A survey by Netwrix has found that almost 60 per cent of IT professionals have made undocumented changes to their IT systems that no one else knows about, and as many as 40 per cent of organisations don’t have any formal IT change management controls.
Netwrix’s, ‘2014 State of IT Changes’ survey collected data from 577 IT professionals in organisations across multiple industries and a range of sizes. The survey found that 65 per cent of IT professionals have made changes that caused services to stop, 52 per cent had made changes that affected system downtime daily or weekly and almost 40 per cent had made a change that was the root cause of a security breach.
The survey also found that 62 per cent of the respondents had little or no real ability to audit the changes they made, revealing serious gaps in meeting security best practice and compliance objectives, and only 23 per cent had an auditing process to validate changes being entered into a change management solution.