Application Discovery
& Dependency Mapping Explained (FAQs)

A network is the sum of its components, and if you want to ensure its functioning at the highest level, you need to be able to pinpoint every app that exists inside it.

However, when the average company has 254 SaaS apps, identifying all the apps and dependencies that exist throughout an on-premise or cloud environment is easier said than done.

Organizations cannot afford to rely on manual IP scanning to catalog or inventory each app their employees use every day; they need an AI-powered, automated, and scalable application discovery process.

In this post we are going to examine what application discovery is, and how an automated dependency mapping tool can help.

Application discovery is the process of identifying and creating an inventory of the apps installed and used throughout an environment. This not only includes apps used within on-premise servers, but also those in the cloud, in containers, and even on employees’ personal devices.

Discovering applications is essential for IT administrators because it helps to set out a framework they can use to navigate the network and understand how different elements fit together. It also enables security teams to manage the performance and security of the business apps used by the organization.

A dependency mapping tool is essentially a tool that automatically maps apps and dependencies. A typical dependency mapping tool automates the discovery of applications within a network and provides a visual map to which an IT administrator can refer.

Dependency mapping tools are a popular choice among IT teams because manually identifying and inventorying apps is a time-consuming process.

Taking the time to map application dependencies, or investing in a tool that automates the process, pays dividends because it provides administrators with a heightened understanding of their organization’s IT environment.

Greater visibility over how apps connect to each other reduces the amount of time it takes to conduct troubleshooting and root cause analysis, which means that disruptions can be resolved faster, limiting the overall operational impact of downtime.

Dependency mapping also enhances change management, giving administrators the ability to identify the impact that changing the topology or composition of the network will have on critical services.

At the same time, better knowledge of the IT environment makes it easier to spot inefficiencies and redundancies, giving insights into more cost-effective ways of structuring the network and decreasing resource consumption.

As an added bonus, having a complete understanding of application topology decreases the risk of vulnerabilities in the network, and reduces the likelihood of data leakage and intrusions from unauthorized third parties.

Organizations interested in mapping application dependencies at scale would be well-advised to incorporate an application dependency mapping tool so they do not have to manually poll apps from scratch.

AlgoSec

AlgoSec is the industry-leading AI-powered application and connectivity management solution for mapping apps, security policies, and connectivity flows across on-premise, hybrid, and

multi-cloud environments.

As a solution, it is designed to enable network security operations teams to map and understand app and connectivity flows through their organization. This top-down, topological perspective allows users to identify business risks and remediate them ASAP.

For example, an administrator can use the platform to identify obsolete traffic that could serve as a potential entry point for malicious traffic.

At a high level, application discovery not only helps administrators keep up with topology changes in the network and reduce the risk of downtime, it also provides the visibility needed to simplify the management of firewall and SSL configurations.

Features

• Discovery of applications and connectivity flows

• Real-time map of app connectivity requirements

• Impact assessment of topology changes on application connectivity, security and compliance

• Complete easy-to-use workflows for streamlining migration to a new data center or cloud environment

• Zero-touch change management and access rule recertification

Use cases

• Create a real-time map of applications and connectivity flows to outline network topology.

• Use workflows to support users who migrate apps as part of the data center migration process.

• Before migration, assess and predict the impact of topology changes on application connectivity, performance and security.

• Automatically configure application security policies post-migration.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) and the AWS application discovery service

AWS application discovery service is a common choice for migrating apps to an AWS environment.

The AWS discovery service can automatically discover on-premise applications, and integrates with AWS Migration Hub to help migrate multiple applications at the same time.

While this approach is useful for identifying applications in on-premise environments, unlike AlgoSec, it does not offer deep visibility into connectivity flows. It also offers limited support for cloud migration, lacking automated change management capabilities and migration workflows.

