5 Key Advantages of Evolven Integrity Monitoring Over Legacy FIM
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This content is brought to you by Evolven. Evolven Change Analytics is a unique AIOps solution that tracks and analyzes all actual changes carried out in the enterprise cloud environment. Evolven helps leading enterprises cut the number of incidents, slash troubleshoot time, and eliminate unauthorized changes. Learn more
In the realm of IT operations, compliance, and security, file integrity monitoring (FIM) has been a bedrock detective control at the foundations of best practice since the 1990’s. However, when it comes to optimizing change and configuration controls for the rapidly changing, modern hybrid multi-cloud environments we manage today, Evolven excels in several key areas. In this technical blog, we'll explore five aspects where Evolven Integrity Monitoring outperforms legacy FIM, providing enterprises with enhanced visibility, efficiency, and security.
- AI-Analytics Based in Data Science: Evolven enhances everything about the user experience and productivity for DevOps, CloudOps, and IT Ops teams with its data science based approach to change analysis. After collecting information from operating systems and network devices, legacy FIM is jammed with data, but still has limited ability to decide what’s important. The machine learning in Evolven reduces the data overload, tunes out noise and highlights risks using advanced algorithms purpose built for the task. Evolven’s data science approach results in fewer incidents and faster Mean Time to Resolution (MTTR) without the distractions and alert fatigue associated with legacy FIM. And aside from using this AI focused on changes and configuration, developers at Evolven are experimenting with using generative AI as an easy to use interface further eliminating friction and simplifying root cause analysis.
- Hybrid Multi Cloud Adaptability: Evolven specializes in automating change controls across hybrid multi cloud environments, offering a unified view of configuration states from on-premises data centers to the public cloud. This versatility ensures seamless monitoring and control, irrespective of the infrastructure's complexity or the silos of development, security, and operations. Legacy FIM’s ability to innovate toward managing hybrid cloud configurations will not match Evolven's comprehensive approach now or in the future. Additionally, Evolven's platform is tailored for agile environments that need to keep pace with digital convergence in the cloud at a scale well beyond the limits of traditional FIM. Managing even several hundred or thousands of servers with legacy FIM could be a full time job, but Evolven automatically analyzes changes across hundreds of thousands of systems in hybrid multi cloud environments automatically without requiring full time attention from anyone.
- Prioritization of Risks: Evolven's AI-driven analytics prioritize risks triggered by actual changes, helping prevent and resolve stability, compliance, and security issues. This intelligent risk assessment assists IT teams in focusing on the most critical threats, optimizing resource allocation. Further the integration of application performance monitoring events directly into Evolven means that the performance indicators of incidents can be correlated directly with the granular state-based details of what changed. For legacy FIM to achieve this feat it needs to rely on a separate SIEM or log management component meaning extra work to maintain and more data overload and alert fatigue.
- Automated Change Reconciliation: Evolven introduces automated change reconciliation, bridging the gap between actual and planned changes or between authorized and unauthorized changes. This streamlines change management processes, reducing manual efforts and minimizing errors. Legacy FIMs are primarily using something like change correlation to manage the noise generated by chatty rules. These correlations require more content and manual management of tagging, actions, and workflows to decide if a change is within a change window or part of a baseline comparison. More mature systems may feature certified or home grown integrations with ticketing, simple integrations with patching and so on. Each technique layers on more complexity to the solution and requires professional services to implement and ongoing manual effort to maintain. With Evolven, your change reconciliation process is expedited with a more accurate and comprehensive change audit report to meet regulatory and business requirements.
- Many to Many Continuous Drift Analysis: In the realm of IT operations and configuration management, maintaining stability, compliance, and security within an ever-evolving landscape presents a significant challenge. This challenge is especially pronounced in dynamic environments where constant changes occur, such as hybrid cloud setups. Evolven addresses this challenge through an innovative patented approach to drift detection and consistency analysis enabled by its vertically built change-focused machine learning platform. The “many to many” continuous drift analysis offered by Evolven goes beyond traditional change management by focusing on the intricate relationships and dependencies between configurations, applications, infrastructure, and data and their ever changing nature. This approach recognizes that changes rarely occur in isolation; they often trigger cascading effects across various components of an IT environment. And trying to maintain a single “Golden Baseline” to compare against these changing systems is a fool’s errand. Evolven’s Configuration Risk Intelligence platform continuously gathers baseline information and compares clusters in near real time across all parameters - not just those scoped by a systems administrator. The superiority of this approach is in providing near predictive capabilities on changes that don’t match expectations so they can be corrected before costly incidents occur.
Conclusion: In the evolving landscape of IT operations and security, Evolven stands out as an Evolved Integrity Monitoring and Configuration Risk Intelligence platform that excels for AI-analytics, hybrid cloud adaptability, risk prioritization, automated change reconciliation, and drift and consistency analysis. While legacy FIM may have been a GREAT tool, for what it did, when it was first implemented it hasn’t kept pace with the times - and it shows.
If you're stuck with a legacy FIM solution you may want to take a look at what the future offers in Evolven. It’s just a thought!
