint configurations and a holistic visibility, IT administrators cannot know or manage all the applications present in the environment. Hence, an appropriate security configuration management solution is needed that would enable companies to enforce a consistent endpoint configuration policy along with other network security appliances.

Industry solutions for Security Configuration Management
Leading companies specializing in IT Compliance automation have come up with security control automation solutions with consistent and cost efficient and real time detection of policy violations. It also offers automatic control remediation of errors. Furthermore, these solutions anchor security control automation in real-time and allows integration through collaborative services along with third party tools for:-
* Vulnerability assessment and scanning
* Log management and monitoring
* Event and incident management
* Enhancing security control automation by locking down service and network devices to avert unapproved access and configuration modifications

This apart, cloud security and virtualization too are the key elements of innovative security configuration management solutions. It addresses virtualization specific security concerns by:-
* Expanding security to virtual and cloud environments
* Guaranteeing security and compliance of cloud resources
* Offering a single cohesive view of security of every data center and cloud resources

Thus we see that security configuration management is present at the convergence of operations and security and merges elements of automated remediation, configuration compliance and vulnerability assessment. The ultimate objective is to bring down risks by making sure that the systems are configured properly.

Read on -
security vulnerability assessment
infrastructure configuration management