Scheduled duties are
performed according to a regular cycle — for example
‘Weekdays’, or ‘First Friday Every Month’. The list
of duties scheduled for a specific user or team is
displayed via a duty view. The user or
team member can work through duties in sequence or
skip some and return to them later. Duties that are
not run in a specific period can be carried forward
to another user or team, at the discretion of
management. Scheduling accommodates complex
requirements including optional carry-forward for
public holidays and weekends
Automatic duties are
similar to scheduled duties, run to a regular cycle.
Unlike scheduled duties they are initiated
automatically at set times and do not interact with
the user
At-request duties or
ad-hoc duties run only when selected by a user
The viewing of
any duty is regulated by two mechanisms. Firstly, the role-based security
mechanism restricts views on the basis of the user’s
respective role and assigned capabilities. Users can then
select many different views, but it is more usual to
restrict users to certain views.
The ‘All Scheduled’ view shows all scheduled duties
which the user is privileged to see.
The ‘Role’ or ‘team’ view shows the tasks outstanding
for a specific role or team.
The ‘Outstanding’ view shows
those scheduled duties that are due now. Users or team
members leave this console on-screen to display the color-coded duties to be
performed. Once the duty is successfully run, it is
automatically removed from all users’ duty views. This
encourages and facilitates teamwork amongst staff.
The ‘At-request’ view shows those duties that do not
have a schedule. This view is effectively a users’ window
onto complicated, encapsulated procedures. For example,
help desk staff may leave this duty view on-screen for
ready access to valuable and frequently used procedures.
Task Prompting With COSduty, even those critical manual tasks
are rendered unforgettable. For instance, the process of
removing last night’s backup tape from the drive and
placing it into the fire safe has no command, script or
program. However, it needs doing and it needs doing by the
first member of the support team that arrives in the
morning. COSduty will prompt the instruction as a
duty to be performed.
Management-by-Color When a duty is about to become overdue it is
highlighted in the warning color. Duties that are overdue
are highlighted in the alert color. Overdue duties can be
automatically withdrawn from the duty view to ensure procedures
are carried out only within the specified time-window.
Role-Based Security Each user is assigned one or more pre-defined roles.
Each role is granted a set of access capabilities. Each
capability restricts or enables functionality. Users are
grouped together by roles, which effectively form teams.
Secure-Delegation Each task or function is defined as a duty. Correct
privileges are then assigned to the duty, not the person.
A user can perform the duty depending on his/her COSduty
role and the role’s capability. Delegation is secure
because the user does not require a privileged account to
perform the task. This even applies to tasks or jobs that
require root privileges.
Work-by-Proxy With secure-delegation,
COSduty
users are empowered to perform work-by-proxy. Users become
authorized to act on behalf of someone else and perform
tasks that their normal user and group permissions would
not usually allow.
Power-Delegation COSduty’s power-delegation feature allows
different types of tasks to be encapsulated and delegated.
Complex tasks are rendered simple and repeatable. Arcane
tasks are de-mystified and rendered usable. Even manual
tasks (tasks that do not have commands behind them) are
rendered unforgettable. Power delegation provides major
benefits for different types of people:
Junior IT staff —
guidance and control
Experienced IT staff —
freedom from the mundane, repetitive tasks and
increased efficiency through hiding subtle
differences in operating systems
A team of system administrators and managers —
empowered to take control of the workload and evolve
from fire-fighting to policy-driven management.
Dependency on key skills is reduced
Secured Environment Instead of granting users access to privileged
accounts, COSduty’s role-based security
feature allows the system manager or supervisor to define
each function as a duty. They assign appropriate
privileges to the duty, which then makes the duty
accessible to those roles which possess those privileges.
Because a duty can be used to encapsulate secure
functions, there is no need to provide shell access for
non-privileged or inexperienced staff.
All tasks can be viewed and their progress monitored.
An audit process records full details of which duties were
performed or skipped, and whether they succeeded or
failed.
Auditing and
Reporting The COSduty audit-record provides full
details of which duties were performed or skipped, and
whether they succeeded or failed. The comprehensive
audit-record allows extensive management reporting. The
audit-record can be queried at any time with SQL-like
commands to answer such questions as "which duties did
not complete successfully?" and "which duties have
not been performed?"
Easy-to-Use
Standard Interface The control of a network of heterogeneous UNIX systems
is made quicker and easier for junior staff to learn and
use through the use of one standard interface. Experienced
administrators are shielded from subtle differences in
operating system syntax.
Support for Embedded On-line Hypertext Documents
An on-line policy document or a quality manual can contain
links to the actual COSduty database. This allows
the duty to be actually launched from the browser.
Alternatively, the COSduty database can contain
embedded hypertext links to online documents. For example,
a user that needs to execute a specific duty can use the
embedded link to the on-line policy document to understand
why the duty needs to be performed.
COSduty
and COSMOS Installation of other products from the COSMOS
operations management suite is not a prerequisite for
installing COSduty. However, combining other COSMOS
products augments and enhances COSduty
to new levels of functionality and control.
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