Cybersecurity is something any business can afford to miss out on. When we look at some of the recent stats, it appears that having cyber defenses should be one of the top priorities as most businesses tend to hold sensitive data. Here are some alarming stats that we should be aware of.

1. It is predicted that by 2025, the cost of cyberattacks will reach around $10.5 trillion.
2. After a data breach, it takes an average of 287 days for security teams to perform RCA and rectify it.
3. Out of all the cyberattacks, 43% of them are aimed at small and medium businesses. Out of these SMBs, only 14% are equipped to deal with such scenarios.
4. In the year 2021, there were 50% more cyberattacks per week as compared to 2020

Such odds can be a severe concern for IT teams as they have to monitor the company’s infrastructure to look out for possible entry points, vulnerable spots, unsecured assets, inactive or unused devices, and many such factors. That is why every enterprise needs cutting-edge measures to deal with such situations. In case of such adverse scenarios, where the infrastructure is compromised, there should be an immaculate and ironclad recovery strategy to minimalize the impact. This raises the bar for the IT teams. This is where this guide will prove to be useful.

Step 1 – Having comprehensive knowledge of your infrastructure

Company infrastructure is subject to constant change. Something or the other is changing on daily basis to meet client needs, SLAs, or even compliances. In such a dynamic environment, it’s necessary to have in-depth knowledge of deployment architecture, technology stack, and dependencies between resources to make sure that proper security measures are in place and the protocols are updated accordingly.

Step 2 – Business Application Modelling

Start Anywhere Application Modelling or SAAM is a visualization of the interconnectivity of applications. It provides a clear view of entry points and all the nodes between applications. It can be used to identify the resources or nodes that are used by multiple applications.

Step 3 – Know Your Critical Assets

The key to minimalizing the impact and paving the path toward fast recovery is to identify critical business resources, assets, and services. Once your business identifies these key elements, you know which nodes need bolstered defenses.

Step 4 – Automate Your Discovery Process

Keeping up with the rapidly developing and changing infrastructure could be challenging. And the knowledge of company infrastructure is an important parameter to devise an effective recovery strategy. To make sure that you have the correct data at your fingertips to do that it’s best to automate the process of infrastructure discovery, dependencies, cloud resources, hardware, and even software.

Complete Veritable Visibility

When it comes to reducing the risk no matter what environment it is, on-premise or cloud, the key is to have visibility over the infrastructure at all times. The risk of outages or attacks can be easily reduced irrespective of the complexity of the systems by simply having the proper visibility. While it may not seem like a lucrative prospect at first but there’s a lot to gain in the grand scheme of things. Here are five benefits of your enterprise that can have a significant impact on reducing risks and outages.

1. Improved risk mitigation.
2. Improved ability to reduce and contain the impact of outages.
3. Significant decrease in vulnerabilities.
4. Complete coverage of distributed infrastructure.
5. Faster decommissioning of assets.

Key Takeaways

The lesson to be learned is that staying prepared pays subtle but long-term dividends. Regardless of the infrastructure, with the right tools and technology, your company can stay prepared and enjoy a variety of other benefits that add value to your business. With proper visibility over your infrastructure provided by BMC Discovery, switching to SAAM and automating the entire asset discovery process becomes easier.

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About the Author:

Ashish Khot
AVP BMC Technolog

15+ years of Experience.

Enhancing End User Experience Through various IT Automation Initiatives Enriching experience of IT Service Desk Function. Making IT Operations more robotic, loosening IT strength in daily activities Increasing IT’ s Alignment in Organizational Goals with stronger footprints.

Today business organizations have enormous IT estate spread across the earth’s canvas in different locations. Having painted the world with different IT assets, it becomes hard to manage the variance and stay updated on the information related to latest IT estate, becoming a bottleneck for all IT administrators. BMC Discovery 11.3 Helix is an advanced solution which provides business owners with the required handy information to keep you updated on your IT infrastructure details, such as:

IT leaders need to consider following points ITSM Pre and post implementation:

• “What assets do I have?” – Inventory
• “How are they connected?” – Relationships
• “Where are they located?” – Locations
• “How are they being used?” – Business Context
  

Today’s practices of managing operations are quite different and have unrealistic ways of dealing with the critical information of configuration items which form an indispensible part of your acute business applications.

Either we are unaware about the entire stack we have or we fail to relate it at business service level, or we fail to update our inventory regularly, the effect of which is either we lack information, or we have incomplete data, or invalid information to manage our IT assets. The failure doesn’t stop here, it multiplies its effect during managing your changes and deducing impact analysis in case of identifying which change needs to be prioritized ahead of other and reasons for such decisions.

BMC Discovery is a solution that helps discover your data center inventory automatically, configure and relate application data to the IT assets. BMC Discovery helps managing localized asset inventory, managing compliance data and accentuate your operations

What is new in Discovery 11.3 Helix?

BMC Discovery 11 uses a sleek design with logical regrouping of various tabs like Application, Infrastructure, Discovery and Reports into menu based UI.

• Container Infrastructure Discovery:
  Earlier the Container management software was discovered as SIs using TKU patterns. Container discovery enables BMC Discovery 11.3 to discover the management software controls.
• Direct REST API directory:
  With the addition of Nimble Web API with token authentication credential, BMC Discovery 11.3 empowers to directly discover Nimble storage using REST APIs.
• CentOS 7 Migration Options:
  With the replacement of earlier OS with CentOS 7 now ensures continued support for the appliance OS during its lifetime and provides support for newer hardware.
• Other Enhancements Include:
  Stacked devices, Virtual network devices, Nutanix HCI (hyper-converged infrastructure) discovery, improved modelling and visualizations.