Security and Transparency in IT Production

Auditors expect companies to prove complete documentation of their IT production processes. As part of the audit, they also take a close look at various process histories.

In order to be able to track the processes controlled and monitored by the automation engine or agents at any time and in detail, statistical data, logs and reports are stored in the Automic database. (Automic is a product of Broadcom Inc.) Since long-term storage of job reports takes a large toll on resources and has a negative impact on system performance, in practice these flow logs are retained in the Automic database for a limited time only.

To facilitate data retrieval or audits, it is recommended to store the process execution logs in the Automation Engine outside of Automic. However, most companies use the file system or keep the data in a storage system. For compliance reasons, among others, job reports must be ensured over the entire archiving period. In most cases, accessing these reports is an extremely time-consuming or even impossible task without suitable retrieval software.

And in the event of a follow-up audit, the laborious reconstruction of archived processes required to obtain the audit certificate will result in considerable additional costs.

A unified, company-wide archiving system that complies with legal requirements and company specifications that also delivers features for user-friendly, detailed data analysis can help solve this issue.