Cloudhouse has today released Guardian Essentials, a new way for enterprises to provide IT compliance evidence within days rather than months. As a new entry tier of its configuration drift and compliance platform, Guardian Essentials gives IT, security and IT Change Management teams an answer to the question auditors and incident reviews keep asking: what actually changed, and was it approved?
Addressing the Enterprise IT Compliance Gap
Designed to tackle the growing gap between the pace of enterprise IT change and organisations’ ability to govern it, Guardian Essentials automatically measures an organisation’s existing estate against more than 500 CIS Benchmarks. It works with the CMDB and cloud accounts businesses already use, giving IT, security and change teams a continuously updated record of what changed, whether it was authorised and whether systems remain compliant.
The risk is not the volume of change, but the consequences when change goes wrong or cannot be properly accounted for. An FCA analysis of more than one million production changes found that change was behind almost a quarter (24%) of high-severity incidents. Its preliminary research also found an average emergency-change rate of 7.5%. As enterprise estates become more complex and the pace of change accelerates, the challenge is increasingly being able to establish what changed, whether it was authorised and whether systems remain compliant.
Tracking Configuration Changes in Real Time
Guardian Essentials builds a live picture of an organisation’s IT estate by connecting to existing ServiceNow CMDB and AWS accounts, while also allowing customers to add their own devices and data from other sources. This enables IT teams to detect configuration drift as it happens, with changes assessed against more than 500 CIS Benchmarks and Cloudhouse policies, without requiring an estate-wide agent rollout or lengthy discovery project.
“Teams do not need another six-month discovery exercise,” said Stephen Earl, Head of Product at Cloudhouse. “They need to answer one question and answer it in front of an auditor: what changed, and was it approved? Essentials answers that from the data they already have, in days rather than quarters.”
Building a Reportable Compliance Record
Guardian Essentials also allows teams to track and trend compliance over time, providing a reportable record of configuration changes and policy adherence for audits, incident reviews and internal governance.
“The moment that lands in every demo is manual change reconciliation,” said Jon Dedman, Director at Cloudhouse. “You put detected drift next to the approved change record, and they do not match. For most organisations, change nobody approved is the first real surprise.”
Essentials is the first of three Guardian tiers. Organisations can add selected risk, vulnerability and change-management capabilities as their requirements grow, or move to Professional and Enterprise tiers for more advanced automation, AI-assisted change management and compliance capabilities.