McAfee Change Reconciliation

McAfee Change Reconciliation Overview:

McAfee Change Reconciliation creates a comprehensive inventory of the changes carried out on all systems, grouping and matching them with change tickets and approvals. It flags ad-hoc changes made without approvals, and documents emergency changes that were made with improper documentation.

Description:

McAfee Change Reconciliation creates a comprehensive inventory of changes carried out on all systems, grouping and matching them with change tickets and approvals. It flags ad hoc changes made without approvals, and reports on emergency changes that were made with improper documentation. Implemented in conjunction with McAfee Change Control or McAfee Configuration Control, this solution provides granular change details encapsulated and attached within the change management solution (such as BMC/Remedy) for automated closed-loop processing of the trouble ticket or change request.

With Change Reconciliation, you can:

• Extend the reach and enhance the efficacy of enterprise change management solutions. McAfee provides the unique endpoint ability to enforce policies and control, while monitoring all system-level changes.
• Eliminate ad hoc changes. Change Reconciliation automatically provides detailed documentation for authorized changes and creates incident tickets for emergency changes, reducing the burden on IT staff and meeting internal compliance.
• Integrate with other widely used change management systems, configuration management databases, and even custom ticketing systems to ensure strong controls for Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) projects and those managing change-sensitive critical service infrastructures.

Benefits and Features:

Solutions:

Automate change policy, and ensure effectiveness

Most IT organizations today recognize the importance of change to their operational effectiveness and have invested in tools such as change management, data center automation, or a service desk. But often there is a gap between actual change activity and the documented change management process. This change control gap leads to manual activity by IT departments to control and minimize the negative impact of change.

McAfee® Change Reconciliation, which operates in concert with McAfee Change Control, correlates changes made on servers to change tickets documented in existing ticketing systems and integrates with popular change management systems such as HP Service Manager and BMC Remedy. McAfee also integrates with popular configuration management databases (CMDB) such as BMC Atrium and HP Universal CMDB.

McAfee Change Reconciliation verifies that approved changes have been deployed and identifies unapproved/unticketed changes (for example, emergency changes) with a high degree of accuracy. With McAfee Change Reconciliation, compliance becomes more cost effective. The solution automatically groups related changes and provides a mechanism to easily document emergency or undocumented changes detected on a system. When deployed with McAfee Change Control, the software can be configured to prevent any unauthorized changes to the infrastructure, especially changes made without an approved change ticket.

Highlights:

• Reconcile actual changes to approved, ticketed change requests
• Automatically create new tickets for unticketed changes
• Create tickets for changes made to staging environment, and reconcile the ticket with production environment changes
• Request exception reporting on the differences between staging and production changes

McAfee Change Reconciliation in Action

McAfee Change Reconciliation automatically validates changes corresponding to an approved and implemented request for change (RFC) based on the identifying hostname or configuration item (CI), actual start time, actual end time, and username. After reconciliation, the RFC is updated with detailed information about the change, including the name of the user who made the change, the CI/hostname that changed, and a link to a detailed report of changes.

McAfee Change Reconciliation can also be used to highlight differences in changes deployed in staging and production environments. The software can track changes on staging environments and create a manifest ticket to be used for production implementation.

By adding McAfee Change Control to this equation, IT change management can technically enforce the documented enterprise change policy. For example, a policy can be enforced that allows a change to be made only if there is an approved RFC and the time of change is between the scheduled start and end time.

Enriching the CMDB with Real-Time Change Events

CMDB software allows you to capture, document, and store both physical components and logical elements. Some CMDBs also offer advanced capabilities such as impact analysis and access controls for creating and maintaining the CMDB. The McAfee Change Reconciliation adapter for HP uCMDB and BMC Atrium integrates comprehensive real-time change data into the CMDB. The change data collected by McAfee enhances the data available in the CMDB which benefits the applications that rely on the CMDB. Change data collected from McAfee can be accessed from the CMDB interface either via topology query language (TQL), a contextual launch of the McAfee Change Reconciliation interface, or from applications that leverage the CMDB data.

Closed-Loop Change Management for Improved Compliance and Availability

McAfee Change Reconciliation results in reduced cost of compliance, increased availability, and improved information technology infrastructure library (ITIL) processes. McAfee integrates with both default and customized installations of HP ServiceManager, HP Release Control, and BMC Remedy using the out-of-the-box connector. McAfee also provides an application programming interface (API) for integration with custom workflows.

System Requirements:

Supported Operating Systems (OS)

• Windows NT
• Windows 2000/2003/2008
• Windows XP/Vista
• Windows XPE
• Windows XP/Vista (64-bit)
• Windows 2003/2008 (64-bit)
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3/4/5
• CentOS 4/5
• SUSE Enterprise Linux 9/10
• Oracle Enterprise Linux 5
• Solaris 8/9/10
• HP-UX 11.00/11.11/11.23
• AIX 5.2/5.3
• IBM i5/OS (AS400) V5R3/V5R4/V6R1
• IBM 4690 OS V5

Supported Databases

• Oracle 8i/9i/10g
• SQL Server 7/2000/2005
• DB2 8.x/9.x
• DB2 for iSeries V5R4

Documentation:

Download the McAfee Change Reconciliation Solutions Datasheet (PDF).