According to feedback from clients, corporate IT operations staff often run into a wide variety of problems, which is a real headache! Today, the IT Operations editorial team has summarized six major IT operations service management issues, in the hope of helping IT operations staff organize their thinking and resolve problems quickly!
- Management status quo: The IT systems supporting a company’s business operations are mainly composed of a large number of network devices, host systems and application systems. From an application perspective, these devices and systems belong to different business systems and departments. Network devices, host systems and the like each have their own independent user management, authentication/authorization and auditing systems, and are maintained and managed by different system administrators. When maintenance staff face these systems, the complexity of their work multiplies.
- Unclear authorization: In this complex, heterogeneous support architecture, because each system authorizes separately, it is impossible to strictly enforce the least-privilege allocation principle recommended by IT operations best practices. At the same time, as business systems and users increase, user authorization management becomes considerably more complex, and system security is put at risk.
- Risks of shared accounts: This IT operations service management issue is mainly reflected in the fact that, to reduce management complexity and difficulty, some accounts are shared by multiple people. The spread of these accounts is hard to control, and security incidents often occur precisely because of such account sharing.
- Risks of weak passwords: For maintenance staff, switching frequently between systems requires entering different usernames and passwords for each system to log in. To make them easier to remember, maintenance staff often adopt relatively simple passwords, or use the same password across multiple systems. In urgent situations, they may even share their usernames and passwords with others. All of this poses a tremendous threat to the security of the entire system.
- Lack of centralized log auditing: Because each system runs independently, system operation logs and audits of maintenance staff activity can only be carried out separately for each system. When a system fails, problems must be investigated system by system, with no unified, centralized troubleshooting possible. This greatly reduces work efficiency and increases the possibility of expanded losses.
- Temporary account management and auditing: As IT support systems gradually increase in number, situations arise in which hardware vendors providing services or IT project outsourcing providers need to perform system maintenance. When temporary accounts are not opened, closed or appropriately authorized in a timely and accurate manner, this creates a disguised threat to system operation. At the same time, operations performed on the system by third-party vendors or service providers are not easy to record, so when IT operations service management issues arise, there is no way to provide evidence or trace them.
