Introduction › Managing Information Technology › Mitigate Risks

Mitigate Risks

Enterprises today face increasing risks and exposures in the areas of platform and application management, event management, business processes, records retention, and security. A unified data strategy enables the CIO and IT management staff to ensure that the IT infrastructure is fully secured and protected, and adheres to proven compliance and governance guidelines. Some of the primary approaches to minimizing such risks include:

• Applying consistent security
• Ensuring availability
• Implementing open standards

Managing risks is more difficult when IT environments include multiple heterogeneous databases and proprietary file formats. A common data source and data definitions provide the trace and audit capabilities that are required in complex regulatory environments. Data storage should be based on a relational database management system that provides transaction support, recovery, clustering and high availability. Extensible data definitions provide a way to manage additional proprietary data.

Software products for IT management need to be secure, scalable, robust, and built on mature, proven technologies and architectures. Support for open standards and interfaces, and implementation of best practices such as the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL), helps mitigate risks.