Expert Warns Unmanaged IT Change Increases Security Risks, Outlines Control Steps
A director at Cloudhouse warns that unmanaged IT change can cause outages and cyber attacks, and recommends three steps to control it, according to a TechRadar article.
The article notes that IT teams face constant change, including creating user permissions, deploying operating system updates, integrating third-party tools, and managing changes made by external providers, outsourced teams, and employees. While change is necessary for security, resilience, and modernization, unmanaged change—such as unnoticed external patches or forced OS upgrades—can cause systems to drift from their intended baseline, adding risk to each subsequent change and potentially leading to damaging outages.
The author cites recent research showing that misconfigurations or gaps in security coverage materially enabled more than 90% of cyber incidents investigated, demonstrating how minor changes or lapses in oversight can create openings for attackers. Many organizations must monitor large and complex IT estates with hundreds or thousands of business-critical endpoints, and much change is automated or carried out by external parties, leaving IT teams with limited visibility without the right software and processes.
The first step recommended is to understand change by gaining greater visibility across the IT estate. This requires automation tools that enable continuous drift detection, scanning every layer of infrastructure to establish a known-good configuration baseline. The platform can flag any change that causes a device to drift from the baseline and reveal gaps between expected and actual changes, ensuring manual fixes or external patches are flagged rather than going unnoticed until an outage occurs.
The second step is to respond swiftly. The article states that manually reconciling and approving change is error-prone and slow. Automating change approval processes allows software to reconcile every detected change against approved baselines and validate steps taken against the change request. This enables teams to rapidly respond to unapproved changes, address issues before they escalate, speed up delivery of upgrades or projects, and give IT teams greater freedom to innovate safely.
The third step is to protect systems. When teams understand their estate and accelerate approvals, they can detect and remediate issues faster, reducing mean time to resolution, mitigating failures escalating into outages, and minimizing incident costs. Protection also means ensuring compliance and the ability to export defensible evidence on demand for regulators. Continuous compliance that generates clear, auditable trails is important; otherwise, audits involve time-consuming manual searches through spreadsheets and screenshots, with information potentially out-of-date by the time it is collected.
The article concludes that IT change is constant and will only increase with the rapid development of AI and cloud tools. This provides more opportunities for modernization but also creates more risk when uncontrolled. To maintain control and prevent damaging incidents, IT teams need to understand when configuration change happens across their estate.