Two-thirds of cloud attacks could be stopped by checking configurations, research finds -

IBM says that over half of cloud security breaches are caused by issues simple to rectify.

Inventory Analytics with Evolven 

Introduction

How frequently do you need to answer a relatively simple question like “which hosts in our environment run JVM older than 1.8 updates 241?”, “what types of AWS EC2 instances do we currently have active?” or “how many hosts and CPUs do we have running WebSphere Application Server?” Questions like the examples above can be triggered by a variety of reasons:

• Operations. To understand the scope and priority of administration and maintenance tasks
• Capacity. To find the right resources matching specific capacity requirements or to evaluate the available inventory of resources
• License management: To calculate how many servers or how many CPUs run a particular software package
• Migration to a new data center or cloud environment. To benchmark configurations in order to establish standard baselines in the new environment
• Security. To identify which of the configuration items are out of compliance, still need to be updated or have been updated
• And beyond...

The questions seem to be straightforward but getting answers is definitely not. It might involve contacting an IT asset management team or CMDB administrators to produce requested reports. Sometimes it will feel easier to write a script that will be executed across the environment to collect requested information or just login into each of the hosts to check required configurations. In all cases, it will take time, effort and might even introduce risk if scripts are executed or hosts are manually accessed.

Specialists carrying various roles might need to focus on different configuration scopes. For example, you might care about the versions of technology components only if you are tasked with maintaining infrastructure up to date. Or you might want to track and analyze Windows hotfixes if you are a Windows system administrator.

It is clear that effective analysis of inventory and its configuration requires automation of information collection, prioritization, and interrogation. Full flexibility is required to easily tailor information views and queries to the needs of each operator depending on his or her role and responsibility. 

The Challenge 

Enterprise IT environments typically consist of a heterogeneous mix of numerous legacy and modern technologies distributed between physical data centers, virtualized environments, and the cloud. The behavior of each component is controlled by extensive configurations defined through configuration files, database tables, Windows registry, system commands, and various other methods developed by vendors responsible for these components. Each business system might require different configurations of participating technology components to address performance, reliability, capacity, and security requirements. New configuration baselines are established when implementing required configurations. Continuous modification and expansion of business systems in response to evolving business requirements also mean constant changes in the environment configuration. In addition, ongoing maintenance might result in a drift, even between the components that must remain similar. As a result,

it is extremely difficult to maintain up-to-date knowledge on all the configuration baselines, both current and historical, used across the end-to-end IT environment. An additional challenge would be allowing any member of the IT organization to easily query and interrogate this knowledge, based of course on a set of access policies and user permissions, with minimum training, independent of the specific member’s technical skills. 

What Evolven Does 

Evolven has developed a set of unique technological capabilities allowing users to automatically detect extensive granular inventory configurations across end-to-end IT environments, visualizing key configuration elements, providing powerful search and analysis capabilities on the configuration data, and reporting results via inventory dashboards, offline reports and REST APIs.

Collection. Evolven dynamically collects the most granular and complete configuration and inventory of environment components from the application level, down to the infrastructure, from the on-premise data center to the public cloud, using its own collection technology. There is no need to define what to collect. Evolven decides on the scope and collects configuration information out of the box ensuring that no important change will be missed

• Collected configuration is resolved down to individual parameters
• All configuration sources are supported, including files, Windows registry, data kept in the database, API-based configuration, system commands, etc.
• Each environment component configuration is scanned to its maximum extent (e.g. Evolven collects 1500-2500 parameters for Windows OS, 3000-4000 parameters for an average database, and tens of thousands of parameters for an application server, etc.)
• Evolven can be easily tuned to collect the configuration of custom applications without any coding
• The collection can be set to any frequency including a continuous collection with minimally controlled overhead. This ensures that inventory and configuration data is always up-to-date

Search and queries. Evolven provides a powerful query engine that allows users to search through the inventory configuration for inventory items and configuration elements matching anything from simple string-based patterns to multiple dependent complex conditions

Benchmarking. Evolven provides a one-click automated benchmarking of inventory based configuration parameters across hosts, sub-environments, and multiple environments

Policies. Users can easily describe inventory configuration requirements by defining flexible rules for desired type, range, and values of configuration parameters. Evolven will continuously validate collected inventory configurations, highlighting configuration elements that do not match policies versus those that do

Customization. Evolven provides a simple user interface to choose key configuration elements and granular configuration parameters particularly relevant for a user’s scope of role and responsibility for clear visualization. It allows users to define and store searches, policies, and benchmark queries in one click. All the results of inventory analysis can be provided via a user interface, offline reports, REST API, and relational database views 

How Evolven Helps

Evolven provides full control and visibility into inventory configurations from key configuration elements to the most granular configuration parameters:

• Up-to-date knowledge of end-to-end environment inventory and its extensive granular configuration based on near real-time data collection
• Clear visualization of key configuration elements and the most impactful configuration parameters, eliminating the need for manual access to the IT environments and complex queries across existing asset management and CMDB systems
• Out of the box visualization of configurations for common technologies
• Simple, user interface-based customization of configuration views for the common and in- house developed environment components
• Powerful search allowing users to quickly find answers to any inventory and configuration related operations, capacity, asset management, and security management question
• A clear view of configuration baselines available in the environment including all the drift and variations, known and unplanned
• Continuous search and alerting on configurations matching set policies to automatically identify and act on deviations from organizational configuration standards
• Easy setup, operation, and customization of Evolven targeting any IT user with any set of technical skills allow an organization to rapidly answer any inventory configuration-related questions without any overhead.

The Benefits

Using Evolven to track and analyze inventory configurations across end-to-end IT, leading IT organizations across the world are able to:

Avoid unnecessary access to IT environments to directly query configurations, reducing risk related to direct environment access

Accelerate response to operations, capacity, asset management, and security management questions by 80%, increasing agility and responsiveness of the IT organization

Reduce IT team efforts related to inventory configuration search, analysis, and interrogation by 70%

Increase productivity of IT staff providing answers to the questions related to inventory configurations through self-service with minimum overhead 

John Reuben - Global VP Sales & Alliances - Evolven - john.reuben@evolven.com