Reality Maps: Application Mapping Software Tracks IT Assets

Computerworld - When auditors come knocking at the door of Boise State University's IT department, executive director David O'Neill has a quick way of dealing with them. Rather than rounding up senior engineers to sit down with the auditors and spend hours answering questions about the university's IT systems, O'Neill instead relies on an automated application-mapping tool to quickly produce an up-to-date inventory and diagram of all the software systems and the relationships among them.

The old approach of getting auditors what they needed could consume as much as three to five days of his senior engineers' time, says O'Neill. "Since most of these audit questions are really almost inventory questions, I said, 'Let's have a machine answer those questions.' We don't need a bunch of my senior engineers doing it. That's too damned expensive," he explains.

The product Boise State is using, nLayers Inc.'s InSight appliance, can, for instance, show whether backups are happening as expected, whether a sensitive system is open to access by other servers when it shouldn't be, or if there's an unauthorized desktop that has found a back door into a student-records database server.

"You think you're the only one serving an application, but guess what -- someone else is serving it too. Or there's superfluous data moving around on the network. Or you've got folks accessing [Internet] sites they shouldn't be," says O'Neill.

Boise State uses Packeteer Inc.'s PacketShaper to make network traffic visible, but it doesn't show what that traffic represents in terms of applications, locations and other specifics. The mapping tool gives O'Neill access to that intelligence.

The Need to Know

Like O'Neill, IT managers at large corporations are increasingly concerned with tracking the continuous changes to their IT environments. They must be able to provide up-to-date information about their systems to internal and external auditors and quickly pinpoint problems in critical applications. And they can't to plan for the future growth of the IT infrastructure unless they have full knowledge of the existing applications and their interdependencies.

Given that most large organizations are supporting dozens -- sometimes hundreds -- of applications across global networks, it's nearly impossible to keep a real-time record of the IT enterprise. That's why application- discovery and -mapping technologies are gaining ground in corporate IT shops. Unlike network monitoring tools or mapping tools that focus on finding hardware, application mapping is primarily concerned with software components and their relationships, though the tools may also include hardware information as it pertains to an application.