By Roman Martin, Solutions Engineer, CloudSphere
When it comes to digital transformation journeys, it’s crucial to understand what you own within your IT estates. What’s more, you should also know how your assets and services are related to one another. Without this kind of insight, any major change, such as migrating assets into the cloud or implementing a new solution comes with unnecessary risks.
CloudSphere’s Insight Console is a custom module within our SaaS platform that makes it easy to identify what’s in your IT estate with automated data collection, discovery and mapping.
In this article, I’ll share an overview of our console, including how to access it within our platform, as well as the four-step process to using it effectively.
Overview of CloudSphere’s Insight Console
One of the first Insight Consoles that CloudSphere released focused on validating the data that we collected. Its purpose was to help our partners and customers ensure that the discovery component was set up correctly.
Now, in addition to the discovery phase, you also get the full scope of assets being identified and recognized within your IT estates. To get this information, all you have to do is visit your Insight Console.
Accessing the Insight Console
To access the Insight Console, you’ll need to log in to your CloudSphere portal. Once you’ve logged in, find and select Insight Console along the left-hand menu towards the bottom of the page.
Clicking Insight Console will take you to the overview of the console, where you’ll see four blocks mid-way down across the page. These blocks represent our four-step process on the Insight Console.
The Insight Console’s 4-Step Process
The purpose of our four-step process within the console is to ensure that the actual scans of the IT estates are set up correctly. Below is a quick summary of each step.
Step 1: Identify Any Issues
To start off with, reviewing your data to ensure we have the full picture, common issues we encounter include:
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- Firewall rules preventing access
- Incorrect permissions
Once you’ve established that the appliance is scanning properly and you’ve got all of the raw discovery data, you’re ready to move onto step two.
Step 2: Validate Applications
At this point in the process, you’ll want to ensure that you’ve recognized all the actual applications running on your assets and that they’re coming through correctly.
You may have some “suggested applications”, which doesn’t necessarily mean they’re wrong. These apps just haven’t been verified. You’ll want to review those suggestions and exclude anything not of interest, think Anti-virus agents or Update installers.
Finally, the unrecognised applications need to be validated. Many of these won’t be true applications but some may be bespoke and require fingerprinting.
Step 3: Assess Service Mapping
The next step is reviewing the mapping of your services and app dependencies. Here, you should verify that that the console has a true business context assigned to each instance.
The aspects that you need to verify are ones that only a human can identify and tell the tool. For example:
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- Is the environment product, dev, or test?
- How critical is the service?
- How confidential is the data that it’s storing?
Step 4: Review and Explore
Now it’s time to review what you’ve collected and explore your inventory. At this point, you’ll need to determine what you want to see using your data.
What Comes Next?
After you’ve gone through the four-step process within the CloudSphere Insight Console, there are many use cases of your data that you can leverage.
Watch my Tech Bite video below for a more in-depth review of the console, as well as how to make the most of your data insights to reduce your overall risks in the cloud.
Have questions or want a free demo? Get in touch using the button below.
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About Roman Martin
As one of our Solutions Engineers, Roman Martin is a member of Cloudsphere’s go-to-market and strategy team for Europe, the Middle East and Africa. In this role, he manages key partnerships and drives net-new business across some of the top hyperscalers around the globe.
You can connect with Roman on LinkedIn.
About CloudSphere
CloudSphere makes digital transformations easy. Throughout the cloud journey, we empower our partners and customers to Discover, Plan, Migrate, Optimize, Modernize, and Secure entire cloud environments with automated features that save businesses time, money and disruptions.
