Are Detective Controls Sufficient in Change Management?

Recently I came across an article “Why detective controls are important in change management?”.  This is a great article which sets the stage for talking about the importance of controls in Change Management.  I strongly agree with the author and want to extend the idea.

The presence of detective controls based on a scanning approach can lead to gaps where the change was performed and then reverted before the next scan was executed.

Consider the scenario where a user performs a change and quickly reverts it.  With scan-based solutions, there is no way to detect such changes and such changes can cause outages and violate various Service Level Agreements that a business owner might be accountable to.  Wouldn’t it be more effective to have detective controls detect changes in realtime and capture the five dimensions of change – who, what, where, when and why?  This reminds me of a customer quote after an outage caused by a change “Who changed what, when and my god WHY?”

Extending the concept of controls, the next thing that IT staff is now looking for is “preventative controls”.  Would it not be great to prevent change from being executed if the change was not approved?

by
Rishi Bhargava
Director, Product Management
rishi@solidcore.com