Have you noticed the increasing buzz and importance given to Intellectual Property addresses?
That’s for a reason. IP Discovery is important for organizations. Why? They have to maintain visibility, security, and compliance across their networks.
And what if it’s not managed carefully? It can negatively impact the overall network performance. This article is all about how one can perform efficient and non-disruptive IP Discovery, let’s get started!
Why does IP discovery matter?
Running a network without IP Discovery is very similar to managing invisible assets as per Slurp’it. You can’t secure, update, or even detect them. It actually helps businesses to:
- Identify all active devices on the network
- Detect unauthorized access or rogue devices
- Monitor complete network health and prevent issues, if there is any
- Make sure the business is compliant to all the IT governance and security policies
However, it is important to note that aggressive or poorly timed discovery scans can completely flood the network and affect productivity. So make sure to know what you are doing first.
Some best practices for better IP discovery
Now that you have uncovered what IP addresses can best help with, it’s time to understand the best practices at Slurp’it for better discovery
- Businesses initially must choose the right discovery method to go ahead with. Not all discovery techniques are created equal. Hence choose the one that can balance both effectiveness and performance.
- If you’re going with passive discovery, over here, you will be monitoring network traffic without probing. It’s actually less disruptive but may miss idle devices.
- And if you’re trying out active discovery, the use of ICMP, SNMP, and ARP scans is a lot here. This one is more comprehensive in nature but even adds network traffic too.
- The hybrid approach on the other hand blends both passive and active methods. This one gives optimal results.
Businesses can also schedule scans during peak off hours. Know that, timing actually impacts performance. So if you really want to avoid disrupting daily operations, schedule scans. You can schedule scans late at night or early morning. You can do it during weekends, or have some planned maintenance windows. All of this actually minimizes impact while keeping the asset inventory up to date.
It’s also important to note that it can generate heavy traffic. Hence, to mitigate this, businesses can enable rate limiting in your discovery tools. They can adjust timeouts and scan intensities. Even the scans can be spread over longer durations. This will actually avoid sudden traffic spikes and reduce congestion.
Implementing segmented discovery can even work best. To avoid scanning the entire network all at once, businesses can prioritize critical subnets like servers and firewalls. They can further stagger scans either by department wise or location wise. Trying out VLANs to isolate discovery traffic can even work best. This approach actually offers more control and the performance risk goes down as per Slurp’it.
Additionally, businesses can:
- Try out cloud based and AI tools. Modern IP Discovery tools actually use AI and cloudbased infrastructure. This helps with streamlining the process the apt way around.
- The benefits these tools offer are real time, low impact device discovery. One can easily analyse and flag anomalies (most of the work is done by tools). The device classification is also done automatically by the tool.
- The way networks keep on changing everyday, even your discovery strategy should change that way. Reports should be scanned regularly. The intervals should be adjusted often.
- Lastly, unmanaged scans can trigger alerts or be perceived as threats. Hence, to maintain trust, businesses can use authenticated scans. They can whitelist tools in firewalls and IDS/IPS systems.
All in all, logging all activity is a must for compliance audits. This actually keeps the network both secure and discoverable as per Slurp’it.
How does IP discovery work?
Now let’s get into the main part. We will be explaining to you how it works in real time. For example, there is this global financial institution. They have been facing frequent slowdowns. The reason was simply the use of outdated IP discovery methods.
The solution?
They actually tried our AI hybrid discovery. They scheduled scans during office peak hours. Segmented scans were done across all the branches.
All of this actually resulted in a 30% drop in network strain. This improved the complete IT response times. And even the full network visibility was maintained throughout!
It is extremely vital. But only when executed with care. Businesses must select just the right methods. They should optimize schedules, and use intelligent tools to conduct secure network discovery. Make sure to take the first step today.
Start by evaluating your current IP discovery practices. Align them all with the best practices stated above. This will help your network stay secure and agile! For more information, contact us at Slurp’it!
