Fewer hours on server work and audit preparation, with every run tied to its change record.

For mid-size banks, insurers, payment firms and fund firms with their own operations team, and for the hosters that serve them. Routine server work runs as plans that anyone on the team can run, and each run is tied to the change record it belongs to, so the sample an auditor asks for already exists.

Hours saved

The routine server jobs stop being someone's afternoon.

A plan is written once and run the same way every time, with a preview on each host. See infrastructure automation.

Patching a fleet: A patch campaign runs in waves with a failure threshold and stops when failures pass it, so a bad patch does not reach the whole fleet.
Configuration changes: Edit a file or a template on many servers at once. Each host shows its diff before anything changes, and every revision is kept.
People who leave: The leaver event removes a person's access everywhere in one step, with proof per host, and no key has to be rotated.

Every run tied to its change record

Who ran it, what it did on each host, and the change it was approved under.

Roles per environment let your engineers build and test a plan in staging while the operations team runs it in production. Each run keeps its own record, so a change is a chain you can read from request to outcome and not a set of tickets to reconcile.

Fig. 1, change record for run #4f2a, revision 7

Change record /Patch nginx across prod, run #4f2a

Sample

@alex → AIDry-run passedApproved by @danaAudited · #4f2a

Origin: Drafted by the AI composer for @alex
Targets: web-01, web-02, web-03 in prod
Dry run: 3 hosts, 12 changes, 0 destructive
Approved: Dana Okafor at 14:32:07, for revision 7 only
Outcome: Completed on 3 hosts, 4 steps

Diffweb-02

/etc/nginx/nginx.conf+3/−2

 --- a/etc/nginx/nginx.conf
 +++ b/etc/nginx/nginx.conf
 @@ -1,7 +1,7 @@
  user  www-data;
−worker_processes  4;
+worker_processes  auto;
  pid /run/nginx.pid;
 @@ -31,6 +31,7 @@
      ssl_prefer_server_ciphers on;
−    ssl_protocols TLSv1.2;
+    ssl_protocols TLSv1.3;
+    ssl_session_tickets off;

A published example

What one bank reported with the same pattern.

PagerDuty published the case of an Australian bank that builds and tests its automation in staging, runs it in production, and ties every run to a change record. PagerDuty reports that audit preparation fell from two to three weeks to under a day, about 250 hours a month. This is PagerDuty’s customer and PagerDuty’s account, not Opafra’s; read it at pagerduty.com/customer/australian-bank.

Standard changes and the emergency path

Approve routine work once. Keep a path for the emergency.

Both are described on the change control page.

Standard-change catalogue: A plan is approved once and run many times as a standard change. Each run is still recorded, and a change that has run before under an approval is lower risk than a new one.
Emergency path: Run now when production is down. A second person approves and reviews it afterwards, and it is recorded as an emergency change.
Every run tied to its change record: The run records who ran it, on which hosts and the approved revision, next to the change it belongs to.

Audit preparation

The records are written while the work happens.

Access, change and restore-test records are written as the work runs, and the audit log exports as CSV or NDJSON. Preparing an audit becomes gathering what exists. See the evidence page for the four records.

Good to know

Hosters, DORA and limits, stated plainly.

Hosters that serve financial firms: A hoster that runs servers for a financial firm needs that firm to approve changes on its own servers and to keep the record. See hosting and managed service providers.
DORA: See the DORA page for the points of DORA’s technical standards on change and access, each with the record that answers it.
Built for Linux servers: Opafra connects over SSH, so it is built for Linux servers.
What is not in the record: Opafra records what goes through Opafra. Work done on a server by another route is not in these records.
Not a certification: Opafra is not a certification, and it does not make an organization meet any rule. This page shows the records the work leaves.

See it against your change process.

Tell us how changes reach production today and who approves them. You get a demo and your price in writing within one business day, with no call.

Get a demo