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The accuracy and legitimacy of financial statements delivered to shareholders and the public will be doubted if an organization's IT infrastructure is insecure, unreliable, or implemented improperly. This is a key driver for CobiT, which defines the process and objectives to achieve a level of control to ensure business initiatives such as Sarbanes-Oxley, FIPS and HIPAA are able to relate and be measured against a set of IT management deliverables.

CobiT includes a set of 34 high-level control objectives, one for each of a set of common IT processes, grouped into four domains: planning and organization, acquisition and implementation, delivery and support, and monitoring. Under this set of high-level objectives are 318 recommended detailed control objectives.

To evaluate how an organization measures up against these control objectives, CobiT provides a scoring system ranging from 0 (non existent) to 5 (optimized). Within its management guidelines, CobiT characterizes the maturity model for each high-level control objective - how each control objective can be characterized for each score. For example, there is a high-level control objective called, "Delivery & Support: Ensure Systems Security", and under it there are characterizations of a level 0 maturity-the enterprise has no recognition for a need for security-and a level 5 maturity-clearly defined, rigorous, forward-looking security. Between level 0 and level 5 are four more levels of maturity with separate characterizations.

Using these control objectives and maturity models, someone inside or outside the organization can make an assessment of the 34 high-level control objectives, and CobiT provides a mechanism to report on that assessment, comparing it with industry best practices, international standards, and the ultimate goals of the organization. From this comes an overall assessment, recommendations and action plans.

DataStream applied to CobiT
DataStream applies directly to 11 of the 34 high-level control objectives in CobiT.
The key features within DataStream that apply to a best practices environment, and often to more than one of the CobiT control objectives, are:

• Centralized access Control: All access to managed device consoles is performed through DataStream
• Activity Auditing: All access via DataStream is monitored for events and logged
• Real-Time Notification: All Incidents are reported and logged in real-time
• Physical security: All managed device access is secured through its console

Conclusions
DataStream addresses many of the issues affecting organizations attempting to achieve superior levels of governance over their IT infrastructure and fully supports CobiT best practices. DataStream allows organizations to implement a management environment that ensures their IT can support and be measured against regulatory compliance such as Sarbanes-Oxley.

DataStream is the solution when IT organizations need to streamline day-to-day operations, reduce downtime and optimise overall service.