Drift Management Tools

Do you keep track of changes in your Prod and Non-Prod environments on a regular basis?

Drift Management tools help understand how Prod and Non-Prod application servers are configured. These tools compare the environments and provide details on any discrepancies and security vulnerabilities, for example: Missing config files, certificates, certificate renewals, NAS drive mounts, and many more.

What contributes to a drift in configurations?

Some of the many causes of configuration drift are,

1. Patching that conflicts with the existing configurations.

2. Undocumented manual changes by developers or system admins.

3. Human errors like typos, incorrect attributes, system tunables, etc.

4. Software updates that conflict with the existing configurations.

Uses of Drift Management tools

Drift management tools are helpful for the following purposes,

1. Migrating from old Infrastructure to New Infrastructure.

2. During Disaster Recovery.

3. Failing over from one data center to another.

4. Audit process.

5. Detect Security Vulnerabilities.

Drift Management Tool Vendors

1. Evolven.

2. Chef.

3. AWS Config.

Conclusion

Keep your environments up to date with necessary and recommended patches, maintenance release, and quick fixes, but also make sure none of these things get into conflict with the existing one and create any security vulnerabilities that puts your servers, and application environments into jeopardy.