Quest Software Expands Real-Time Change Auditing to NAS

Quest Software, Inc. has augmented ChangeAuditor, its real-time change auditing solution to include auditing for NAS storage systems.

With the addition of support for EMC Celerra and NetApp Filers, organizations now have a unified auditing solution for the entire IT environment including Active Directory, Exchange, SQL Server, LDAP, and Windows File Servers. With ChangeAuditor, administrators can have change management analysis and reporting from a single console to show the who, what, where, when, workstation and why without the performance impact and complexity required by native auditing.

Need for Unified Storage Auditing
Many organizations still have a majority of information stored on simple file servers and network-attached storage systems. IT is being required to maintain a level of control over this data because of legislative or industry regulations and requirements across all regions including rules such as HIPAA, Sarbanes-Oxley, Grahmm-Leach-Bliley, and PCI DSS.

In addition to meeting these external compliance requirements, organizations need to be aware of the internal security concerns such as intellectual property theft and corporate espionage that has the potential to negatively affect reputation or cause financial damages.

Solution for Storage Auditing
In the past, organizations had to manually collect logs from each storage location with no centralized audit trail and then create multiple reports on the collected data. The risks of non-compliance, internal security breaches and time intensive work for IT were high. Quest now addresses all of these concerns and avoids the manual work with the new ChangeAuditor that includes EMC reporting and NetApp monitoring. The solution is capable of capturing activities that occur within a storage server, with respect to user operations: File and folder operations such as access, creation, deletion, and renaming; permission and ownership changes; and content changes – such as file reads and writes.

"Internal security concerns and external compliance requirements are elevating the need for IT auditing solutions for the organization," said Michael Tweddle, senior director of product management, Quest Software. "The data included in storage servers is growing at exponential rates and we recognize the need for our customers to have a unified auditing solution to bring all of their security and change auditing into a single location, rather than relying on numerous discrete, independent, and proprietary audit logs."

Availability and Pricing
Version 5.5 of Quest ChangeAuditor is available, with North American pricing of $15 per enabled user for EMC Celerra and NetApp Filers.