Change auditing and Netwrix Auditor
Michael Fimin is the CEO of Netwrix. In this interview he talks about the importance of change auditing and outlines the features of Netwrix Auditor.
Why should organizations think about change auditing?
Frequent security breaches and compliance violations have shown us the vulnerability of proactive security systems, such as firewalls, IDS, and antiviruses. They should not be treated as the only line of defense against external and internal threats, as they identify explicit attacks while hidden attacks are traced only by changes in the IT infrastructure. Our recent survey has revealed that the majority of IT pros have little or no real ability to audit the changes they make.
This is a risky practice that may jeopardize the security of the business, while change auditing ensures that all changes are tracked in order to facilitate the investigation in case of a security violation and information leakage. Change auditing is a must for passing compliance audits and helping with root cause analysis, which leads to decreasing system downtime and improving business continuity.
Introduce Netwrix Auditor to our readers.
Netwrix Auditor is a change and configuration auditing platform that allows you to know exactly what happens in your entire IT infrastructure. It audits changes made to security configurations, systems, and data and provides information as a set of easy-to-read reports. You will always know who changed what, when, and where, as well as before and after values for every change. The use of change auditing software such as Netwrix Auditor helps to streamline compliance, strengthen security, and simplify root cause analysis.
What systems does Netwrix Auditor cover?
Netwrix Auditor provides coverage for Active Directory, Exchange, File Servers, SQL Server, SharePoint, VMware, Windows Server, and more. Actually, we can provide auditing of virtually any other system or application, even if it does not produce any logs. This is accomplished via session activity auditing with search and replay or tracking of configurations stored in databases.
What are the new features of Netwrix Auditor 6.0?
The new Netwrix Auditor 6.0 includes two major features and over 25 enhancements.
The first major feature is Enterprise Overview dashboards that provide complete visibility into what is happening in your network. It does not matter where changes are made—in Active Directory, Exchange, File Servers, or other systems—the Enterprise Overview will notify you and make them available for future analysis. You can quickly get a bird’s-eye view of your IT changes and dive into the most suspicious areas with just a click. Or you can get detailed information about a particular person’s changes across the entire network in one easy report.
The second major feature is SharePoint auditing. Netwrix Auditor 6.0 provides visibility into farm configuration, user content, and security changes, including modifications of permissions and permission inheritance, SharePoint group membership, and security policies.
Having released Netwrix Auditor 6.0, we moved to the next step toward providing IT departments with complete visibility of their infrastructures. Exclusively focusing on assisting organizations to audit IT systems, Netwrix aims to become the de facto standard for change and configuration auditing, leaving all the competitors far behind.