Features

The AWS application discovery service is designed to enable organizations to identify applications across AWS-powered cloud environments. The service includes the following features:

• Encrypt data in transit and at rest

• Create a snapshot of your on-premise application inventory

• Integrate discovery data with other AWS services, such as AWS Migration Hub and SMS

• Plan migrations for servers that share applications

• Connect applications to servers

• Group servers to migrate

• Mix agentless and agent-based approaches

Use cases

• The main use case for AWS Application Discovery is discovering and creating an inventory of on-premise Information you can gather includes hostnames, IP addresses, MAC addresses and more.

• Map connections between applications and servers to create a visual representation of your network environment.

• Ingest utilization data to plan for your migration to the AWS Migration Hub.

Microsoft Azure Migrate: Discovery and assessment tool

One of the next biggest alternatives to the AWS application discovery service is the Microsoft Azure Migrate: Discovery and assessment tool. This solution enables users to automatically create an inventory of on-premise databases software, web apps, and SQL or AWS server instances.

The Microsoft Azure Migrate: Discovery and assessment tool also integrates with Azure Monitor’s Application Insight, an application monitoring solution.

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure

Oracle Cloud also offers its own migration tool designed to migrate on-premise applications and virtual machines from on-premise environments to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure using automated migration and provisioning.

Oracle Cloud’s migration tool also offers templates, workflow automation and connectors for popular workloads including SQL Server, MySQL, Java, etc. Like Azure, Oracle Cloud also offers Application performance Monitoring integration.

Besides the top three cloud vendors, there are a number of other cloud security and SaaS-vendors offering application discovery capabilities. Some of these are listed below:

Datadog

Feature summary: Automated application and dependency mapping in real-time, alerts, latency graphs, and performance anomaly detection.

Pros and cons: Rapid app and dependency mapping but beyond that lacks functionality for supporting cloud migrations.

ManageEngine applications manager

Feature summary: Application Discovery and Dependency Mapping (ADDM) with IP range application discovery, scheduled discoveries, scan summary reports, and a dependency map view.

Pros and cons: IP range based discovery offers a broad view of apps and dependencies but does not offer migration workflows and change management capabilities.

SolarWinds server & application monitor

Feature summary: Polling to create application and dependency maps, tracking the response time of services, creating custom alerts for network latency, packet loss, and uptime monitoring.

Pros and cons: Designed for monitoring application performance in on-premise environments, but it too lacks migration support.

One of the main challenges that organizations face when trying to discover applications in on-premise environments is reliance on outdated legacy monitoring tools. Manually discovering and mapping applications is inefficient, and offers limited visibility over configuration data and metrics across the environment.

Application discovery tools such as AlgoSec’s tools enable security teams to discover application dependencies and connections throughout the environment that could easily be overlooked by relying on manual approaches alone.

Automation also opens the door for an organization to leverage virtualization technologies from providers like VMware and Hyper-V, which unlock new cloud-native capabilities that cannot necessarily be replicated on-premises.

• How does AlgoSec help with application discovery and asset management?

AlgoSec can help you to discover, identify, and map applications across your on-premise and cloud environments in real-time using AI, so you can keep an up-to-date perspective of your

entire network.

• How does AlgoSec help optimize traffic flows and improve firewall performance?

Deploying AlgoSec enables an organization to scan traffic flows and match them to applications within the environment.

Once you discovered traffic flows, you can start to automatically optimize application flows and the maximum number of flows per application in order to optimize your firewall throughput and performance for end users.

• How does AlgoSec help enforce security and compliance across the data center?

Increased transparency of application, traffic and firewall flows makes it easier for IT security teams to assess the effectiveness of security policies in the environment, and creates an audit trail that can be used to manage potential compliance violations.

Enhanced visibility makes it easier to maintain compliance and to ensure that security controls are effective at protecting your critical data assets from compromise or misuse.

For example, administrators can automatically identify compliance gaps and generate compliance reports to document the state of firewalls and surrounding infrastructure to comply with PCI, HIPAA, SOX, and NERC.

