Patent ID: 8176158

Claim:
An article of manufacture comprising: a non-transitory computer-readable storage medium; and a plurality of instructions stored in the storage medium; wherein the plurality of instructions are adapted to provide one or more control modules segregated from persons or technologies associated with an enterprise's information technology (IT) infrastructure making authorized changes to the enterprise's IT infrastructure, to perform a plurality of audit operations, independent of the persons or technologies making authorized changes, comprising: independently detecting changes to one or more data processing devices in the IT infrastructure, regardless of source, intent or authorization of the changes; reconciling the detected changes with intended and authorized changes; correlating the detected changes to events contained in one or more event logs associated with the one or more data processing devices; and independently reporting change activities, including the detected changes supplemented with the correlated events, across production systems of the enterprise's IT infrastructure, including reporting detected intended and authorized changes to persons or technologies making authorized changes.