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Configuration Management Transcription

Welcome to our configuration and change management module. It is important that you securely provision your resources. Provision means to set up or supply credentials or some other access to resources. Your systems, controls, and your users need to be properly provisioned before they are allowed to connect to your systems.

It is important that you can figure the resources on your network to support a specific function. You should establish a known secure baseline for your devices per your security policies and you should make sure that systems are up to the specific level of security required before allowing them to connect to your systems.

You should test the systems to verify that they consistently function properly and that all security controls are working to keep out unauthorized individuals. You should monitor for any unauthorized changes in your network or on specific systems. And if a change is needed, you should follow a structured approach using configuration management.

Configuration management, or CM, is designed to establish and maintain information about your resources throughout their life cycle by documenting a configuration management plan. This plan will define the roles and responsibilities of individuals involved in the process, will determine how configuration item, or CI, changes are made, define how you will document and maintain version control, and also to communicate all of the aspects of configuration management to your project stakeholders.

Configuration control is where you systematically control and manage all of the configurations on your systems throughout the life cycle of the project. You should make sure that only necessary configuration changes are made and make sure that you always understand the impact of the change that you are making before you implement the change.

For the CISSP examination, you should remember that configuration management helps you to make sure that only authorized changes are being made. And you should also remember that you only make necessary changes and that you understand how a change will affect your organization prior to making the change. A configuration management database, or CMDB, is an ITIL model term for the centralized location where you keep all of your organization's configuration information.

This will drive and support the change management process and also provide you with assurance that the individual members of your teams are always working off of the latest version of your software, documentation, and data. It will also contain resource information such as location of your resources, and their maintenance state and when they need to be maintained next, the ownership of the items. The customer that uses the resource, the business need for the resource, as well as the DAA, or designated approving authority, who authorizes that item in your organization. It would also contain information about the relationship with other configurable items, or CIs, any legal, regulatory, or business requirements, and any specific architecture issues or implementation issues that you need to be familiar with.

Change management is an administrative control and controls any changes made in your enterprise during the life cycle of your equipment or resources. It will help to make sure that beneficial changes can be made with a minimum risk and a minimum amount of disruption to your information technology services.

Controls are put in place to make sure that the formal procedures are carried out within the range of your change management policy to make sure that you're ensuring stability and security. Change management should be included in all phases of your development, deployment, and operations of your resources. If you're not carefully evaluating changes you could destabilize even well-designed and well-implemented systems, causing major problems or security risks in your organization.

And this is why you should carefully evaluate any changes before you implement them. This concludes our configuration and change management module. Thank you for watching.