Discovery of corporate IT resources is the ability to have knowledge of all devices located within an organisation, even those with limited or no human interaction. Most organisations will start by manually maintaining a list of their devices or resources in a shared document such as an Excel spreadsheet, making changes each time a new device is acquired or deleted.
This process is manageable when organisations are relatively small. However, this method becomes imperfect when networks begin to grow. One of the main weaknesses of this methodology is time. Keeping these lists up-to-date can become a full-time job in some cases.
In addition, the lack of knowledge of the devices on one's network could open up potential security holes. For example, how do you know which devices need to be updated if you don't know you have them?
Standard resource discovery methodologies usually involve **** querying the devices you come into contact with. This is simple, just ping the network and see which devices respond; however, it may become complex to create a complete inventory of connected applications.
Furthermore, this approach requires a level of insecurity as firewalls will have to allow both outgoing and incoming requests.
This now probably brings us to the best approach I can recommend: detection of passive assets via syslog. According to this method, a syslog message is captured by a log management solution and a record is automatically created based on the data contained in the syslog itself, e.g. new source IP address.
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