Cloudhouse launches Guardian Essentials for audits

Cloudhouse has launched Guardian Essentials, aimed at enterprises that need to produce IT compliance evidence more quickly.

The new offering sits at the entry level of Cloudhouse's Guardian range and is designed for IT, security, and IT change management teams. It measures an organisation's existing IT estate against more than 500 CIS Benchmarks to identify configuration drift and unauthorised change.

The launch comes as companies face greater scrutiny over how they manage technology changes across large, increasingly complex systems. In analysis of more than one million production changes, the Financial Conduct Authority found that change was behind 24% of high-severity incidents, while preliminary research pointed to an average emergency change rate of 7.5%.

Against that backdrop, many organisations are trying to improve records of what changed in production environments, whether the change was approved, and whether systems remained within policy. Audit preparation and incident reviews often require teams to reconcile records across infrastructure, cloud services, and service management platforms, a process that can take months.

Guardian Essentials uses data businesses already hold rather than requiring a new estate-wide infrastructure deployment. It connects to existing ServiceNow CMDB and AWS accounts and also allows customers to add devices and data from other sources.

By building a current view of an organisation's estate from those sources, the software is intended to help teams detect drift as it occurs and compare changes against benchmark and policy requirements. According to Cloudhouse, this removes the need for a lengthy discovery project before compliance reporting can begin.

Stephen Earl, Head of Product at Cloudhouse, said customers want a faster way to answer a basic audit question.

"Teams do not need another six-month discovery exercise. They need to answer one question in front of an auditor: what changed, and was it approved? Essentials answers that from the data they already have, in days rather than quarters," Earl said.

Audit pressure

For large enterprises, the challenge has become more acute as technology estates stretch across on-premise systems, public cloud infrastructure, and a growing number of operational tools. Even where formal change processes exist, organisations can still struggle to show a clear link between an approved request and the live state of a system.

Guardian Essentials is intended to create a reportable record of configuration changes and policy adherence over time. That record can then be used in audits, internal governance work, and incident reviews, where investigators often need to establish whether an unauthorised or undocumented change contributed to an outage or control failure.

Cloudhouse is positioning the product as a way to expose mismatches between approved changes and detected drift. It argues that these gaps are often where businesses first uncover activity that has not passed through the expected process.

Jon Dedman, Director at Cloudhouse, said the issue comes up repeatedly in customer demonstrations.

"The moment that lands in every demo is manual change reconciliation. You put detected drift next to the approved change record, and they do not match. For most organisations, change nobody approved is the first real surprise," Dedman said.

Tiered offer

Guardian Essentials is the first of three tiers in the Guardian line-up. Customers will be able to add selected risk, vulnerability, and change management functions as their requirements expand, or move to Professional and Enterprise tiers that include more automation and AI-assisted change management.

Cloudhouse's broader business centres on tools for managing change in enterprise technology environments, including legacy application modernisation and workload movement. Founded in London, it counts organisations such as National Grid, Royal Mail, NASA, NYSE, and Ascensus among its customers.

The immediate focus for Guardian Essentials is to give enterprises a faster route to evidence collection by using existing configuration management and cloud account data. Planned additions include Azure and CSV node onboarding, Freshservice CMDB support, and ServiceNow change reconciliation, while native applications for the ServiceNow Store and the Freshservice Marketplace are in certification.