Compliance Automation use cases

Compliance Automation reduces the risk of unauthorized and unplanned changes through enforced change tracking and automated documentation of all changes.

Business value

In the BMC BladeLogic Automation Suite, the Compliance Automation value path provides a uniform, closed-loop solution that lets administrators use consistent policies, processes, and tools across physical, virtual, and Cloud environments. IT managers and administrators can take advantage of the use cases in the Compliance Automation value path to determine whether they are following the rules and procedures necessary to ensure they are in operational or regulatory compliance across their servers, applications, and network devices.

For example, an administrator might determine that a business service requires that a particular application should be deployed on a group of servers. The administrator can use discovery to determine what software is currently installed on the server group. He or she can set up a compliance policy to test for the presence of the software application. A Compliance Job can run regularly to ensure that the servers in the group have the correct application installed. If a server is not in compliance, the system can automatically generate a change ticket so the correct software can be deployed to the server after the proper authorizations are received. Finally, dashboard reporting lets IT managers and administrators monitor overall trends in compliance for the business service in question.

Use cases

There are many options for automating the process of maintaining compliant configurations in the data center. Some of the most common use cases are:

• Assess-server-software-compliance
• Enforce-continuous-compliance-for-networks
• Enforce-continuous-compliance-for-servers
• Report-on-compliance-status-and-trends

These use cases are accomplished by integrating the BMC BladeLogic monitoring, auditing, compliance, and remediation processes with IT management systems such as BMC Application Discovery and Dependency Mapping and BMC Remedy ITSM. The integration of BMC BladeLogic with BMC Remedy ITSM is accomplished through BMC Atrium Orchestrator and standard application interfaces (APIs).