On Tue, 18 Nov 2008, Tom Limoncelli wrote:

> On Tue, Nov 18, 2008 at 12:36 PM,  <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>> my security team is currently recieving ~500 change tickets a month (not
>> counting patching, upgrades, etc) with a 2 business day SLA to complete
>> them. we are getting a lot of people screaming that we should be more
>> responsive and implement the changes faster.
>>
>> I'd like to hear from other folks as to what sort of change rate and
>> schedule is considered reasonable for large orginizations. I'm especially
>> interested in hearing from anyone in the financial sector.
>
> Can the tickets be categorized into 5-15 different "types" so that you
> can assign different SLAs to different requests types?

we've done a little of this (seperating out 'research this' 'write a new 
script to do that' from 'make a new firewall hole for this other thing'), 
but we are trying to find out what is considered 'reasonable' SLAs for 
different types of things

> Is there any way to make the process more self-service?  For example,
> could the customers be given a dashboard that lets them control the
> more simple requests (add/change a single machine)?

we are working on this, but the volume I listed is what's left (there's a 
team of a dozen people working these 500 requests/month in addition to 
projects, it's not a small company)

> If the requests currently come in via email, could they instead use a
> web-form that would sanity check the request, possibly run it through
> a regression test suite, then just simply ask for a human to approve
> it?

there is a web ticketing system.

> Could you delegate some of the control?  For example, if these
> requests come from all over the company, maybe each division could
> have an "approver" that is able to aprove the common requests, leaving
> you to only have to deal with the special cases?
>
> Is there a class of request that the helpdesk could be empowered to
> handle on their own?  For example, if some of these requests are
> password resets, you could permit helpdesk people to follow a very
> spelled-out procedure to do resets for, say, accounts of non-managers
> and non-executives.
>
> These are just the thoughts that come to mind without understanding
> who the customers are or what constitutes a "security request".  If
> you are allowed to be more specific (I understand if you can't) please
> do.

the bulk of these are firewall changes. As such we are not comfortable 
with the self-service approach.

David Lang
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