Domain 4: IT Operations Flashcards
Protocol analyzers
Protocol analyzers are network diagnostic tools that monitor and record network information from packets traveling in the link to which the analyzer is attached.
Capacity management
Capacity management is the planning and monitoring of computer resources to ensure that available IT resources are used efficiently and effectively. This will look at capacity from a strategic viewpoint and allow a plan to forecast and purchase additional equipment in a planned manner.
Parameter Settings
Configuration parameters allow a standard piece of software to be customized for diverse environments and are important in determining how a system runs. The parameter settings should be appropriate to an organization’s workload and control environment.
control to monitor the service level agreement (SLA)
Comparing internal reports with the vendor’s service level agreement (SLA) reports would ensure that the vendor’s monitoring of the SLA is accurate and that all conflicts are appropriately resolved.
Open Source Software
There are many types of open source software licenses and each has different terms and conditions. Some open source software licensing allows use of the open source software component freely, but requires that the completed software product must also allow the same rights. This is known as viral licensing, and if the development organization is not careful, its products could violate licensing terms by selling the product for profit. The IS auditor should be most concerned with open source software licensing compliance to avoid unintended intellectual property risk or legal consequences.
Cyclic Redundancy Check
The cyclic redundancy check (CRC) can check for a block of transmitted data. The workstations generate the CRC and transmit it with the data. The receiving workstation computes a CRC and compares it to the transmitted CRC. If both of them are equal, then the block is assumed error free. In this case (such as in parity error or echo check), multiple errors can be detected. In general, CRC can detect all single-bit and double-bit errors.
Parity Check
Parity check (known as vertical redundancy check) also involves adding a bit (known as the parity bit) to each character during transmission. In this case, where there is a presence of bursts of errors (i.e., impulsing noise during high transmission rates), it has a reliability of approximately 50 percent. In higher transmission rates, this limitation is significant.
echo checks
Echo checks detect line errors by retransmitting data to the sending device for comparison with the original transmission.
Alternative Routing
Alternative routing would ensure that the network would continue if a communication device fails or if a link is severed because message rerouting could be automatic.Alternative routing is a method of routing information via an alternate medium such as copper cable or fiber optics
User spool and database limit controls
User spool limits restrict the space available for running user queries. This prevents poorly formed queries from consuming excessive system resources and impacting general query performance. Limiting the space available to users in their own databases prevents them from building excessively large tables. This helps to control space utilization which itself acts to help performance by maintaining a buffer between the actual data volume stored and the physical device capacity
Diverse routing
Diverse routing routes traffic through split-cable facilities or duplicate-cable facilities. This can be accomplished with different and/or duplicate cable sheaths. If different cable sheaths are used, the cable may be in the same conduit and, therefore, subject to the same interruptions as the cable it is backing up.
Computer clocks across an organization be synchronized
During an investigation of incidents, audit logs are used as evidence, and the time stamp information in them is useful. If the clocks are not synchronized, investigations will be more difficult because a time line of events occurring on different systems might not be easily established.
Management of Storage Growth
In case of a crash, recovering a server with an extensive amount of data could require a significant amount of time. If the recovery cannot meet the RTO, there will be a discrepancy in IT strategies. It is important to ensure that server restoration can meet the RTO.
central communications processor
Alternative standby processor at another network node
tape management system
If the IS auditor finds that there are effective staging and job setup processes, this can be accepted as a compensating control. Not reading header records may otherwise result in loading the wrong tape and deleting or accessing data on the loaded tape.