• How does AlgoSec help with business continuity and disaster recovery?

AlgoSec helps your organization to maintain business continuity not only through proactive network security policy management, but also by simplifying the process of migrating application connectivity flows and firewall policies to the cloud and ensuring compliance.

Migrating your apps and data to a secondary site ensures that if your primary site is affected by a power outage or natural disaster, you will still be able to access critical information.

Furthermore, according to an EMA survey, network security policy management also enhances business continuity by helping organizations to enforce more consistent security policies, conduct more proactive disaster recovery testing, and limit the number of change-related outages.

• How does AlgoSec help with data center migration?

AlgoSec can help you to migrate your data center by discovering and mapping applications and connectivity flows, and connecting them to the relevant policies.

Once these are discovered, the solution can migrate them to a new on-premise installation or cloud platform, while automatically identifying and removing obsolete and redundant firewall rules. This reduces the amount of overall manual processes associated with the migration.

• How does AlgoSec help with cloud cost optimization?

AlgoSec’s application discovery and mapping capabilities help your organization to optimize costs in the cloud by giving you a reference point to conduct application performance monitoring and ensure that your cloud bandwidth is used efficiently.

This ensures that you are getting the maximum throughput from your network infrastructure and are not being held back by outages or other application performance issues.

• What are ADDM solutions and their advantages?

Application Discovery and Dependency Mapping (ADDM) is a category of software solutions that can map applications and dependencies to help human users understand how they connect together and interact.

ADDM solutions are a popular choice for IT administrators because they enable users to identify and map dependencies automatically rather than spending a substantial amount of time locating them manually.

• How does application performance monitoring work?

Application performance monitoring is where an organization monitors performance metrics from applications located throughout their environment.

Monitoring application performance helps to generate insights into how to optimize system availability, performance and response time. It also helps to ensure that end users enjoy a solid user experience with minimal downtime.

• What are some common application discovery methods?

There are a number of common application discovery methods that organizations can deploy. These include:

1. Sweep and poll – A technique for discovering IT assets whereby a system pings IP addresses and identifies the devices that issue a response.

2. Network monitoring – Monitoring real-time packet information to generate data on application dependencies. This can be done at the packet level by capturing packets or at the flow level with NetFlow.

3. Agent on Server – A process for identifying applications that uses a software agent deployed to a server to conduct real-time monitoring of incoming and outgoing traffic in order to map dependencies.

4. Orchestration-Level Discovery – Where an organization uses an orchestration platform like AlgoSec to discover applications and dependencies automatically without having to deploy agents to servers.

• What is the role of DevOps in application discovery?

Application discovery plays an important role in the DevOps process because it enables development teams to work toward automated app deployment. Automating the discovery of apps and connectivity flows means that users do not need coding knowledge to understand the environment.

Increased visibility also supports a DevSecOps strategy, offering security teams greater transparency over application components.

For example, a security analyst can view apps and connected dependencies and get a clear perspective of the entire attack surface and potential vulnerabilities a hacker could exploit.

• What is the role of application discovery in cloud migration?

Discovering applications and dependencies helps you to fast-track your cloud migration by identifying what components you need to move and allowing you to phase the deployment in steps.

Gaining visibility over applications in your environment is a critical step on your journey toward enhancing your business agility and continuity and minimizing downtime. A better understanding of app topology helps administrators find risks and remediate them quickly to ensure ongoing compliance.

If you cannot see how effectively your applications are being delivered, or how they perform, then there is no way to consistently optimize performance or enforce security policies.

While manually developing an inventory of apps and dependencies is a time-consuming process, the AlgoSec platform can completely eliminate the need for this by discovering apps in real-time so you can see how these components connect to each other on-premise, and across the private or public cloud.

Real-time visibility over apps gives you everything you need to manage performance, risk, and compliance challenges at enterprise pace.