IT security plays an increasingly vital role in IT planning and budgeting decisions.Even if you’ve made a large investment in the technology and talent required to manage security issues, you may feel, as many IT professionals do, that security remains a persistent and stressful challenge.

Your security plan must incorporate configuration management, so that you can know what’s happening across your infrastructure at all times — when changes happen, and the nature of those changes — and so that you can continuously enforce your security policies.

This paper examines the key security benefits of configuration management and situational awareness, including how to: