By Kimberly Koerth

The majority of IT professionals have made undocumented changes to their IT systems that no one else knows about.

Netwrix found that 57 percent of IT professionals have made changes without recording them, while as many as 40 percent of organizations don’t have formal IT change management controls in place. Frequent system changes without documentation or audit processes can cause system downtime and security breaches from internal and external threats while decreasing overall operational efficiency.

What’s more, 65 percent of IT professionals have made changes that caused services to stop. Thirty-nine percent have made a change that was the root cause of a security breach. Sixty-two percent have little or no real ability to audit the changes they make, while only 23 percent have an auditing process or solution in place.

“This data reveals that IT organizations are regularly making undocumented changes that impact system availability and security,” Netwrix CEO Michael Fimin said. “This is a risky practice that may jeopardize the security and performance of their business. IT managers and CIOs need to evaluate the addition of change auditing to their change-management processes. This will enable them to ensure that all changes – both documented and undocumented – are tracked so that answers can be quickly found in the event of a security breach or service outage.”