How to safeguard Exchange environment from unexpected downtime and security threats

The security of Exchange environment to a large extent depends on how meticulously and elaborately the auditing data is being collected from it. The next step is to process that data and present it in a format from which inferences can be drawn about the nature of changes and their effects on the overall health of Exchange environment. Those responsible for the stability and security of Exchange servers must be in a position to instantly filter critical changes and then have the necessary tools to undo such changes or act on it as per requirement.
In this context, the basic framework of Exchange Server auditing can be understood to be as the one in which configuration changes being done to the servers are collected from the entire network, stored at one place and are reported in a manner that suits compliance to internal and external regulations.

Native auditing solutions, unfortunately, does not emphasize equally on all the components of this framework. Moreover, they fail to look at the auditing from real-world perspective. For example, in native auditing you can choose to log even smallest of the changes done to Exchange configuration, but the way they are logged makes it very difficult to understand it from auditing perspective. Most of the Exchange administrators work in a tight schedule where every minute of downtime or mailbox unavailability is considered as a big issue. And here we are talking about the organizations that are not at the forefront of the league that put Exchange availability as their first priority. Those organizations, take a proactive approach desiring real-time alerts to critical changes and ability to draw insights from the operational changes done on daily basis, so that a totally secure and fail-safe Exchange server environment can be put in place. In this backdrop, the ideal auditing solution can be presumed to be the one which can provide details of changes in a glance, undo the unwanted changes in a few clicks and also help administrators to understand it completely to stop such changes from occurring in future. 

The problem with the native auditing is that it lays bare all the complexities involved in it. Auditors have to find their way through complex technicalities where most of time and effort is lost into finding what went wrong, where, when and by whom. In a real world scenario this is practically unacceptable. The other options are commercially available business add-on tools. These tools hide the technical complexities of the native auditing from end users behind an intuitive and user-friendly interface. They also integrate some algorithms based on real-world requirements that provide efficiency to the entire process. As an end user, what you do is click a few buttons and the underlying layer beneath the user interface, performs a number of functions to present the change logs to you in an “audit ready” format. 

Common additional features include centralized long-term storage of audit data, real-time alerts for critical changes, scheduled generation and delivery of reports, In-depth auditing that presents who, what, when and where information in an easy-to-understand format through a number of built-in reports. LepideAuditor for Exchange Server is one such tool that can be downloaded for free and evaluated to audit your Exchange server environment.